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Any old timers?
Are there any other old timers here?
Some of my computer related recollections over the years...
I wrote my first program in 1974 as a Senior in high school. I had to punch the cards and carry them with me when the class went to the district office. It was one of the first terms that the course was even offered.
My first computing job was as a computer operator using a mainframe computer that had a whole megabyte of ram. The computer was the size of a room, and each 256K bank of memory was about the size of the cubicle I work in now. When we discovered that one of the banks was faulty, we actually shut off the bank of memory, re-ipled and ran with less until the technician could come out and fix it. As low as the computing power was, it took several of us to monitor it, and to mount the tapes for processing. Partly due to my early experience, I truly understand that I am typing this on a computer that has more processing power than what NASA used to land a man on the moon. I didn't work for NASA, but I know what the computer technology was a decade after the landing.
My first home computer was a Commodore Vic-20 that had an amazingly poor resolution hooked to the TV, and had 3K of Ram. My only data storage was initially a casette tape unit. I did move up to a floppy disk when I upgraded to the Commodore 64.
My first online experience was not the internet, it was dial-in BBS systems that enthusiasts ran in their homes. I called in at 300 BPS amd communicated with a "server" that was pitifully weak by today's standards. You can look up TRS-80 to see what level of machines were serving up data.
I visited one of the sysops and saw his setup. Like most BBS systems, he didn't even have a hard drive, but he was dreaming about getting one some day to replace the several 5.25" floppy drives that housed the BBS data.
A few years later, I remember the surprise I felt when someone in one of my classes bought a massive computer for $650. It had 640K of memory, a monochrome monitor and a 10 megabyte hard drive. The processor ran at 4.77 megahertz.
I soon bought a better system than that one, it has a "Turbo-XT" and had a button on the front to switch turbo mode off and on... The button was necessary because some programs (especially some games) ran too fast in turbo mode. My system then had less storage (including hard drive) and less computing power than the weakest video cards today.
I remember when I first went to 16 bit (PC AT class system) and I had a 100 megabyte hard drive and 2 megabytes of memory.
Any other thoughts from the old days?