Any old timers?

[whs]

Hmm, interesting to see that there are some people around who remember computers before they became PCs. When I told a kid the other day that I wrote my first program in 1958 on a Zuse Z11, he could not believe that computers were around in those days (they actually were already around 20 years earlier).
Later (early 60's) I had my hands on IBM/650, 1401 (1200 bytes of RAM, later 4000 bytes), 1440,1460, 7070, 7090 and then IBM/360 and /370. Then they made me a manager and I lost my touch - LOL.

 

[Tarka Dal]

@Little Darwin
Your very good at keeping people enthralled! Ever thought of becoming a writer?

It occasionally crosses my mind, but I tend to start projects and never finish them, not a good trait for getting started in a new field. Plus I always have this fear that I will write a book, and never realize that it is a book I read long ago.

Ironically, I have always loved to read (for some reason I am not doing as much in the last few years) but I always hated English class.

My outlet is forums. Mostly Bike Forums and now here.

You don't have to do Fiction. Do Fact based. More interesting anyway!

 

[Little Darwin]

When I told a kid the other day that I wrote my first program in 1958 on a Zuse Z11, he could not believe that computers were around in those days (they actually were already around 20 years earlier).

You almost wrote your first program before I was born (1957).

I started on IBM S360s...

I thought my experience was ancient.

Here is something that people who never did it wouldn't consider... Back in the old days, there wasn't enough memory to do a sort in memory and i/o was slow, so for large data entry jobs, we took the cards that the keypunch operators created, and sorted them on a card sorting machine. He had to run the cards through at least once for each column in the sort field.

Then the sorted cards were merged with the job control language (JCL) cards which were kept in drawers and the deck was loaded in each time a job was scheduled. The schedules were maintained manually, for us it was by checking boxes on a printout that was created every morning by (any guesses?) loading another deck of cards.

 

[whs]

Yeah, that's why we all grew muscles - from hauling those card boxes (with 2000 cards) around.

 

[Little Darwin]

And it got more fun if you dropped some cards, since that meant resorting.

And if a card got bent, either in sorting, or in the card reader then we got to recreate the card.

 

[whs]

And it got more fun if you dropped some cards, since that meant resorting.

And if a card got bent, either in sorting, or in the card reader then we got to recreate the card.

And all of that in hexadecimal.

 

[Kari]

I can remember how I felt when I got my first Seagate 10MB (read: Ten Megabyte, or 0.01 Gigabyte) hard drive some hundred years ago, mid 80's. It was something like a miracle, I would definitely never need a bigger HD!

Telling this to todays teenagers is the easiest way to get laughed at. They simply do not believe it.

 

[gladson1976]

When I told a kid the other day that I wrote my first program in 1958 on a Zuse Z11, he could not believe that computers were around in those days (they actually were already around 20 years earlier).

You almost wrote your first program before I was born (1957).

I started on IBM S360s...

I thought my experience was ancient.

Here is something that people who never did it wouldn't consider... Back in the old days, there wasn't enough memory to do a sort in memory and i/o was slow, so for large data entry jobs, we took the cards that the keypunch operators created, and sorted them on a card sorting machine. He had to run the cards through at least once for each column in the sort field.

Then the sorted cards were merged with the job control language (JCL) cards which were kept in drawers and the deck was loaded in each time a job was scheduled. The schedules were maintained manually, for us it was by checking boxes on a printout that was created every morning by (any guesses?) loading another deck of cards.

I've never used cards, but I guess you'll have to explain what a card is to the kids nowadays. The only cards they see nowadays aren't punched. :roflmao:
Punched card - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Computer programming in the punch card era - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Lordbob75]

Haha. This thread was fun to read.

I graduate HIGH school in... May this year. (That's right, I am 18).

I have tinkered with computers or electronics my whole life (took apart vacuum cleaners at 18 months old, and put them back together... I think they still worked).
I don't envy the Punch cards, but I know how hard programming still is today (I took a Java class and learned I SUCK).

I will stick to hardware

Just imagine the stories I will tell kids in 30 or 40 years :shock:

~Lordbob

 

[strollin]

I graduated high school in 1971 and I certainly remember punch cards and BBSs. I was even a co-sysop for an IBM employee BBS for a couple of years.

My first programming class in college used punched cards. I hated it and thought programming was stupid and couldn't see why anyone would ever want to be a computer programmer. Now 34 years later I'm a software engineer, go figure!

At work in 1984, I was a mgr and we had 1 IBM PC to share between 3 mgrs. One of the mgrs wanted to use a new program that just came out, Lotus 1-2-3. Only problem was that it required 256K of RAM and our PC only had 128K. I went down to the parts room and got 18 64k RAM chips (1 chip for each bit + 1 for parity) then stuck them in the machine. Then I had to decipher the user manual to figure out how to set the switches to tell the machine it now had 256K (BIOSs weren't very smart back then you had to tell them everything!). I thought I did pretty good upgrading that PC considering I didn't know how to use it! After that I taught myself to use it and eventually became very proficient at Lotus 1-2-3.

