November 14, 2004

• Master Skrik (aged 10) recently found a picture of a Commadore 64, and asked me where the CD drive was kept. A few years ago, he found my father in law's record collection and tried to describe an LP to me as "a big black CD".
• Oh GOD WE'RE SO OOOOOLD!!! I remember the ZX80!!!!
• Through most of college I used punch card computers. With only 3 runs a day you were forced to study your program very closely before submitting the job. Every once in a while some poor soul would drop their deck that they hadn't sequenced yet, and have to spend an hour putting the cards back in order. It was a big advance using paper tape with the minis - I had time to go smoke a cig while the tape was loading.
• You guys are living in the past
• I especially like the part on the 4th page which identifies computers as "both fascinating and alarming," as though back then people thought computers could to make their heads explode or spontaneously assume command of the government. We tend to forget that until say the early 80s computers had a mysterious, slightly sinister aura about them. I suspect this was because they were associated with two faceless institutions: large corporations and the government.
• A little history of punch cards. I found it interesting that an old technology, the loom, is part of the thread that got us to our present technology. And as well as punch cards being used by those faceless institutions, they were used in faceless universities too.
• "I come from a time in the nineteenth hundred and seventies, when comeputers were used for two things: to either go to the moon, or play pong...The men who went to the moon, god bless 'em, did it with no mouse, and a plain text only black and white screen, and 32 kilobytes of RAM." [MP3] - Three Dead Trolls The manual is from dng's site, who's been slashdotted - congrats dng!
• Oops - COMPUTERS
• I wish I'd had that book in 1979 when I was trying to get my grad thesis stats done. The PC's couldn't handle my 200 variables and I had to use the punch cards to use the university mainframe. I lost several printouts that went to some never-to-be-found destination, on the campus. Since I was in the social sciences, the professors didn't know anything about computers either. All we got was a couple of short classes in doing up the punchcards. After that you were on your own. The fifty odd pounds of print-outs I had to deal with left me leary of computers for a few years, until I picked up an old Commodore and started learning DOS.
• Man, even DOS is next to obsolete these days. The only thing I use it for now is to load the very occasional game of Transport Tycoon. And, correct me if I'm wrong, but Win2k and other recent versions don't even come with DOS anymore, right? I'm pretty sure Win2k has a dos emulator instead. *sigh*
• "I've got cardboard boxes full of 5 1/4" floppies older than you are..." /whimper, heavy sigh at ChickenLips64 flashback
• Anyone remember 8" floppies? I don't.
• A couple of months ago, we were at #2's parents' place and having a quick look through some old stuff he'd left there when we moved to the US. Among the debris was a huge box of 5 1/4" floppies. Now we'd have to trawl garage sales to find a drive for that. But, of course, he can't just get rid of them - there might be something important on there! There was also a tape drive, from memory, and possibly a ZX-80 that he bought for $5 at a garage sale a few years back. He used to have a decent collection of old computers that he'd play with occasionally. We had an Amiga but they're still popular enough that he actually sold it for $50.
• Here's a challenge... Develop a system that can control a 13,000 kg spaceship, orbiting at 3,500 kilometres per hour around the moon, land it safely within metres of a specified location and guide it back from the surface to rendezvous with a command ship in lunar orbit. The system has to work the first time, and minimise fuel consumption because the spacecraft only contains enough fuel for one landing attempt. Do this with a computer that has barely 5,000 primitive integrated circuits, weighs 30 kg and costs over $150,000. In order to store your software, the computer doesn't have a disk drive, only 74 kilobytes of memory that has been literally hard-wired, and all of 4 Kb of something that is sort of like RAM. -The Lunar Module Computer
• We tend to forget that until say the early 80s computers had a mysterious, slightly sinister aura about them. I suspect this was because they were associated with two faceless institutions: large corporations and the government. OMG! They still are!!! *head bitten off by HP laptop*
• My first interaction with a computer was as a kid when a friend's father let us play Star Trek (the old BASIC game) on the mainframe he had in his basement. He was an engineer at Oak Ridge and was one of the few people in the 70s who used a "home computer". It was a big cabinet-sized system (like an IBM 360, but I don't remember what it was), with 8" floppies, lots of blinkenlights, and a teletype. One of my math professors in college once talked about the computer that his department let grad students use in the early 70's. It was one of the early PDP-8 sytems. It was old enough and so painful to use that the professors wouldn't monopolize it for their own projects. One had to boot it up by entering the driver for the paper tape drive by hand in binary using flip switches. This let you load the driver for the magnetic tape drive which was stored on paper tape. After you did this, you could load the printer and keyboard I/O drivers which let you program or load stored programs and run the punch-card reader. My first system was a Sinclair ZX-81. Simple and clunky, but heck, a bargain for less than $100 in the early 80's! My mom wasn't going to spring for anything better because she looked at it as just another toy. This kept me amused until my mom remarried and I got access to my stepfather's TRS-80 model III. I loved the two 5.25" disk drives, as the Sinclair's tape storage was a huge pain in the ass. 64K of memory was luxurious as well, but the Sinclair's graphics were better (I had the graphics upgrade: 256 x 192 B/W) He later got rid of it for Tandy's clone of an IBM PC. Wheee, color and a 10M hard drive, which we never got close to filling up...!
• There's no DOS on my computer anymore? I haven't tried to find it since I switched to 2K. No wonder the stupid putr keeps fuckin' up - if there's only me telling it what to do.
