drucker Loc: Oregon

My first computer experience was at a telephone company office and the time code punched and hand written notes of the long distance operators were converted to punch cards by gals at bank of card punches -- one card for each call. The original entry included the originating number the destination number, and the duration of the call. Feeding those deck of cards seemed like a never ending job because each pass only did one thing -- sort to time so that the proper day or night rate could be applied, sort to destination so that the proper rate could be applied. Each pass added a bit of information until finally each card had a dollar value for the call. then finally they could be sorted by caller to prepare the bill. As cumbersome as it was, it was a long way ahead of of the previous method of ledger page for each subscriber where individual calls were recorded by hand.

Portions constantly changed and within a couple of years the entire systems had been replaced, and then replaced again. One of the steps involved 10" floppy disks that if I remember right held 80k. That replaced thousands of cards but the system had its own set of challenges. It was a celebrated day when we got a 10mg hard disk! It and its controller was only the size of a small microwave.

In 1976 I moved into printing and learned CP/M. Oh how easy that seemed to be compared to the previous languages. DOS was still 5 years away!

cincykid

You could always dpot the engineers at the University of Detroit in the mid 60's. They all had slide rules on their belts.

cincykid

You could always dpot the engineers at the University of Detroit in the mid 60's. They all had slide rules on their belts.

alliebess Loc: suburban Philadelphia

I actaully had two - a "pocket" 6 inch one and another one, 12", for classes. And when my father bought my 12" the clerk looked at him very oddly - because he was buying it for his daughter. (I was a chemistry major, math minor and did indeed work as a chemist in a male-dominated field for a number of years.

47greyfox Loc: on the edge of the Colorado front range

Yup, I still cherish my Picket as well. I also have a Post Versalog. Occasionally, I drag them out as a test of my memory. Good thing, the Picket is metal and yellow.

drucker Loc: Oregon

There is still a "slip stick" in the pencil holder on my desk and a circular slide rule in desk drawer at home. I still use both in calculating reductions and enlargements of prints and photos. My grandkids just roll they eyes when I pull them out to use.

EdM Loc: FN30JS

the HP35 (?) calculator was >$700..I got one... rev polish, but that died...shame, it was gooder.

RS Loc: W Columbia, SC

Oh, thanks for the memories...
I was in Vietnam in '67 - '68 where I was in charge of a maintenance team of various machines
including the IBM keypunchers, verifiers, sorters, and duplicators that put the holes into
the IBM cards that held the programs which were then fed into the UNIVAC 1005 card processers that
printed out various reports for various units including the 9th Inf Div and 196th Lt Inf Bde.
People had a tendency to look down on repairmen as though the programmers and operators were brighter,
but I often had to point out that we repairmen also had to know programming - often showing that
the machines sometimes were not capable of what the programmers were telling it to do;
and, of course, in order to fix the machines, we also had to be able to operate them.
To top that off, the machines were usually scheduled to run 24/7, and the maintenance teams
had to be available 24/7, which most of the time was the case.
Oh, yeah, thanks for the memories . . .

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Worked on the same machines in 1968/69 in DaNang (even though it wasn't my primary MOS). Where were you in country?

SmittyOne Loc: California

My first computer was an 8080 processor, built the thing myself, ran cassette basic, had a horridly large amount of RAM, an WHOLE 32 kBits! Forget the actual manufacturer of the kit, but, man, did I love that thing. Monitor was a TV, and when the computer wasn't one, we threw the switch, and watched TV.

EdM Loc: FN30JS

I got the entire defensive electronic signal level system of a major bomber [s/n etc over 200 components) into an HP9828 with 12k of memory. Took a few hours to run, but I had to park so much data now and then that I did burn out the tape drive on the HP9828.

RS Loc: W Columbia, SC

I bounced around quite a bit.
Forgive me, my spelling on this will probably be
horrendously off on these names, but here goes:
- Chu Lai
- Phu Bai
- DaNang
- Saigon, and finally
- Long Bien

EdM Loc: FN30JS

I had my dad's k&E rule, and a nifty 12" circular one with a smith chart on the back (or front)... 'tink was a freebee fro FXR at the time.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

You were all over! Wasn't being nosey - just wondered if we had served together. I was a 34B2H (fire control computer repair instructor). Started in Cam Ranh Bay, went up north near the Ahn Ke pass fixing early fire control computers (FADACs) with the Cav, at Monkey mountain working on Hawk missle fire control, and in DaNang, in the big depot computer center working on the same machines as you (key punches, verifiers, sorters, collators, etc and Univac 1105s running SAL), before leaving out of Bin Hua the day before Tet in 69. We had some strange adventures including a disgruntled CE throwing a thermite grenade into a 557 card interpreter in the data center - the sound of a grenade bail popping off will clear a data center in seconds! I'm sure my spelling of Vietnamese names is much worse than yours, and apologies to the thread for reliving old times :)

EdM Loc: FN30JS

at Monkey mountain working on Hawk missle fire control,

you guys come outa TAS @ Bliss?