pcdefl
Member
I used one of these back in 1977!!
Does these bring back "good old" memories!!
Thank you for posting the images!
And from 1978 until 1982 I "upgraded" and used intensively one of those punch cards keyboards!! to write BASIC FT (Fast Translator) and FORTRAN IV to be run on an IBM 360 machine!!View attachment 99021
As junior high school students, a friend and I used to sneak into a university science library below-ground time share terminal room to play a version Star Trek on these teletype machines. It would take two or three minutes to print out quadrants of the universe complete with the Enterprise, Star Base, and evil Romulan Warbirds. Imagine the noise with 20 of these cranking at once. I still incorporate the password we somehow acquired into those that I use today, and for some reason have a roll of the paper nearly a half-century later. I think the college course I later took covering FORTRAN and BASIC (yes, punch cards!) lead me to a totally unrelated career.
Does these bring back "good old" memories!!
Thank you for posting the images!
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.