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Old farts reminiscing about computers
- Thread starter HankLloydRight
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I'm 51.
I went to high school in Silicon Valley. My high school was one of the four schools that Apple donated 10 computers. This was done to start the personal computing revolution and get high school students interested in computing. I signed up for and was accepted into that very first computing class. My father's company decided they needed to open up a plant in Texas and so we moved to Texas and I lost my slot in that class. My father's company, Memorex, changed their mind and didn't open the plant and we moved back to Silicon Valley and I went right back to my same school. The only effect it had on me was that I missed a couple weeks of school and I lost my slot in that very first class.
Life takes interesting turns.
I still owned an Apple II. I can remember going to a small store and buying the big 16K card to upgrade from 48K to 64K!
I went to high school in Silicon Valley. My high school was one of the four schools that Apple donated 10 computers. This was done to start the personal computing revolution and get high school students interested in computing. I signed up for and was accepted into that very first computing class. My father's company decided they needed to open up a plant in Texas and so we moved to Texas and I lost my slot in that class. My father's company, Memorex, changed their mind and didn't open the plant and we moved back to Silicon Valley and I went right back to my same school. The only effect it had on me was that I missed a couple weeks of school and I lost my slot in that very first class.
Life takes interesting turns.
I still owned an Apple II. I can remember going to a small store and buying the big 16K card to upgrade from 48K to 64K!
Jdcleary
Member
I'm 80 and my first experience was with the IBM 650 with a drum rotating at 12,500 rpm. Wrote programs in 1959 to automate American Motors 10,000-man weekly payroll. Lots of 80 column punch cards and re-writing some of the COBOL in Assembler language would decrease the processing time as was very noticeable as the cards sped up going through the 650's card reader. Too many years ago to remember the model number. :biggrin:
Cottonwood
Roadster#433, Model S#S37
Yet another 50-something-year-old here who grew up in Silicon Valley.
I first learned to program in BASIC around 1974 when I was about 10 years old.
My mom enrolled me in a class at the People's Computer Company storefront community center in Menlo Park, CA. Does anyone else here remember that place? I googled around but couldn't find any pictures of what it looked like inside the center. PCC is better known for publishing the computer magazine Dr. Dobbs Journal.
Anyway, they had 2 PDP minicomputers (donated old PDP-8 systems, I think), a couple of Teletypes, and an optical paper tape reader. It was all low-key and low budget. At some point one of the machines developed a flaky memory that caused it to periodically crash. When I was around, it became my job to reboot it and reload the runtime system from fan-folded paper tape through the optical reader. Later on, the optical reader died and for a time I had to resort to loading the paper tape using the slow mechanical reader on one of the Teletypes.
Even before then, my dad (who worked for IBM) had a teletype installed in a spare bedroom at home for awhile where he could work by using an acoustical modem in a wooden box where you would place the telephone receiver after dialing the access phone number.
It was similar and possibly identical to this:
1964 Antique MODEM Live Demo - YouTube
Occasionally I would go into work with him on the weekend and he would write programs in pencil on a standardized sheet of grid paper. After he had a few pages ready he would hand them to me and I would walk down the hall to the punchcard room and create punchcards on something that looked like a cross between an IBM electric typewriter and a paper money counting machine at a casino. It was very likely an IBM 129 Card Data Recorder like this:
Silicon Valley was an odd place to be a kid. I once found several blank 3-4" silicon wafers (used for making computer chips) sitting in the street gutter outside my home. Another time I found a Signetics semiconductor chip catalog book sitting on the lawn of the playground at my elementary school.
Later, my junior high school got a couple of Imsai 8080 boxes and I taught myself simple machine language programming. When I wasn't in school I would sometimes stop by the Computer Plus store in Sunnyvale which carried some of the earliest personal computers. I either didn't know or had forgotten until I just googled it now but the store was run by Steve Wozniak's brother, Mark.
Around that time I also got my first computer, a TRS-80 -- my dad was too cheap to buy me an Apple II and I was too lazy to get a paper route to get my own.
I first learned to program in BASIC around 1974 when I was about 10 years old.
My mom enrolled me in a class at the People's Computer Company storefront community center in Menlo Park, CA. Does anyone else here remember that place? I googled around but couldn't find any pictures of what it looked like inside the center. PCC is better known for publishing the computer magazine Dr. Dobbs Journal.
Anyway, they had 2 PDP minicomputers (donated old PDP-8 systems, I think), a couple of Teletypes, and an optical paper tape reader. It was all low-key and low budget. At some point one of the machines developed a flaky memory that caused it to periodically crash. When I was around, it became my job to reboot it and reload the runtime system from fan-folded paper tape through the optical reader. Later on, the optical reader died and for a time I had to resort to loading the paper tape using the slow mechanical reader on one of the Teletypes.
Even before then, my dad (who worked for IBM) had a teletype installed in a spare bedroom at home for awhile where he could work by using an acoustical modem in a wooden box where you would place the telephone receiver after dialing the access phone number.
It was similar and possibly identical to this:
1964 Antique MODEM Live Demo - YouTube
Occasionally I would go into work with him on the weekend and he would write programs in pencil on a standardized sheet of grid paper. After he had a few pages ready he would hand them to me and I would walk down the hall to the punchcard room and create punchcards on something that looked like a cross between an IBM electric typewriter and a paper money counting machine at a casino. It was very likely an IBM 129 Card Data Recorder like this:
Silicon Valley was an odd place to be a kid. I once found several blank 3-4" silicon wafers (used for making computer chips) sitting in the street gutter outside my home. Another time I found a Signetics semiconductor chip catalog book sitting on the lawn of the playground at my elementary school.
