On Friday 06 September 2002 11:05 am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > On Fri, 6 Sep 2002, Mike Settle wrote: > > Oh, for sure - Computers were just plain *FUN* back then !!! Now, > > they're just a *&^%in' job..... We had two different ways of generating > > computer 'music' back then - One, was to turn to a really low band on one > > of those new-fangled Japanese transistor radios and set it on top of the > > CPU. The other way was to put the print chain in neutral, run a bunch of > > cards thru the reader and listen to the 'tune' on the printer..... > > OK, all you super-annuated geeks, here's a little test that I found > online: > > Determine how far back your computer skills go by seeing how many of the > following you have experience with: OK, sounds like fun. BTW, (in case you haven't figured it out from my other postings) I'm not a computer professional) but a retired mechanical engineer who's been using these things since the mid-60's.
> Altair 8800 Was that the one with all of the switches on the front? If so, I've seen several run, but I didn't actually touch them. Old rule of mine: Don't push buttons on expensive machines that don't belong to me. > 7-track tape > 9-track tape Yup. > chad bins (nothing to do with the polls) Yup. Spilled one, once. Learned that it's a bitch chasing those things with only a corn broom and fingers as tools. > drum card Huh? > card reader Yup. > line printer Amazing machines -- noisy as hell (especially with the cover up), but they could really crank out the paper. Don't get frisky with form feeds, and hope the ribbon doesn't go south on your shift. > line printer forms control tape Luckily, I managed to duck that bit. > green bar A great invention. Those great long transparent rulers were useful, too. > write ring Huh? > core memory Yup. > decollator/burster Yup. Careful with the carbon sheets if you're kind of clumsy and you wear white shirts, though. > batch station > overlay segments > DVST graphics terminal Huh? > coding form (FORTRAN or COBOL) I threw away some FORTRAN and BASIC pads just last year. > EBCDIC Yes, indeed. I once had an Anderson Jacobsen printer that was based on the Selectric consoles used on the IBM System 370. Although the type balls used on them were dimensionally identical to the type balls used on standard office Selectric typewriters, the positioning of the characters was quite different. The office type balls were much less expensive (sometimes free), and offered a better selection of fonts, so I hand coded a Z80 assembly language driver that allowed me to use either kind of type ball. > 110 baud modem > ASR teletype My wife put me through engineering school as an ATT Long Lines teletype operator, and she drove one of those things all day long. Back in those days, all teletype switching was done manually. Luckily, I graduated (1961) shortly before the system was converted to dialup. Several years later (1967), I got first hand experience with dialup teletype to access a shared time computer running GE's Dartmouth BASIC. (As in 10 LET A=5, etc.) One of the funniest things that I've ever seen was a slow motion film made of an ASR-33 mounted on a shake table, and subjected to a shock spectrum that simulated a nuclear blast. First, the sheet metal covers peeled off, and then it began to stream paper upwards to the ceiling. A pawl on the feed mechanism was displaced from the ratchet, so the paper just kept on going. And going. > paper tape Yup -- that was how we backed up our programs on the shared time setup. > TI silent-700 (the 50 pound model, not the 5 pound one) No, but I knew a guy who had a Kaypro. Does that count? > 10 platter removable disk pack Also called a cake platter because it looked like those dishes that they used to have in roadside diners. > flowchart template Sure. We designer types had templates for everything. > Hazeltine 2000 No. Was that anything like an ADM-3A? > Bell Labs Unix V6 or V7 No, that came after I left there. Besides, I was way at the other end of the organization charts, worrying about how to make sure that you could call your Aunt Tillie in Boise after the Big Ones were dropped. > nixie tube display Yup. Mostly on lab equipment -- not sure that I ever saw one on a computer. > Commodore Pet > Timex Sinclair Does owning an Exidy Sorcerer count? True story: I spent $140 to expand the memory from 16kb to 32 kb. Pretty much eliminated OUT OF RAM messages unless I got careless with DIM statements. > > > -dl > And who really remembers what a statically-deskewed longitudinal check > frame count is? No. Nor does anyone else. Even the guy who invented has forgotten it. > > (And I know this really appears off-topic, but this was where Linux came > from :)). Thanks. This has been a ball. -- cmg
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