• In 1996-98 I was programming assembly code on Univac 1170 mainframes running CTS timeshare. They had just gotten rid of their punchcards around 1992, upgrading to VT100 terminals, but debugging was still being done via memory dumps to a printer. These dinosaurs are still around, believe it or not.
• P.S. A good Univac humor page. And I leave you with this prophesy: And just as ZZNOAH finished, the last word of core was lost to an ER MCORE$, and there was a mighty crash, and the time of the crash was forty million SUPs. And at the end of the crash ZZNOAH reloaded EXEC 8 and CTS with his bootstrap, and mounted the backup tapes. And Univac said to ZZNOAH, "Never again shall I clear the Fastrand in this manner, and to seal our covenant I have dumped a rainbow onto the plotter tape."
• W2K's command line interpreter is close enough to DOS for me, even though the internals are different. I mainly use it to run the DJGPP port of less, and the occasional FC. Also, some of my utilities were written with DJGPP, which is like gcc for DOS, but understands long file names.
• My dad worked on the Saturn rockets during the '60s. He programmed models of atmospheric affects during the first seconds of lift-off using computers that resembled the Lunar Moduel Computer in Vaca Pinter's post. He was pretty impressed by my VIC20 in 1982.
• My dad worked on the European space program here, and he was scratching his head with disbelief when the neighbours put a Microbee out with the rubbish in the mid-90s.
• I enjoyed feeding the tape into my dad's PDP8. I have a jar of the tape punch-outs somewhere, even now. The first computer in my first computer class had individual neon digits, ten of them stacked. The proper number would light, and shine through the rest, to the best of its ability. You kids got no appreciation. None.
• I mainly use it to run the DJGPP port of less *head explodes* Back in myyyyyy dayyyyyy . . . well, I can't beat the punchcard stories, but I did enjoy 10 ? "I rule"; 20 GOTO 10 on the department store machines.
• One of my first computer programs was a biorhythm calculator, programmed in FORTRAN, coded onto Hollereth punchcards, that printed the graphs of three cycles on the old greenbar computer paper. 1967. Yikes. Damn, I'm OLD!
• Good post, clockzero. You've got all us oldtimers out and reminiscing. )))
• The first computer I used interactively (around 1970) was a mainframe IBM 370/60, or something like that. One of the company's mysterious and respected programmers (they weren't nerds or geeks, yet) had put together a budgeting program where I could input data using an IBM Selectric typewriter as a terminal, with reams of perforated computer paper recording our dialogue. No monitor. When it would really piss me off, and I'd type in "fuck you", it would type back "value error." I'd laugh and go back to inputting stuff. My first home computer was a Packard Bell with 4 mb of RAM. I eventually bought another 8 mb for about $300. And, in spite of PB's bad rep, the thing kept plugging along for years with no problems. I finally gave it to my nephew, and he may still be playing Colonization on it for all I know. I loved that game! But then, I got the bug, thanks to the wonderfully nerdie, executive class folks I worked with for several years. I now have to upgrade every 2 years. We just gave away my 7 year old box, and my daughter has my 3 and 5 year old ones. And about a year ago, I bought a maxed out Dell which I can't even pick up. I'm trying to fight the addiction, but I can't promise anything.
• dxlifer-- Old-fashioned computer people are good people.
• Punch-card Jesus would be an excellent band name. (also, I made the front page. Hurrah!)
• Old-fashioned computer people are good people. Absolutley. Plus it seems that reminiscing is more pleasurable and less contentious than debate on more "current" topics can progress to. Aging is such a treasure trove of delights.
• No it isn't.
• you sick . . . old computer guy. My Atari800 was inifinitely frustrating to program anything with, but it had cartridges!! Mom, this is soooo coool! pleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease /repeat
• It's prolly too new for this thread, but I still use my 486 with DOS and WordPerfect 5.1, which doesn't recognize the word "internet." It's still faster than my new computer with Win2000. I heart DOS.
• Bah, Atari800? My Amiga500 was better!!! : ) Ha, I feel young again after saying that...
• Oh nostril, maybe you just aren't old enough to really appreciate it. Personally I'm working hard on the eccentric little ol' lady jig. I decided that was my future role as a teen. But then again, lots of people do complain if I think about it further. I like the wisdom and perspective that the decades offer, as well as all the computers.
• I wouldn't be a teenster or a twentyster for nuttin! But I wouldn't mind having the body back They sent the first rocket into space on a 'puter that could barely calculate to .00000000000000010, so wadda say guys, why don't we get the hive mind together and take over the earth tomorrow? muh haha haha /evil laughter
• i do like old computers. then again i also like being able to build one and get it working without worrying about setting interrupts by manually moving jumpers on add-on boards. downside of not having to use the really old ones is i don't know assembly language. poor me.
• Uh oh, GramMa got into the schnapps again . . .
• BlueHorse, I'm busy tomorrow, or is that today? I'm never sure which day it is here. Count me in, otherwise. /evil yawn. It's early yet.
• I just received a very pleasant email from Penguin's lawyers, granting me permission to keep the books posted there (as long as I add a copyright notice), and saying how pleased they are that this old material is available online.
• Cool!
• *snif* Eet's a Christmas miracoo, 'at's what eet ees! nice work dng!
• Wow, non-rabid copyright attorneys. Penguin and dng, I salute you!