On 10/20/10 20:46, Bob Hall wrote:
On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 12:07:55PM -0500, Tim Daneliuk wrote:
On 10/20/2010 11:55 AM, Gary Kline wrote:
On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 12:47:38AM -0700, per...@pluto.rain.com wrote:
Matthias Apitz<g...@unixarea.de> wrote:
El d?a Tuesday, October 19, 2010 a las 07:29:46PM -0700, Gary Kline escribi?:
PS: I really _was_ current on hardware stuff. Back in the VAX
780 days :-)
I booted my first UNIX V7 tape on a PDP-11 around 1982, I think.
Gotcha beat :) UNIX V6, PDP-11/34, RK05 disk cartridge, 1975.
The whole runtime fit on one RK05. The sources took a second one.
I remember the 11/34 fondly. The whole EE department at Cory
Hall was running one one; then when I interned at Livermore my
job of porting the "Portable F77 Compiler" was done with vi and
the source code that Stu Feldman wrote. I love[d] those bloody
old computers, :-) Dunno why. Maybe because they really
*were* about computing. Not streaming [[whatever]] or having
php running. (Blah^9^9^9)
:)
Heck, when I started out, they didn't even have zeros and ones yet.
We had to settle for "o"s and "l"s ...
When I started out, we didn't have read/write heads for the hard disks.
We had to copy the data from the screen to the disk by hand using
magnetized sewing needles. In order to read the damn things we had to
pass a compass over the disk and see where the needle deflected.
Enough Monty Python Yorkshiremen claims, already. :-)
Getting back to reality, although I never did it (fortunately), a friend
of mine who was about a decade older than me (I'm mid/late 50s) had the
experience of programming microcode on a machine by inserting brass
slugs for 0s and ferrite slugs for 1s on a pin board. Anyone got any
idea what that was? He was (UK) military so maybe it wasn't a generally
known box.
--
"Although the wombat is real and the dragon is not, few know what a
wombat looks like, but everyone knows what a dragon looks like."
-- Avram Davidson, _Adventures in Unhistory_
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