Computers

[Rossluck]

It occurred to me today that I generally don't go anywhere near a computer unless I need to check emails, or run a search on GOOGLE, or see what's happening in these forums (and have a peek as a guest at the other one :wink:), or check out ebay. So, without the net I probably wouldn't use a computer at all.

But for years we didn't even have access to the net, and rarely used email. The first computer I used (listen to this, young'uns) required 5.5 inch floppy disks to run. So, if you wanted to use a word processor, say, you'd have to put one floppy in with the program files, and replace it with another disk to save what you had in the computer's 64 K memory, and replace that one with the spell check disk and so on .... Then came the hard drive, and then more and more speed, then smaller floppies, then CDs and DVDs, and more speed, and then flash cards, and more speeds: all frustratingly accompanied by the Microsoft hourglass icon.

Oh, and it also occurred to me that since I was born in 1957 the Australian polulation has more than doubled . :?

http://www.populstat.info/Oceania/australc.htm

[wheelinround]

Guess you never saw the 10 inch floppy disk then Ross or the tape type recorders used at one stage mainly on Commodore's. Aunt used to bring home her work a punch card machine for programing on Main Frames.

[Gra]

Guess you never saw the 10 inch floppy disk then Ross or the tape type recorders used at one stage mainly on Commodore's. Aunt used to bring home her work a punch card machine for programing on Main Frames.


and the confetti from those punch cards was a real b@#$% to get off if it was "spilled" into your pocket or your briefcase...(A favorite Party trick:U)

[Cliff Rogers]

I've seen 8" FDs but not 10".

There was a telephone call logging system for motels that booted MS-DOS 1 from 8" FDs that I worked on it Townsville last century.

[wheelinround]

Could be 8" Cliff so long ago

[BobL]

What about paper punch tape as both input and output - the first computer I used had 4k (yes "k") of RAM and storage was by paper tape. SOme output was via teletype (electric typewriter). The core memory was hand assembled magnetic cores.

To do any sort of half decent calculation you had to load and run segments of the the program and output the intermediate results in a series of steps. It ran from 1972 to 1983 - a lot longer than most computers today. When we finally retired it, the internals were full of cockroach skins and dust. ( no "bug" jokes please)

[malb]

I've seen 8" FDs but not 10".

There was a telephone call logging system for motels that booted MS-DOS 1 from 8" FDs that I worked on it Townsville last century.

Never seen 5.5 inch either for that matter, though 5.25 was common for many years and a range of formats and densities. Then when the rest orf the world started going to 3.5 inch Amstrad got real smart and tried to launch 3in.

Then at one stage in the eighties I had an XT clone with 5 floppies hung off it, 2x 8in, 3 x 5.25, and 2 x 3.5. Spent about 2 years converting manuscripts from proprietry typsetter formats (about 120 out of 2000+ that existed) to Microsoft Word formats so revised editions could be desktop published. So much fun doing that and proofreading them.

[joe greiner]

One of my perfessers at Uni predicted that punch-card format would be greatly reduced in scale. I never figured out how such tiny holes could be punched with the required precision.

I wrote one of the first banner programs, in Fortran no less, for the IBM 360 (Yes, it took me a few cycles to get my bachelor's). 'Twas quite a hit at a conference in Montreal, I was told. Only one font, but it did white-on-black as well as black-on-white. The LOUD NOISE from the line printer alerted the computer centre staff what was happening. I still have the punch cards, but no way of reading them. And no intention either.

Joe

[dai sensei]

I remember all of them, the cards, the tape, the minis, mainframes, even the programmable calculators. My first big job was writing software for the HP41C, the wis-bang fancy claculator with 2K of memory, at the time it was amazing :doh:

I also remember when I was in PNG arguing with the boss over buying an additional storage external hard drive for the office. I wanted a 1Mb drive for the office, but he bought the 0.5Mb drive saying "we would never fill the 1Mb dive". The office was then 7 people, we filled the new drive in 3 months.

Makes me laugh when I think about the external drive with 500Gb I just bought for a back-up for my home computer :U

[Chipman]

Would you believe I was actually using an Apple 2e with 5 1/4 drives at school on Friday! It has a program that really works well and can't get it anywhere else so I have kept a couple of them. Surprisingly the students think it is really cool using such an old machine. Not bad for a 25 year old machine.


Cheers,

Chipman:)

[Barry_White]

Well I still have the first computer I ever bought in 1984. It was a Bondwell luggable weighed as much as a portable sewing machine and looked like one as well.