My first computer was an IBM PC in 1984. I quickly outgrew it and built my first computer a few months later, an 8Mhz "Turbo" XT clone. I paid $500 for a 20M HD!!! I didn't like the clone BIOS so I bought an EPROM programmer, copied the BIOS ROMs from an IBM XT and put them in my clone. My clone thought it was an IBM XT, right down to having cassette BASIC in ROM.

Before I became a mgr I had worked the previous 7 years as a technician testing IBM 3350 disk drives. These were the type of drives that you would see strings of in computer rooms. A single drive contained 2 HDAs (Head Disk Assembly) referred to as "spindles". Each spindle could store 300M on it's 14 inch platters. A string consisted of 4 machines physically connected together. 4 machines x 2 spindles x 300M = 2.4G of data storage in a single string. I couldn't begin to tell you how many of those drives I tested and debugged but I know that we produced 75,000 of them over the product's lifetime.

Sorry to be so long-winded but this thread inspired me!

 

[DocBrown]

My first computer was a Commodore-64 in 1983. I ran a BBS system for the C-64 club in Phx, Az. NO Hard drive, just two C-64 floppy drives

 

[smarteyeball]

I think part of this is the realization that whatever I buy today will be obsolete very soon from the perspective of always having to be on top

Just a minor correction here:

Whatever you buy today is already obsolete because as a general rule, there are always several 'new and improved' models already designed and ready for production at any given moment - be it static, market based or competitor edge based roadmaps.

At the consumer level, being 'on top' lasts for about 5 mins. If you are lucky

My first computer was a Commodore-64 in 1983. I ran a BBS system for the C-64 club in Phx, Az. NO Hard drive, just two C-64 floppy drives

Two floppy drives? Greedy bugger. I had one datasette...

 

[topCturV]

Interesting thread.
I took manufacturing processing in the mid 70's and to run a program on a milling machine we use to punch holes in a one inch wide tape for instructions for the machine.
Later, early 80's, I got into computer aided design and I learned that on a Euclid System.
I also have a copy of Windows 2.0 somewhere.
Dang, how time fly's by.

 

[gladson1976]

Haha. This thread was fun to read.

I graduate HIGH school in... May this year. (That's right, I am 18).

Just imagine the stories I will tell kids in 30 or 40 years :shock:

~Lordbob

I can see that now

Lordbob: In my days we had things called Keyboards and Mice, and we ACTUALLY had to type things using that for the computer to understand.
Grandchild: WHAT !!!! :shock: :shock: :shock:. You're kidding. (Thinking: type !!!)
Lordbob: Honest, we did that.
Nanoputer: (Processing thought input)... (mimicking C3P0) It must be true. It is there in my archives. A pretty primitive way if input, in my opinion.

 

[Little Darwin]

Another flashback just came to me.

People with dial-up think they have it bad today when they open their browser and have to wait for the modem to connect...

Do modems still use the Hayes methodology for getting commands from the computer?

I know I must have done it manually thousands of times before I got a fancy program that would deal with the dialing.... I would look at the printed list of bbs systems to get the number...

open the session
pause
Type: +++
pause
Type: ATDT5551212

Then wait for the connection. As I recall, I also had to add steps to set parity etc at some sites. There was no auto detection.

 

[whs]

strollin, did you work at the IBM Santa Therisa plant in SJ? I was i Bldg. 26 in the early 70's.

 

[Fantail]

My 1st real computer was a Tandy 1000 SX similar to the one in the pic below.
It had the 640k upgrade, a 720 & 5.25 floppy, and a 30 meg card drive. Cga Monitor and -- Tandy Deskmate II software.

Fair mention goes to the 9-pin noisy dot matrix printer, that I still have - somewhere.

 

[HammerHead]

State of the art

Mine was a wooden frame with multiple wires threaded thru small wooden balls. You could place them any where you wished. Very low power. This was about the time someone came up with dirt and we had to start cleaning everything.

 

[Little Darwin]

Ah, CGA.

I knew several people that refused to go to CGA because they didn't want to give up the resolution of their Hercules (or similar) monochrome cards.

The real geeks had monochrome, but with amber monitors instead of green.

 

[strollin]

strollin, did you work at the IBM Santa Therisa plant in SJ? I was i Bldg. 26 in the early 70's.

Bldg 26 was at the main SJ plant which is where I worked. Santa Teresa Lab (now called Silicon Valley Lab) is a programming lab about 5 miles south of what used to be the main SJ plant. The main plant was sold to Hitachi a number of years ago and I'd estimate two-thirds of the buildings have been torn down (including bldg 26).