Later, my junior high school got a couple of Imsai 8080 boxes and I taught myself simple machine language programming. When I wasn't in school I would sometimes stop by the Computer Plus store in Sunnyvale which carried some of the earliest personal computers. I either didn't know or had forgotten until I just googled it now but the store was run by Steve Wozniak's brother, Mark.
Around that time I also got my first computer, a TRS-80 -- my dad was too cheap to buy me an Apple II and I was too lazy to get a paper route to get my own.
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Like many others here, I'm born mid-60s. First program written was at a Radio Shack:
10 PRINT "Hello"
20 GOTO 10
RUN
Thought I was king of the world. Saw and played with Commodore PETs during Canada Wide Science Fair in Waterloo Ontario in 1980. Lusted after an Apple ][ but couldn't find the $$. Managed to scrape together money in 1981 to get an Atari 800 and proceeded to learn everything there was to know about it. Wrote a bunch of games (was mentored via snail-mail by Atari programming great Stan Ockers), utilities, word processors for it, many of which got published in the Eugene Oregon Atari Computer Enthusiasts newsletter. And nearly hit the big time with the magazine Antic paying me to have one of my games published in their book..but then BANG the bottom fell out of 8 bit computing.
Skipped 16 bit computing for the most part being busy at University using Michigan Terminal System (MTS), and then VAX & Unix at my first job. Re-entered home computing after nearly buying a NeXT but instead going for a much cheaper generic PC so I could run ... OS/2 ... at home. ( My Big OS/2 Scoop from '92 ) When that went nowhere, I began using Linux (Slackware) and wrote one of the first reviews of it for a Canadian computing newspaper in 1993 (sadly, not online). But my review of Motif for Linux still is! Motif 1.2.3 Runtime and Development System for Linux | Linux Journal
Ended up starting my current, 22 year old company, developing on that Linux system. Authored my personal home page on it too, using VI, and haven't changed it since.
Today I use gmail and slack on a Mac, and enjoy driving, unassisted, my 2012 autopilot-less Tesla.
10 PRINT "Hello"
20 GOTO 10
RUN
Thought I was king of the world. Saw and played with Commodore PETs during Canada Wide Science Fair in Waterloo Ontario in 1980. Lusted after an Apple ][ but couldn't find the $$. Managed to scrape together money in 1981 to get an Atari 800 and proceeded to learn everything there was to know about it. Wrote a bunch of games (was mentored via snail-mail by Atari programming great Stan Ockers), utilities, word processors for it, many of which got published in the Eugene Oregon Atari Computer Enthusiasts newsletter. And nearly hit the big time with the magazine Antic paying me to have one of my games published in their book..but then BANG the bottom fell out of 8 bit computing.
Skipped 16 bit computing for the most part being busy at University using Michigan Terminal System (MTS), and then VAX & Unix at my first job. Re-entered home computing after nearly buying a NeXT but instead going for a much cheaper generic PC so I could run ... OS/2 ... at home. ( My Big OS/2 Scoop from '92 ) When that went nowhere, I began using Linux (Slackware) and wrote one of the first reviews of it for a Canadian computing newspaper in 1993 (sadly, not online). But my review of Motif for Linux still is! Motif 1.2.3 Runtime and Development System for Linux | Linux Journal
Ended up starting my current, 22 year old company, developing on that Linux system. Authored my personal home page on it too, using VI, and haven't changed it since.
Today I use gmail and slack on a Mac, and enjoy driving, unassisted, my 2012 autopilot-less Tesla.
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snort
Member
I was about the third user of VI ever. Bill Joy and I were in a class together (CS292R) he sat down next to me in the terminal room, pushed me out of the way, and fired up his brand new toy on the program I was working on.
I'm 3C years old. first program, at age F, was in BASIC using an ASR33 on a PDP-10. I have learned א languages since then. Ok, maybe not quite that many. but a a lot.
--Snortybartfast
I'm 3C years old. first program, at age F, was in BASIC using an ASR33 on a PDP-10. I have learned א languages since then. Ok, maybe not quite that many. but a a lot.
--Snortybartfast
I assume that 3C hex and not 3X100. VI is a beast of an editor, but it's only advantage is it is available on every Unix and Linux machine. I was once pretty good at VI, but it's been 20 years since I used Unix much.
snort
Member
Yes, 3C hex. (although you never really know about Magratheans. I might have meant 3 times the speed of light)
I still use VI now and then. You never really forget. Like riding a bicycle, I guess. I drove an ICE yesterday for the first time in 6 months. took about 30 miles to get comfortable...never really did.
--Snortybartfast.
Careful! We're coming dangerously close to vi vs. EMACS here, and after that come the pico-lovers!
physicsfita
Member
snellenr
Member
TECO & EDT, vi/vim & EMACS, through the various visual studios and now Xcode -- but I *STILL* miss being able to use the Xedit prefix area to xx/xx exclude lines of code :-(
I don't do much UNIX hacking anymore, but when I do, I end up using vi, and I always marvel at how the commands and keystroke memory is still there somewhere in my brain. Because if you asked me right now what the commands were, I wouldn't be able to tell you, but somehow I can get around in front of a keyboard.
Cottonwood
Roadster#433, Model S#S37
Just think what would happen if you brought an S100 computer to school today?
The New York Times: Handcuffed for Making Clock, Ahmed Mohamed, 14, Wins Time With Obama
The New York Times: Handcuffed for Making Clock, Ahmed Mohamed, 14, Wins Time With Obama
An IMSAI is worth about $3,000 as an antique these days. And please, these ARE the crazy years as a boy passes off a clock radio he disassembled as his own invention and gets invited to the White House. Heinlein knew the future well enough!
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