Well, ya all make me ashamed to admit to learning keypunch-- compliments of
IBM-- for Caterpillar. The mainframe, I believe, was in its infancy at then.
Pj
At 03:01 AM 7/25/00 -0000, you wrote:
>Nope, hadn't that particular thrill...but I do remeber the card readers
and tape..
>
>And, only heard about the plug boards when I was first learning programming.
>
>I remember my first internet experience was playing Star Trek on a DEC
terminal through a telephone coupler as a modem link. I *did* like the
hundreds of lights on those modems, though... looked real cool when I was
12 years old!
>
>
>> No one remembers the Diablo drives, 5M fixed & 5M removable (soft sectored
>> cartridges made for some fun when mounted on a hard sector drive :)
>>
>> But that was "high tech" compared to storage which consisted of paper tape,
>> punch cards, mag tape... Of course, even these were great when compared to
>> programs "written" on 30"x30" (if I remember the size correctly) plug
boards
>> with loads of wires and the odd diode to prevent backflow. That was
about the
>> time it took an entire weekend to sort a few thousand "records" (cards, one
>> column at a time) if not too many cards were "eaten" by the sorter which
>> required a trip to the 026/029 machines... Then VM appeared on the
>> IBM360/67... Ahhhhhh!!! :^)
>>
>> Retired (not yet 55),
>> Pierre
>>
>> PS: The best "flashback" was watching a co-worker go airborne... he was
>> sitting on a chair which he rolled over bubble wrap while pulling out a DEC
>> power supply drawer... :^) :^)
>>
>> Greg Stewart wrote:
>> >
>> > I remember when a 10MB hard drive was the size of pizza, fit into a
refridgerator-sized beast ofa cabinet, and PCs had 8 & 1/2 inch floppy
diskettes!
>
>
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