>
> On Wed, 2003-09-03 at 13:41, Edward Croft wrote:
> > Kevin, you want me to hold him down while you thwack
him! :-P
> > I started in '83 on a Kaypro II, then 85 switched to
> Digital VAX, then
> > DG, and so on and so forth....
> > Anybody remember soldering together HeathKit PCs?
> >
>
> Not the PC, but some of the test equipment. I still have
a VTVM.
>
> The first computer I worked on was analog. It was a tube
> driven synchro
> system, used for fire control. Its "data" was output to a
digital
> computer. The digital computer was mounted on the bed of
a 5
> ton truck.
> This "computer" was more of an A to D converter and modem
> than computer.
> Today fancy gizmo's have more power.
>
> The price of the pots (variable resistors) in one-third
of analog
> computer would pay for several servers. (Several thousand
dollars for
> each pot in the late 60's.) Hate to see what they would
cost today!
>
> Yes, I am over 25. :)
> --
> Jerry W. Hubbard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
You young whippersnappers are making me feel real olde here.
memory is failing here, but............ do you remember...
(not in chronological order)
the birth of the original PC - Radio Electronics magazine
as I recall
"How to Build Your own home computer" - using the 4 BIT
Intel 4004 chip.
The birth of the Altair and Imsai using the Intel 8 bit 8080
trying to scrape together the money to buy one when your
father said no
to buying it for you as an incentive for you to "be your own
man" at the ripe olde
age of 12.
CP/M
Bill Gates bringing out DOS
The Solbourne
the Osbourne One "Laptop"
The birth of the Zilog Z-80
CORE memory boards.............
Watching robots build and wirewrap the backplane of the IBM
360.
The birth of Digital Equipment Corporation and their first
PDP
Playing with paper tape, 80 column and 92 or was it 96
column punch cards
Dropping your first punch card deck on the floor and having
to manually
resort the entire deck of 500 cards because you did not
bother to number the
cards using columns 73-80 of the cards so the card sorter
could do it for you.....a mistake YOU NEVER MADE AGAIN.
(mostly because the olde timers you worked with were having
such a great
time over your mistake....cause they told you so.....)
Waiting in line to have your card deck program run for the
10th time
to see if you had gotten that last bug out of your Fortran
code.
Having 10,000 card decks because you were now writing in
COBOL.....
and those cards were numbered.......
DEC RK06 and the later RK07 disk packs - what were they - 10
MB of disk storage
on a single 14 inch platter
RS04 swap disks - 1 MB of high speed swap for your PDP11
I modified the Unix v6 swap algorithm to use that puppy
to resort and reorganize all the ram in my PDP11-70 in real
time so I could avoid the "Panic - Out Of swap space"
crashes of those times.
Writing complex programs that had to fit and work in 32 MB
of RAM.
paying $80,000 for 4 MB of RAM that came in two rack mount
chassis units
that were 19 inches by 30 inches by 10 inches each and
thinking that was GREAT
because now I had maxed out the memory on my PDP 11-70 which
ran my very
large insurance company at the time.
CRT terminals hardwired via RS232 or 20ma links to the
mainframe
rows of RP06 disk drives (wash tubs) with removable ~ 200 MB
disk packs
The birth of the first winchester hard drives
Upgrading to Fujitsu eagles - ~ 450MB, two man rack
installation.
Programming my first computer in my first language
BASIC on a DEC PDP 8e
reading about the birth of the ENIAC as a young pup in the
late 50's when I first
caught word about these things called "Computers" and how
they were going to lead
to great things
meeting Grace Hopper US NAVY - one of the first programmers
ever and the first woman programmer
ever - she was part of the first team that found the first
real computer bug -
a moth caught in the computer relays causing computational
errors
Programming in that advanced language called
ASSEMBLER..................
Programming in tedious COBOL.
being an original HACKER, when HACKER was a good thing....
Yourdan's Structured Programming Methodologies.......
Working with the kernel source code for Bell Lab's just
released UNIX Version 6.
The first 24 bit Color Video Card -
we had three of these -
Composed of Three 19 inch wide by 72 inch high rack mount
cabinets
one for each color (RGB) 8 bits per pixel per cabinet
CORE memory
a DEC PDP 8/e frame buffer controller
High speed parallel bus ribbon cables connecting it to the
DEC PDP11-70
which rendered the images in real time - about 30 minutes
per individual frame
A BARCO RGB color monitor connected to a video switch
Gotta go, the nurse is coming with my medicine, cough cough
cough hack.....
Now were did I leave my walker......
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