Computers Now and Then

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When I did computers in PL1 language back in 1974 I "programmed" with a deck of cards. No screens. The only keyboard interaction was to paper punch the deck of cards.
 
I ran PDP8's back in the day using a teletype - no screen of any kind ... You didn't go back far enough
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I remember punch cards from college in 1981. We were programming in Pascal. Had a 7:30am class, had an assignment due that was we had to write a banking type application. The code would print out on the line printer as would the program output. Cards had to be stacked in ascending order of line number of each line of code. I'd pulled an all nighter at the campus computing center to get it debugged and running correctly. The room floor had cables lying accross it sheathed in step-over ramps and such. About 6:45am I finally got it properly debugged and had just finished examining the output on the printout. I was walking out towards the exit area eyes scanning the printout one final time preparing to rush accross campus to class to get it turned in, when I tripped on one of the cable step-overs and the sequentially sorted and stacked deck of punch cards, and had to be submitted in proper running sequence fell like confetti.

Talk about panic. Well, I managed to get them re-ordered and sprinted across campus, arriving only about 5 minutes late to class panting like a cheetah that just bolted across the savanna.
 
Cut my teeth on one of these:

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We also had these in public school:
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And then my mom brought home one of these from the school board:
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In 1988, my first computer was a Hewitt Rand 8088, which I still have. I also have a Mac Plus and a few other antiques that still work.
 
Originally Posted By: OVERKILL
Cut my teeth on one of these:

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Dysentary.png


I still don't know what dysentery is.
 
College was a combination of a teletype input machine, punched cards, 8" floppies, green screen CRT's, and eventually a black/white monitor. Computers ranged from Prime 300, IBM 360 and a Vax 11/780 by DEC.

The 8" floppies were probably the worst. If you had to insert a line midway through a larger file, you literally had time to run to the cafeteria for lunch, come back, and still be watching the machine working to insert that blank line so you could enter your code.
 
My first one was an IBM. Went to the computer show and got Win 3.1 to put on it from floppys. First thing I did was run Dir DOS command to show all the files. I freaked out and unplugged it thinking they were all being deleted.....
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My parents bought my sister and I a computer for Christmas, it would've been 1985 or 1986. I don't remember the exact model, but it was an Amstrad which used cassette tapes. Loading a simple arcade style game (Bomb Jack was our favourite) took about 15 minutes! Most other kids at that time had the Commodore 64 computer.
 
My dad repaired sperry/unisys mainframes in the 70s-90s for nasa. My first computer was a 8088 which we eventually upgraded all the way to 640kb of ram, and a 20 meg external hard drive which we built a wooden box for that sat outside the computer (the chassis was full from the 5.25 and 3.5 drives). I made it a eventual career and do not miss dip switches but do miss the simplicity.
 
1983 or thereabouts, our school had two "TRS80" computers, that ran off cassette tapes.

The High School "computer club", (there were 4 of us) made money for the club and upgrades by changing the code on a tab printed "playboy bunny", about A4 size, so that it printed people's names all through the bunny.

Still can't beleive people paid $1 per back in '83 for that.

About '87, I had a gap year and bought the family a Commodore Amiga 1000, with the HDD upgrade...$1500 was a fortune back then...I've still got the Amiga, think it works but no sound.
 
Originally Posted By: Shannow
1983 or thereabouts, our school had two "TRS80" computers, that ran off cassette tapes.

The High School "computer club", (there were 4 of us) made money for the club and upgrades by changing the code on a tab printed "playboy bunny", about A4 size, so that it printed people's names all through the bunny.

Still can't beleive people paid $1 per back in '83 for that.

About '87, I had a gap year and bought the family a Commodore Amiga 1000, with the HDD upgrade...$1500 was a fortune back then...I've still got the Amiga, think it works but no sound.


Oh yeah, I remember those. We used to call them Trash 80's. I think that was a common nickname back in the day. I liked the Amiga and was thinking about picking one up as a used one, but never got around to it. Pretty advanced at the time, it just kinda died out.
 
Originally Posted By: dishdude
Originally Posted By: OVERKILL
Cut my teeth on one of these:

appleiie.png



Dysentary.png


I still don't know what dysentery is.


LOL...Oregon Trail. I played that game countless times in the early/mid 1990s. A lot of schools and such had floppy disk computers still in use through the 1990s. Anything to get a "computer in the classroom." I remember my middle school dumped a bunch of those old Apples in an outside corridor circa 2000 where they got rained on and basically ruined. There was absolutely zero demand for them at the time. Probably all of them worked before being exposed to the elements. I never remember a computer being broken in the early 1990s.
 
my first was some dual tape drive relic

second one(first real computer) was
ibm pcjr
512kbyte of ram
(2) 10MB hdd
twin 5.25 floppies
a monitor that had amber and green buttons as well as color
and doubled as a channel 2-13 tv
dos 2.1? or 2.2?

Would play mean 18 golf on it sometimes.

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it also had weird square joysticks

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Originally Posted By: Shannow
About '87, I had a gap year and bought the family a Commodore Amiga 1000, with the HDD upgrade...$1500 was a fortune back then...I've still got the Amiga, think it works but no sound.


Clearly, you spent your gap year as a drug dealer!
 
LOL, no, running a console at a servo.

Because I was saving for Uni, I got free board from Mum and Dad, so the computer for the family was sort of compensation for that.

Although while in high school, there were a couple of names (Croats) that were related, and had more money than Batman (4 cars and three bikes, including a 351 Cortina aren't the most common HS rides) that we used to stir up ubout being drug barons...about 15 years ago, they made the papers with swathes of dope plants in the Brindabellas...both names implicated.
 
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