> On Fri, 2003-09-05 at 09:49, Kenneth Goodwin wrote:
> > <SNIP>
>
> > Dropping your first punch card deck on the floor and
having
> > to manually
> > resort the entire deck of 500 cards because you did not
> <snip>
> ROTFLMAOPMP, Kenneth, I give up, you win! you win!
> Sheesh.
> I remember Hollerith cards but fortunately never had to
deal
> with them
> except to learn about them just in case. Glad I missed
that, though I
> still had to wait for the operator to release my compile
> jobs on an HP.
> I remember the most infuriating thing back in the old
days of
> programming, when it took half a day to compile, was
missing
> that f----
> '.' in COBOL.
> I always wondered what happened to you old geezers. I
> remember the whine
> of an RA60 pack winding up. Loading files from mag tape.
> Hell, the first
> program I wrote was on a VIC 20. Imagine how concise you
had
> to program
> back then. Today they are very sloppy. They just tell you
> that you need
> a bigger machine.
It just goes to show you how REALLY far we have come in such
a short time.
Old geezer, Hell NO Ed, I am only 47 and barely into my
prime.
I just started real early at age 8, barely out of diapers.
Dad was a big wheel at the bank, took his brightest boy into
the shop one
day for a visit (banks - how boring...), got that mandatory
gee whiz tour
of the data center, caught one
look at those big machines with the flashing lights and
spinning reels of tape
and feel in love.....(sort of).... Read everything available
on those computer gizmos from that point on ..... flash
forward to A progressive high school
district with a
PDP 8e and a IBM 1130. The PDP8e was paper tape loaded for
even the OS
NO Disk, very little ram and 8 Teletype TTY terminals.
The 1130 - punch cards and hard disk cartridge and god yes -
a Drum based Line printer
(they used it for the school district records processing as
well)
As a freshman, I had to get up at 5AM, get to my high school
by 6AM,
waddle down pitch dark hallways, open my locker in the dark,
grab the compsci
stuff and catch a bus to the other high school for a 7-8am
class. I whipped
through the course work for the class in two weeks and then
I wrote computer games
the rest of the time in Basic for this PDP. They were kinda
of lame by todays standards
and based on the TV shows of the Day that I had to
reload into the PDP via Paper Tape before I could run them.
But I would have gone through hell and back to get my hands
on a computer to play with.
Flash forward a few more years and I am at a high tech
college working on
a Xerox Sigma 9 Main Frame, Perkin Elmer Interdata 8-32.
Learning all the standard
comp sci stuff. Meet my first "Production PC", the Altair,
at a ACM computer club meeting
at the college. One day a buddy of mine drags me over to the
"Computer
Graphics Laboratory" where he works as an operator. They
hire me part time
as a op/prog and I spend the next 3 years working (fulltime)
with and in awe of such
Geniuses (when they were just out of college to boot) as
Dr. Edwin Catmull, Dr. Alvy Ray Smith
(both now of PIXAR systems and formerly with Lucasfilm - Toy
Story)
Dr. James Clark for a summer, Tom Duff, now of Bell Labs,
(Google on "Duff's Device")
and a cast of others of their caliber
in a Lab specializing in bleedy edge computer graphics
animation.
It's were I found out that there were real programmer
friendly systems like UNIX,
worked on the first production VAX 11-780, and watched a
computer controlled 4 inch
reel to reel
video tape recorder (the IVC 9000) do single frame recording
on
magnetic tape. You write time-code on the tape end to end,
your PDP11-70 goes into dedicated real-time mode for
controlling the IVR,l
you rewind the tape back a bit to get a running start,
You start playback mode, you hit the right time-code value
and then pop the
record button on for a second and it recorded (hopefully)
what was in the attached frame buffer. Video disk recorders
were just
coming out then and were a good 6 figures at that time.
DAMN I miss those days!!! Wasn't LIFE just grand and
exciting back then ED?
When only a few of us had PC's and the DARPA-NET wasnt
loaded down with SPAM.
Writing tight little code was a real art done by really
talented people working
in darken halls of magic and awe. We were worshipped and
feared as Gods Unto Our Own Right.
:=} :=} :=} :=}
ALL break into a chorus of
"Those Were The Days, My Friend, We Thought They'd Never
End"
I would like to see those code jockeys at Microsoft rewrite
Office 2000 to run
in a 64 KB split I and D space system like my old PDP 11-70
64K BYTES for instructions, 64K for data and maybe if you
got the UNIX V6
kernel code to behave you could enable and get I-Code leap
frog to work right
and increase your I-code space
infinitely. I played with it because UNIX was a source
license at that time.
imagine - a version of bank select memory that predated the
PC world's notion.)
Cheap RAM, Cheap and Fast CPU's are making us all soft in
the belly............
Have a Nice weekend all................
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