The Passage of Time

[texbaylea]

I might as well dig out my old computer stories too. My first was a CP/M 2 with an Z80 processor that I built up on an S-100 chassis. It was portable: one suitcase sized cabinet (with handles) for the computer and another with 2, 8 inch floppy drives and a daisy wheel printer. Had a Heath H19 monitor on it also. Those 4 pieces could be hauled about with a hand truck!! The most useful software was Word Master editor plus a formatter that produced documents as good as today's machines but without the graphics. That machine cost me a total of about $8000 in the mid 70's

My son was the only student at Rice University with his own computer/word processor

I then move to a DEC Rainbow 100 with a 20 meg hard drive that I partitioned to run both CP/M and MS-DOS. DEC's biggest mistake was going to their own floppy format so that floppies were not interchangeable.

At the time of the Apollo missions I was in a team that built up low level radiation measurement equipment for looking at the moon samples. My job was an analylizer and detector system that we used to scan the astronauts to see if there were any induced radiation in their bodies. The analyizer was built around DEC PDP 8. Those were the heady days. My wife also worked in the Lunar Receivng Laboratory doing biochemical analysis on the astronauts.

I have since built up several PC's using at various times CP/M, DR-DOS, MS-DOS, OS/2 Warp (much superior to Windows but Microsoft used F,U,D against it) I am using Windows XP now but wish I did not have to (don't use any other MS software). Some time soon I will move to Ubuntu Linux.

Vernon

 

[Tig]

First computer owned Commodore 64. We still use the monitor to watch the VCR and the desk sits in my office.
First big career break came because I was expert in high speed card punch maintenance. Back when mainframes were water cooled, weighed more than a tractor and needed a room the size of a barn.
Latest computer acquired (for free) for home use an IBM 7060 mainframe. It's about the size of the little desk that came with the Commodore and it will replace the desk in my office. That's progress.

 

[Tdog]

Wow, some of you people are as old as I am. I began using a card punch & collator too. I used the computer for statistical analyses. It was tough to learn - - You would turn in your job [box of punched cards] to the operator, hoping that you have everything in the right order - - systems cards, the program, the data, call exit. The least little screw up led you to a print out of errors or garbage. I too was happy when the PDP-10 was unveiled.

My 1st PC was a Zenith 48 [148? crs] - - no hard drive, just put your application [Lotus 123, WordPerfect, etc] in one of the 5.25" floppy drives, & work on you document or data in the other one. It cost about $1000. I also had a great daisy-wheel printer because I hated dot matrix output.

Never mind what statistical work was like prior to computers - - just replacing the old Monroe, Friedan & Marchant rotary calculators with digitals was huge. Each of those desk-digital calculators cost close to $1000 in the early 70's, but heck, they had a square-root function, so it was worth it!

One more jogged memory - - when I was in college, I worked for IBM running what they called a Carroll press. It printed computer cards. If I thought hard enough, I could probably remember how long it took to print a box of 10,000 - - not long. At that time, I had heard of computers, but had never seen one & had very little idea what all those cards were for. I do know that one of the biggest customers was the Sandia Corp. I didn't know anything about them either, but later found out that was part of Los Alamos. I was, & still am, pretty ignorant sometimes.

Jack

 

[RobertN]

Moore's Law. Old Intel guy here. Gordon Moore came up with the adage. Amazing guy. Technology, devices on a chip etc move at a certain rate. Has held true for years now. Got to meet Robert Noyce briefly a couple times. Amazing guys, them and the rest that came from Fairchild.

Consider this industry does a complete change over in months (vs years). Its been doing roughly that since it started. I dont know of any other occupation that obsoletes knowledge and equipment so fast. Thats how we made it from the 'good ole' days to now so quickly.

 

[jimg]

Didnt realize there were so many old geeks kicking around here. I like the stories...keep'em coming.

 

[riptides]

Didnt realize there were so many old geeks kicking around here. I like the stories...keep'em coming.

Xerox Sigma 3's and 5's @a large government agency

One computer the Sigma 5 FILLED the floor. Used punch tapes to boot up.

Green screens were the norm.

IT has been very, very good to me..... and I am not that old.

-Mike Z.

 

[jimg]

Xerox Sigma 3's and 5's @a large government agency

One computer the Sigma 5 FILLED the floor. Used punch tapes to boot up.

Green screens were the norm.

IT has been very, very good to me..... and I am not that old.

-Mike Z.

Those are ANCIENT!!! OTOH its hard to date you on the basis of the h/w alone. It seems the govt uses computer h/w WAY beyond whats normal and sensible. Back in the late 80s we were using RSX11D & I knew of one AF installation using RSX11A. I still think that last stmt might be suspect though. BTW we studied Multics in college and it was old then.

 

[hitekcountry]

Some time back in the 70s I attended an electronics show in San Francisco. Somewhere near the entrance there were these two young hippies. One was sitting behind a cheep folding table with some homemade wooden box in front of him, and the other was standing behind the first hippy. They were obviously waiting anxiously for someone to stop and talk to them and no one did at the time I walked by. Too bad I didn't stop and talk to these guys because the one sitting down was Steve Wozniak and the one standing was Steve Jobs. And the homemade wooden box in front of Wozniak was the first Apple Computer.

 

[jinman]

Wow, some of you people are as old as I am. I began using a card punch & collator too. I used the computer for statistical analyses. It was tough to learn - - You would turn in your job [box of punched cards] to the operator, hoping that you have everything in the right order - - systems cards, the program, the data, call exit. The least little screw up led you to a print out of errors or garbage. I too was happy when the PDP-10 was unveiled.

Okay Jack, let me see if I remember this correctly. Did you feed the cards "11 edge, face down" or was it "9 edge, face down"?

In 1967, I was a controls clerk working for Texas Instruments. I did sales and billings and distributed reports for the entire semiconductor division. I'd get a stack of cards from our keypunch group down the hall and I'd pull and total up all sales requisitions by hand. At the end of the night I'd balance my hand totals against the computer report from our IBM 1401. What fun!

I often ran the card punch, collater, and sorter, but the biggest job I hated the most was running a decollater to remove the carbon between mult-sheet fanfold paper. That was a beast of a machine and sure to jam or rip something apart at the worst possible time. At the end of every month when we did the end-of-month reports, I'd have to wash off the carbon from the paper several times per night. I just smile to myself every time somebody complains about changing toner in a copier or printer.

 

[Bird]

For the most part, this thread is about computers, but I can tell you it was even worse before computers; at least for some of us. When I'd been on the police department about 3 years and was perfectly happy to be working my beat just east of the downtown area, there came a day when the dispatcher called and told me to report to the Captain's office. The Captain had a secretary and a clerk/typist. One had gotten promoted and transferred and the other quit. So someone checked personnel records and found that I could type; not fast and not particularly well, but I'd taken typing in high school; manual typewriters, of course. Now the Captain's office, and most other city offices at that time, had an old IBM Selectric typewriter. I had never used an electric typewriter. The city had no such thing as copy machines, so nearly everything typed had to include 5 "onionskins" (how many of you remember those). No errors or erasures were allowed, and I even had a Captain who would get his ruler out to measure the margins; top, bottom, and sides to see that whatever was typed on that page was exactly centered. It was over a month before he hired a new secretary, and was I glad to get out of there.