Lol, cradles.
Have you guys heard about "matches?"
Far out.
Kinda like car phones.
I guess so!
1200 baud in 1985? Wow. Most people had 150 baud modems then. It was that Summer when the Tandy 1000 first came out. (A computer that actually had a built-in hard drive.) The first one is in the Smithsonian. I remember that TRS-DOS rivaled IBM-DOS equally that year.
In 1985 there were tape-decks that plugged into Color Computers (CoCo's), that acted as hard-drives, though that was going out of style with the new Tandy1000's. (The CoCo is still a classic.)
The first "King's Quest" came out that year. I didn't know the instructions and just started typing. It was the first "home" game that had a sense of humor. It was pretty addicting.
When I was in Computer Programming in College in 1980-1983, I remember there were some "odd" people tucked away in a small section of the Computer Department taking a class about MS-DOS. I thought, "What a waste of time". Little did I know as I sat in my Assembly, COBOL, RPG, EasyTreve classes and other Business and Accounting Computer Courses writing programs so that they could be "batched" on an IBM-4331 and later on an IBM-370. (Do I still remember the numbers of those computers? I think those were the two main-frames we had in College.)
The concept of using a single terminal to run a program was foreign as I was in the middle of transitioning between "punching" 1500 cards for a simple program and using "dumb" terminals to type code. When you wrote a program, you tried to use as many MACROS as you could so you wouldn't have to re-type a batch of cards. Every MACRO you ever wrote, you remembered, for this purpose alone. When COBOL came out with so many MACROS of it's own, it was such a time-saver for programming. It had few bugs and few limitations, so it was well-received.
That wasn't that long ago, though in computer-age it's eons ago.
There's a lot of old-time programmers that are on REDSZONE. I think people today would have loved to have seen how it was, especially using Assembly Language. If you like logic, you'd love to have written programs in Assembly. It was actually a lot of fun.
Last edited by Kingspoint; 08-17-2010 at 06:38 AM.
Remember when businesses would tell customers, "Check the company's BBS"? They were the first "company web-sites". That's where you'd find updated information about products and services.
I was a system manager for a PDP-11/70 back in about 1977-78. I had to boot the machine each day by toggling in a instruction boot sequence through the front panel. It had an 18 bit switch register on the front that I'd toggle in the bit sequence of the instruction and then toggle load. I think it had like 37 instructions and if you got any of them wrong, the machine would say "huh?" when you tried to boot.
Came in handy when I went to grad school at Wright State and we had to write a rudimentary operating system for a little PDP-11/03. Nothing like a bare metal computer to make you appreciate an OS. That was all Macro-11 assembler.
And for school, I'd go to the keypunch room and punch out my card deck to submit to the IO window to an IBM 360. Some of the programs were pretty big and I'd find out the klutzes in the computer room dropped my box and scrambled the cards. Good thing I put sequence numbers on each card. We had an IBM 082 card sorter where I'd worked and I'd run it through that to get it back into sequence.
Get off my lawn all you whipper-snappers!
She used to wake me up with coffee ever morning
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."
http://dalmady.blogspot.com
Yes. I got to where I could "keypunch" 80 words per minute with only about 7-8 cards per 1000 with a typing error. Interestingly, the "sound" of the key-punching helped the accuracy.
I'd literally spend 40 hours per week in the Computer Room at school. I can't think of anyone who didn't have their cards dropped. What a nightmare. My apartment was loaded with stacks of cards (programs). Was it any wonder why programmers were a little quirky? You had to be.
Wow, this thread has REALLY gotten off topic, lol.
I think there is a VBulletin feature for this, but a UK board that I post on has it set up to where the mods I believe have to allow the post before it is seen on the message board. This is only for new members.
Example:
I think that is how it works but it would create more work for the mods here. Might be something to consider though and would keep the nerd fights from getting escalated.Cardinal Troll registers to post
Cardinal Troll makes trolling post in Sun Deck
The post is not displayed until a mod or admin sees the post
Mod sees post is trolling and bans Cardinal Troll
Certainly RFS could delight us with stories of his new-fangled math counter called an abacus. Sure beat counting beans!!
:
Some people play baseball. Baseball plays Jay Bruce.
Just to get back on topic.
You guys are a bunch of nerds.
Board Moderators may, at their discretion and judgment, delete and/or edit any messages that violate any of the following guidelines: 1. Explicit references to alleged illegal or unlawful acts. 2. Graphic sexual descriptions. 3. Racial or ethnic slurs. 4. Use of edgy language (including masked profanity). 5. Direct personal attacks, flames, fights, trolling, baiting, name-calling, general nuisance, excessive player criticism or anything along those lines. 6. Posting spam. 7. Each person may have only one user account. It is fine to be critical here - that's what this board is for. But let's not beat a subject or a player to death, please. |