PC History Lesson: This is too funny to see the current youth experience 20 year old PCs. http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8ucCxtgN6sc...

waegwan Loc: Mae Won Li

This is too funny to see the current youth experience 20 year old PCs.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8ucCxtgN6sc

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Yeah, well, imagine working with punch cards and Fortran on an NCR Century 100 with 64K of memory! That computer ran Davidson College back in 1973... We had to use it for our Statistics and Computers 101 class.

I can barely imagine what my grandkids will use.

Frank47 Loc: West coast Florida

Holy smokes! Burkphoto, another guy like myself old enough to remember punch cards. I remember when calculators first came out and all they could do was add, subtract, multiply and divide . . . . . . . and we were mezmorized!

waegwan Loc: Mae Won Li

burkphoto wrote:

Yeah, well, imagine working with punch cards

Yup been there, done that. :thumbup:

waegwan Loc: Mae Won Li

Frank47 wrote:

Holy smokes! Burkphoto, another guy like myself old enough to remember punch cards. I remember when calculators first came out and all they could do was add, subtract, multiply and divide . . . . . . . and we were mezmorized!

In 1978 in Korea I was really high speed with a Texas Instruments LCD calculator and my own (Army owned) mimeograph machine in my supply room. We'd heard talk about electric typewriters, when I finally got one I wanted to throw it out the window; it moved faster than I could think and unlike computers it didn't have instant backspace erase. :XD:

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Frank47 wrote:

Holy smokes! Burkphoto, another guy like myself old enough to remember punch cards. I remember when calculators first came out and all they could do was add, subtract, multiply and divide . . . . . . . and we were mezmorized!

Yeah, I built one of those +-*/ calculators, a Heathkit. The stupid NiCd battery pack lasted all of about two weeks because they said nothing in the manual about the memory effect, and I kept topping it off. It turned into a brick during one of my exams...

My first really useful computer was an Apple IIe, fully tricked-out with an accelerated 3.6 MHz processor and a full megabyte of memory. A few years later, I had a PC clone running DOS, and a Mac SE, both on my desk at work. I've had both a PC and a Mac around ever since... Now I run Windows ON my Mac, since I don't need it for much.

We have seen one amazing amout of change, haven't we?

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

waegwan wrote:

In 1978 in Korea I was really high speed with a Texas Instruments LCD calculator and my own (Army owned) mimeograph machine in my supply room. We'd heard talk about electric typewriters, when I finally got one I wanted to throw it out the window; it moved faster than I could think and unlike computers it didn't have instant backspace erase. :XD:

My high school had both Mimeographs and Ditto Spirit Duplicators. About all that can be said for either is that they worked... I used 'em occasionally for journalism and drama projects. I had a Smith-Corona electric typewriter that did a fair job with the masters for those things. But you had to be VERY careful as a typist!

In 1990, I was working in a school portrait photofinishing lab. We needed massive quantities of *customized* package inserts, and our Addressograph multilith press was dying. So I networked a couple of Macs into a $250,000 Kodak 1392 LED printer, which printed 92 pages a minute at 300 dpi. That was like using a whole room full of mimeographs! In peak season, that thing printed over 350,000 pages a week. We had come a long way from mimeographs by then.

Popeye Loc: LifIno

First computer was a Commodore without any memory. Had to by a magnetic tape recorder to save any of my programming. I to take a course in Fortran and never saw it again outside the classroom.

chrisscholbe Loc: Kansas City, MO

One of my first jobs in "Data Processing" was to sort inventory cards for a retail store chain.

There were 125,000 cards.
I had to sort them on 12 columns alpha and 9 columns numeric.

It took me 2 weeks.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

In 1966 the IBM team I was on replaced the vacuum-tube based Univac at Univ of NC with the first IBM 360 which occupied about 10% of the space and 5% of the A/C cooling - 64K of core storage. Today, my IPhone has many orders of magnitude more computing power and storage. Two years later I was in Vietnam trying to make punch cards and paper tape work in 100% humidity for fire control diagnostics running on diesel generators. A few years ago, I was part of the team selling and building one of the three 10 Petaflop machines in the country - 786,000 cores, 4 Megawatts power, 66 Petabytes of storage with an I/O bandwidth to disk of > 350 GBytes/sec. We have come a Very long way in 50 years.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

I was weened on FORTRAN on an IBM OS-360, with a whopping 64K of memory.

waegwan Loc: Mae Won Li

Popeye wrote:

First computer was a Commodore without any memory. Had to by a magnetic tape recorder to save any of my programming. I to take a course in Fortran and never saw it again outside the classroom.

I had one of those Commodores, that thing as a trip. I still have a Commodore 64, an Apple II, 2 Atari 520-STs one has been boosted to a whole meg of RAM, and a Daewoo 286 something with the 10 monitor with green letters :)

Earworms Loc: Sacramento, California

waegwan wrote:

the 10 monitor with green letters :)

Monochrome.

cincykid

And you could buy a Texas Instruments calculator for $150 which could do square roots. It was much less expensive than an HP.

EdM Loc: FN30JS

first computer, I cannot remember its name, but the memory was a mag delay line... Drop a set of keys on the TTY and it was game over.. MY FIRST PRGm took the centimeter readings off a slotted line, calculated freq and wl for smith chart entry... whew!