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In many ways the move from cards to terminals was a big a deal as the move from terminals to PCs. I hinted at how dreadful card punches were; I can go on but man they were klunky. They had other odd downsides. The main computing facility at Berkeley was open 24 hours a day (computer people have always kept odd schedules). I was there once in the middle of the night, looking over an input deck, when in wandered a homeless person. Berkeley has a real problem with the homeless; most have pretty severe mental or substance abuse problems (or both). They came to know that you could always warm up in the computer center for about an hour until security chased them away. In any event, this fellow wandered over to my table, and started ranting some far-out screed about aliens. I decided the better part of valor was simply to leave and call security, who showed up pretty promptly. Upon returning to my table, I found my input deck, as well as the contents of my card box (which held maybe 1000 cards) was scattered all over the floor. I had the foresight to use a different color on the card tops for this set of programs (they came in a veritable rainbow so that you could distinguish one batch from another); the rubber bands around others were not disturbed. Still, this meant going through the cards one by one, pulling the program out from others, and then resorting them. Some cards had line numbers (it was FORTRAN), but others did not. So the whole deck had to be reconstructed from the flow sheet, and yes, I made a few errors in the sorting. At least you got good turn-around times when you submitted the jobs to the job desk at those times. |
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Consumer ink jets I agree are terrible. Good ones cost quite a bit of money. I stick with a very old HP postscript laser, which is not fast, but it is utterly reliable and produces very nice quality print. And don't get me started on CUPS. |
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Started on the Commodore 64 & 128 around '86 or maybe '87?
Then bought my Amiga 500. Also have a 4000. I still use them to this day. 64/128 is sitting on old dining table that isn't used, A500 on a coffee table and the 4000 is sitting on a old aquarium shelf. I am a devout CBM product fan Started FreeBSD with 2.21-Release, started OpenBSD with 3.0, and linux with Slackware 3.0. Also have and use OS/2 Warp (have 3 & 4). Taught myself Commodore basic and wrote a couple of personal use programs. Started teaching myself rexx, but saw so many programs being written I stopped. Like most others, I build my own machines to get what I want. |
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First of all, i'm sorry i haven't been in the forum since 08-08-08..my sister's married and i just don't have the opportunity to touch the computer..i just feel sorry because i was the TS...so, sorry..
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and when you start to used FreeBSD in march 2008, why do you used the FreeBSD 5.3, since there is FreeBSD 7.0 release announcement on 27 February 2008? please enlightenment me
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Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. -- Soren Kierkegaard |
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You missed the "Eventually" in "Eventually, I ended up using Gentoo for three years (three years too long)." I didn't start using Gentoo until June of 2005. I migrated my desktop to FreeBSD in March, 2008. I still kept Gentoo installed in a virtual machine until June, 2008. I don't have Linux installed on any of my systems anymore.
You misunderstood the statement "I had used FreeBSD on and off with Linux since version 5.3." That means that I had FreeBSD installed alongside Linux on my desktop starting with version 5.3.
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"UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity." MacBook Pro (Darwin 9), iMac (Darwin 9), iPod Touch (Darwin 9), Dell Optiplex GX620 (FreeBSD 7.1-STABLE) |
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I don't know how I missed this thread.
My first real computer was actually a toy computer that had little sliding racks on it for calculating logic. My dad bought it for some reason when I was about 8. My first sight of a real one was in 1970 when I went to college and the geologists next door had an IBM something with punch cards. I just didn't get it but I was a EE major and had no interest cause I was going into radio/tv. After about 10 years of the radio/tv (and film) thing, I went to work for a company that made one of the first CAT scanners. It was a completely TTL system. My first exposure to a programming language was MUMPS. The first computer I owned was one I built from the brand new 8085 that just came out, saving me the trouble of the extra chips involved with an 8080. Eventually I put together one using a Z80. Assembly language was the highest I ever went, sometimes just using switches and, in a few cases, touching wires together . Saving programs to a cassette recorder was bleeding edge but the damn tapes sometimes took two or three passes before the computer would reload properly; if at all. That was all around 1980. I worked on 6801s, 6809s, 8051s. Intel was the only hardware we bought. And if you were reading Byte in the 1980s like roddierod then you read an article I wrote. I was starting to work more on applications by 1985 but still in assembly. I selected the 68000 (I was now project manager) but my damn MIT big shot sob of a boss made us learn this thing called 'C'. There was more cussing than you would expect out of a professional office. Most of us only used it until it didn't work and then just used assembly. It was all done on a PDP-8 but the thing couldn't handle the load of our compiles (damn HLL POS). I got a few of us together and we pitched buying a mini-computer from some new company called Sun Microsystems. They ran up against Apollo Computers, which I favored. I then moved to Pixar. They sold hardware then that ran Renderman. I remember riding the bus back to the airport after my interview with Ed Catmull who was messing with the rendering engine on the bus. Later, I went to Silicon Graphics and used to occasionally eat lunch with Jim Clark. Things get pretty boring after that, computer-wise. |
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You not saying that your first computer was an Abacus or some form of Babbage's difference engine?
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"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." -Philip K. Dick |
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My first computer
My first computer was a ti-99 and then two years later I invested in a C64
those were the good old day's |
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I never really figured out how to use it. I guess that's why I became a hardware guy. Ooh! Ooh! Dr. J! Dr. J!! Tell 'em about vector monitors! |
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Aha!! My first computer!
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What, storage tubes like the Tek 4014? Oscilloscopes with keyboards? Pretty cool devices actually, but really expensive. I remember well the day we got a board that retrofitted out Zenith Z-29 so that it had a Tek-compatible mode.
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That was when monitors were monitors and men were men.
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I used a 4014 -- 1976 or so. We had it connected to the mainframe via a newfangled Vadic modem that was four times faster than any other async modem available: 1200 baud when the others were all 110 or 300. It was blindingly fast, and worked well for graphic display. But you had to be careful with the modem:
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Regarding your other comments, I did not see some of that personally. But the general message that computers had their quirks in those days certainly is right. |
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