Down the memory lane

Dennis,

Didnt use XL3 for much other than storing lists of names/ a calculator but I remember Windows 3.11 and earlier.

Back when:

CPU speeds were measured in single and double digits. (without 'Gig' after the number!!!!)

The PC could be run in TURBO mode (turning my 8 mhz machine in rampaging 16 mhz processing monster)

RAM was measured in KB

HDD were measured in MB (and yet I still run out of space faster these days)

A modem was something that was owned only by either
a) precocious american teenagers who could some how hack into NORAD.
b) clueless computer illiterate pretty boys who solved the problem of AI/self awareness in microchips by spilling champagne on the keyboard.
(Both able to achieve download speeds that still make my broadband connection of today look sluggish)

Floppy disks were floppy

Ahhhhhhhhh, yes they were the good 'ol days.

Regards
Weasel

I still remember carrying decks of punch cards around. I used to draw a diagonal strip accross their tops in case I dropped them.

When I started at my current employer, the computer was a micromation, about 200mm high by 300mm wide by 350mm deep. Boot disk was an 8" floppy, and you turned a key to start it up. 40Mb HDD, and I think about 128Kb RAM.

BUT, we had a line printer attached that used to spit out A3 computer paper at a phenomonal rate. :o

Punch cards. I used to be an IBM 1401/7074 operator feeding it massive decks of cards. The insurance co. I worked for had a whole room of key-punch operators. The IT schools at the time were all running ads about the wonderful career opportunities of key-puch operators. A different era.

Back in high school, the whole place was buzzing the day we got our first four Apple IIe's. A huge step up from the text only DEC-writer that connected with a small community college 45 miles away.

The next big advance at the school was when we upgraded from 9 pin dot matrix printers. :lol: :lol:

The good ole days, n'est ce pas?

Hey, Doug,

Do you also remember the acres of space used up by the tape drives? (For you younger folks, data used to be stored on magnetic tape. To view you large data holdings you had to request an operator to physically mount your tape on one of the drives.)

Personnaly, I still miss the simplicity with which EXEC, EXEC II, and REXX gave you control over the mainframe operating system and apps. Even a non-programmer (non-IT professional) like me could figure out neat things to do.

I remember at college using one of the first IBM PCs that had dual 8 inch floppies. One floppy for the OP System and another for the data - this was more advanced than the single floppy drive when you had to keep changing floppies. - Hard Drive - what was that?

This was also my first introduction to losing all my work when a fellow student inadvertantly kicked out the power plug (he lost his work as well)

In my system design exam we had to spec a system and the biggest HD was 10MB and that was HUGE!! The trick was to spec the fastest printer available or else the printout of the invoices would take 1 month.

Those were the days.

Hey I had a Comm 64 with a tape (cassette) drive.

Makes you wonder when applications stopped fitting on a flopy disk?

Commmodore 64 - That was indeed when home computing reached its highest point - its all been downhill after that. I remember having the C64 with the C64 5 1/4 floppy, C64 Printer and the C64 monitor. I felt like I had my own Cray.

Before that though I had the VIC20. I know I complain now when some of my games take 30 secs to load up but back then it was wack in that tape, type load and come back in 20-30 minutes.

It is this association with Commodore products that I blame for my late interest in programming. Typing in 500 lines of BASIC to get a damn ball (that was blocky) to bounce across the screen a few times was enough to put me off of coding for another 20 years.

Weasel

Quote

Originally posted by Neale
- Hard Drive - what was that?

I remember when I thought a hard drive was getting in the car and making the 200 mile round trip (after class got out) to see my brother's high school football game (Fri.) and return (either late Fri. or early Sat.) to ISU for the college game.:lol:

Couldn't :drink: before or during the HS game and couldn't miss :drink: :cheers: :beergrin: at the tailgates on Sat.!!!

Quote

Originally posted by thomach
I still remember carrying decks of punch cards around. I used to draw a diagonal strip accross their tops in case I dropped them.

Ah, yes. 1968, sophomore [edited after my memory improved] year in college - IBM 360 using Fortran IV - the latest language release. We turned our cards in before 5:00 PM and hoped that no one left an infinite loop in their stack, or at least the card operator would notice that the program was caught in a loop before too many hours had passed. With any luck at all, we could have our printed out program by 8:00 AM, and start reading through it to find all the errors.