It has a flip down keyboard two 5 1/4 120k floppy drives one for the program you where running and one for your data. It has 128k of memory and came with some incredible software. It has Wordstar, Calcstar, Datastar and Reportstar. The Database program was an Interelational Database which meant you could have three to four databases refering to each other.

I still have the machine as I said and it still works. It also had a 9" orange screen built in.

[artme]

When i was at high School the Dept ED. had a computer that visited schools in the back of an armoured van! 'Twas about the size of a school teacher's desk and could basically do the four maths operations quicker than we could. Cost was (1963 ) 15,000 POUNDS!!

First computer I bought my kids was an Apple 2C enhanced, 128Kb. Twindisk drive, Appleworks. monitor and key board. All up $2100 in 1986.
Look what you get for $2 100 today!!

[BobL]

My first big job was writing software for the HP41C, the wis-bang fancy claculator with 2K of memory, at the time it was amazing :doh:


I still have mine with the card reader, and it still works. I remember writing a model for a nuclear reactor on it in 1982 and it used to take around 16 hours to do the calculations although about 5 minutes every hour or so was spent jockeying mag cards in and out. When I bought a 386 with 387 coprocessor PC in 1992 the same process took around 3 minutes. I should try it on a newish PC sometime.

[Rossluck]

I meant 5.25 floppies.

I do remember the Commodore with the cassette tapes. If you didn't have the pre-loaded tapes you could spend an hour typing in code from a manual and the result would be two bars of twinkle twinke little star while the background colour changed three times. Good stuff. :2tsup:

[dzcook]

my first was a amstrad with a green screen and the cassette tape storage can remenber spending hrs typing in a program and in the end all it was was a stick figure walking across the screen and if you got something wrong in the typing he would dissapppear 1/2 way across or less but it did have a printer dot matrix so i was able to tpye letters etc but pretty sure no spell check etc told some kids about it the other day and they thought it was halarious ( see still need the spell checker )

[Gingermick]

Dot matrix was the bees knees compared to the daisy wheel printers. ehhh, whirrrr, chick, erhh. whirrr, chick.....
Could print a whole letter in half an hour.

[petersemple]

My first computer was an IBM 5100 http://oldcomputers.net/ibm5100.html
Complete with 1/4" tape drive and built in monitor. I guess it was the equivalent of a notebook. And what was even cooler is that it could play the Star Trek game. It was a few years old when we got it.

Peter

[Gingermick]

and weren't they cheap.

[Alastair]

Cut my teeth in first year Uni, on a punch card driven IBM360. Later in a second attempt at another Uni, it was a Burroughs mainframe

Started playing on the HP 9825 in late '70s doing chemical reaction monitoring and reactor simulation modelling at work. Single 2" tape cartridge, with program on track 1 and data storage on track 2. Melted one with the constant scanning back and forth.

Then was running one of the first spreadsheet programs on it in '82. (remember supercalc?)

Later early IBM PC and XT, used as a data management system for factory records, and later as a programming interface for PLC run plant.

Then the world as it is caught up, with Internet, email and Windows!

[AlexS]

First desktop computer I used was an Olivetti Programma 101 in about 1968. From memory, it had 13 registers, some of which could be reduced in precision to give a few more registers. Program & data I/O was by magnetic card, and as with most machines of that time, often required multi-step processing.

My first big job was writing software for the HP41C, the wis-bang fancy claculator with 2K of memory, at the time it was amazing :doh:

In 1978, I wrote a hydrographic data processing system for a 64K machine, the HP9845. This was an amazing machine, and driving two plotters, a digitiser, two x 8" floppies, line printer, thermal printer & two x cartridge drives, it did things that up 'til then were only done on mainframes.

While playing around with it, I wrote a program that would plot the bar codes for a HP41C (or was it HP41CV?) program if you typed in the code. You could then program the calculator by swiping with a bar code reader.

Later on, I used a portable (if you had a coolie at your command) Kaypro, and various other early machines.

[joe greiner]

The Kaypro was "portable" because it had a handle; weighed about 20 pounds, IIRC.

Earlier, around 1980+, I had the full package for the HP41 (C?, CV? who knows?). I wrote a program for multiple moving loads on a "beam-on-elastic-foundation," for a boat repair facility. I set the machine running at 11:59am, and departed for lunch break. When I returned, I found the desk covered with paper tape. Lucky me, I did the post-processing by hand.

Joe

[AlexS]

I set the machine running at 11:59am, and departed for lunch break. When I returned, I found the desk covered with paper tape. Lucky me, I did the post-processing by hand.

Joe

Ah yes. We used to run flood routing programs on the Olivetti overnight - just make sure it has a new roll of paper, set it running & go home. Several times, a 'good samaritan' turned it off thinking we'd forgotten to.