James G. Sack (jim)([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > James E. Henderson wrote: > > boblq wrote: > >> On Friday 23 June 2006 09:57 am, Nicholas Wheeler wrote:
Nicholas, you're an impertinent, saucy, whipper-snapper! ;D > >>> PS: 7 years of Linux experience makes me a newbie. Ya'll must be grand > >>> masters. Contestant number one... He also had to walk 7 miles to school each day. It would've been uphill both ways and in neck deep snow, but he grew up in TX, where they have no hills or snow. :) > >> Chuckle, my first work with computers was in 1961. The machine filled > >> several rooms and was full of tubes. > >> Carl goes back further. So I think does Jim Sack. > >> So yes, you are a newbie. Sadly though, that does not make us grand > >> masters, > >> just "experienced." LOL. > >> BobLQ Contestant number two... His console was kept behind a curtain and had a loud microphone. He likes to be called "The Wizard" and flies hot air balloons in his spare time. Green is his favorite color. > > Me too! I started in 1959 on a giant machine that used tubes, a > > Burroughs 220. I remember that the mean time between failures was about > > 15 minutes. It was slow and fussy, with a 4K mercury delay line memory > > and punched card input/output. Contestant number three... This guy remembers King Tut, helped design the intricate Mayan calandar, and gave hints to Copernicus and Galileo. Newton really wanted to meet him. He remembers when the Dead Sea was only sick. > I had a Heathkit analog computer (tubes) to play with about that time, > but I guess that doesn't (er..) count. Also at that time, I suppose I > might have gotten involved with an IBM 1620 in the EE dept, but I > changed my major to physics. > > So it ends up my first real hands-on experience was about 1962 in > grad-school on a GE-225. I used Fortran-II (aka card-fortran, it had the > simple IF-statement -- no steenkin' else-branch needed). </snip> > As I recall, the mainframe had 32K of 60-bit ram (core, or course). > There were 2 6-ft tall tape drives for holding the fortran > compiler,assembler, etc, and for building intermediate code products, I > think. The final output was a card deck spit out by the nifty card > punch. Then you added job control cards and your data deck at the end > and the whole package was fed into a card reader right at the console. > > Ahhh, for the good old days (not!). > ..jim Sorry, I couldn't help myself.. ;-D And just to be honest, I think it must've been quite exciting to see technology burgeoning when computing was just beginning. The systems sound inefficient and huge, but that doesn't mitigate the fact that even the concept of a computer was being invented from the ground up. Today's advances are amazing, but it's much more difficult and admirable to create such an entirely new concept, and then make it work. -And at a time when the knowledge and information were less in volume plus far less available. I can only speculate about the level of excitement, though. I wasn't even born until 3 years after Jim Sack got his hands on that GE-225. ;-) Wade Curry -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