Although a math major and physics minor, I never learned how to use a slide rule until after college, when I had to teach high school students (for those who don't know, there was an era prior to hand-held calculators! )

I remember after I graduated from college while in the Navy, the Wang two-line display was the state of the art computer technology!!

Ah the good old days... now where was I? Oh yes, where did I put my teeth? And where did all my hair go? :biggrin:

And, come to think of it, the monitors in those days were black and white with text (non-proportional spaced fonts) only.

(A memorable day at my high school was when our chemistry teacher got a new slide rule -- a circular one.) By the way, for those not familiar wih slide rules, they were analog computers with 2 to 3 digit (not decimal) accuracy. :spin:

Having spent a number of years with teletype output from timesharing computers, I saw a demo of a CRT monitor that showed about 24 lines of output at a time (no scrolling). I remember commenting to the demonstrator that I saw no utility in such a thing because there was no way that I could review all of my code at once, like I could on that good old yellow teletype paper.

Quote

Originally posted by Pesky Weasel
Commmodore 64 - That was indeed when home computing reached its highest point - its all been downhill after that. I remember having the C64 with the C64 5 1/4 floppy, C64 Printer and the C64 monitor. I felt like I had my own Cray.

Before that though I had the VIC20. I know I complain now when some of my games take 30 secs to load up but back then it was wack in that tape, type load and come back in 20-30 minutes.

Weasel

:biggrin: Ahh yes, those were the days - 20 minutes of screeching while data loaded in from a cassette only to conclude with the dreaded "LOAD ERROR" :mad:

I remember my first basic program, consisting of about 3 lines of code on a ZX81

The result was
"Liam Googe is an utter n*pple"
all over the screen. I thought it was cool - he didn't and punched my face in :angry:

I got revenge - but that's another story that doesn't fit with this forum's content laws... :wink1:

Ahhh slide rules. Showed my kids how to use one and they couldn't believe we used to use them.

And don't forget logarithim tables. That was when near enough was good enough.

Remember programming in COBOL when one full stop in the wrong place used to bring it all to a screeching halt.

Why is always easier to correct someone elses code than yours?

This thread certainly brought back the memories (good :biggrin: and bad :mad: )

In my days at the University, it was Fortran IV and COBOL with those dreaded punch cards others have mentioned. The worst feeling in the world was having a project due the next day - going to turn in your deck of cards to run and seeing the "turn-around" time clock set to "infinity" - - the Univac 1108 was down again - - only to find out that you spelled "Environment" wrong in your COBOL deck which bombed the program before it got started.

Was working part time at Radio Shack when the TRS-80's hit the market. Spent all my time (between customers of course :wink1: ) trying to get a bowling game programed - - a little white dot shooting across the screen at 10 other little white dots.

Onward and upward to the Atari 800 and C64 era - - cutting notches in single sided floppy disks to make them double sided to save money!!

The company I worked for then had a "Basic 4" computer system with 2 - 75MB disk drives (each the size of a 2 drawer file cabinet)

I have to agree with Dennis that I sometimes would like to "maintain the simplicity". Some days I miss the ease DOS with the command line functions....... but then again, the only smilies we could use were with a colon and a paran :cheers:

.....Ralph

Whoa, you guys had C64s? All I had was a Sinclair ZX81 that wailed like a banshee when I stored or retreived programs from audio cassettes.
My first business computer was an ICL (British made in Japan?) running MPM (think networked CPM). We almost went for the 5mb disk but upgraded to 10mb even though the consultant said we'd never fill the 5mb. Our main app was a database called FMS-80. I was totally giddy when I saw my first spreadsheet and realized the possibilites.

Wow! This is one of the few boards where I can mention something from the past, and several people actually know and understand what I'm referring to!!!

I remember I was in the Philippines when the very first Pong games appeared. Navy pilots flocked to them at the O' Club like... Intelligence officers (like me) were assumed to know how they worked and they didn't improve our flight skills (or so they told us), so we had to wait until they tired of the game.:biggrin:

Hi all
I try not to remember the "old days" but could not let it go by and not tell everyone about my first computer.
Tandy "Radio Shack" CoCo (Color Computer) Didn't have a monitor but used the tv instead and the processor was an old chip from the missle industry created by Motorola.
Operating system was Tris-Dos
Used and Audio casset for loading programs.
Had a ball with it
Jim:tumble: