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My first time sitting down to use a computer was in 1966 or so; as I recall I was using a 110-baud ASR 33 terminal.
My first programming class was in 1971. I was taught BASIC. My first program solved quadratic equations. My first experience with Multics (a precursor to Unix) was in 1979. I think my first use of Unix was around 1981 or 1982. |
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@mousesack, nope, the title said "oldies" just beacuse to attract people .. besides..maybe i'm the youngest one here..
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i think it's pretty cool to show ASR-33 to your grandson later
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Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. -- Soren Kierkegaard |
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Nope, my mistake. The ASR33s were used in my programming classes -- the class had four of them: two which were offline only, used to create/edit paper tapes of the programs, and two which could connect to the HP minicomputer across town, via modem.
The first terminal I used was a Teletype 35ASR. You need to understand, eine -- none of this stuff was "personal computing" by any stretch of the imagination. So no, I don't have any of this equipment; it wasn't mine. The first personal computer I owned was in the 70s -- A Zylog Z-80 (Intel 8080 clone plus some additional capability) with 8K of main memory. I remember swapping out the 8x1K chips for 8x2K chips to double the memory, and was astonished that memory prices had come down enough for me to afford the upgrade -- US$90.00. Last edited by jggimi; 5th August 2008 at 09:30 AM. Reason: clarity |
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For example, your account was limited to a certain total cost, unless you wanted to buy more. This was a way to manage the limited resource, but computing time was very expensive. In graduate school one fellow did not debug a big computational (finite element) program with enough care, and it had an endless loop. He drained the computer budget for the entire lab of a dozen people for that semester. We could not afford to purchase more. This is not an unusual story; everyone from that era has their own similar tale. That changed with the IBM PC. While Apple and many others had computers earlier, it is the IBM blessing that caused business to move to PCs. They could do many of the simple things that people did (and the killer application was Visicalc, a spreadsheet), but the motivation was largely to get rid of the restrictions forced on users by the centralized IT hierarchy. The rest is history, as they say. Quote:
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I got started in 1985 on a Franklin Ace 100 writing little programs in BASIC. That machine was actually a couple years old at the time and there wasn't much available in terms of upgrades. I did some work in PASCAL on an Amiga 500 later on. I was pretty happy with the Amiga until the Pentium-class stuff became available and I was given a Packard-Bell which was the most temperamental and poorly designed machine I have used to date. I can't remember the model, but I think it was a Pentium 100 MHz processor. Thus began a very long and very dark period of disassembling the PC and rebuilding it - and we have come so far.
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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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I started on a MSX, not well known in the U.S., but pretty popular in Japan, Spain, and Netherlands.
It had a Z80 chip, IIRC we had an expensive version with 256Kb of RAM. Quote:
http://www.zilog.com/products/family.asp?fam=220
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UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. |
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I had friends who invested in IMSAI and KIM computers, which were 8080 based. I'd used those, and I was working on a research project that included some professional microcomputers, whose names have long escaped me, as well as some of the consumer-based products of the time, such as the Pet (6502) and the CompuColor (no recollection ). I can't even recall the make/model of my early Z-80; it might have been an Atari.
Around 1979 or so, I purchased a turn-key word processor for the home; I enjoyed having it because it also came with CP/M -- the precursur to what became PC-DOS/MS-DOS. Years later, I purchased a "PC" for the family; as I recall that was a Compaq brand 486. --- Most of my IT career has, when focused on tech, been involved with computing that would be considered "large systems" -- rather than personal or small stuff. |
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MS-DOS came from QDOS ("quick and dirty operating system) from Seattle Computer Products (mainly S-100 bus based); they were more receptive to IBM than Kildall was, and a commercial arrangement was reached. I still have copies of CP/M-80, -86 and MP/M 8-16 on the shelf with complete documentation. |
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Fair enough. QDOS was sort of a CP/M 86 knockoff.
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Well I can't top these guys, but-
Atari 2600 (I still have one, and it still works.) Atari 400, 800 TI-99 4/A Apple II, IIe, IIc IBM PS/2 Model 386 (which ironically contained a 286 processor ) ... And on into 'modern' PC's. To relate to another OT thread about getting kids interested in IT, it was my massive waste of time playing games on the 2600 that got me into computing, not having a complex yet archaic system dropped in my lap with expectations that I would master it easily and enjoyably. Ah, the good ole days!
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Network Firefighter |
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I'll try to keep this brief; let's see if I succeed.
I started programming in 1975; it was a rudimentary FORTRAN course required of all engineers and optional for scientists (they could also choose Algol-W). We used punched cards to feed an Amdahl mainframe, probably the first IBM-compatible, though this one was compatible with the IBM 360. Card punches are terribly unreliable, and often the ribbons would lose ink (and not print the statement at the top of the card) so when you found a decent card punch you tended to return to it. The first computer I owned was a Compupro, an S-100 bus computer on which I ran MP/M 8-16; I bought it in 1980. It had dual processors (8085 and 8088), 256K of fast static RAM, two 8" floppies (1.2MB each) and a slew of serial ports. The dual floppies actually worked pretty well: you could put your OS and all your applications on one, and use the other as a working disk for your files. Input was from a serial terminal, and output was to an infernal dot matrix printer. God those things were awful. I had a friend in the department at Berkeley who wrote bits and pieces of the OS for Compupro, and they gave the department a damn good deal. They were also located physically a few miles away (near the Oakland, CA airport, FWIW). My first exposure to Unix was at Berkeley in the height of the BSD era. It was just hard to avoid. I remember well the day we got our first terminal in the lab (a Televideo 925 -- yuck!) and it was shared between about a dozen of us. Most people used the IBM mainframe (or earlier one of the CDC mainframes); much work was done on a lab Compupro, with some of us slowly migrating over the Unix. I learned much of that using the program "learn" in the bowels of Gilman Hall, a registered national monument in which plutonium and some other transuranic elements were discovered. Work for two Nobel prizes was conducted there. "Learn" is pretty easy to port, and is available on Kernighan's web site. Over they years I have programmed on nearly every OS: the early Apple ones and OS7 (was there one of those?), IBM's VM/CMS, DEC's VMS, HP's RTE-A, MS-DOS, Windows, and of course Unix. There were interludes with the Pet (as mentioned above), on which we wrote finite-difference heat conduction code (that thing was terribly slow) and a Tektronics graphics computer using their extended BASIC. I designed a solvent-recovery system for an Ibuprofen plant on the latter. It truly is amazing how much faster computers are today than they were in the old days, and that brings up an interesting story. Some years ago I wanted to pull some papers out of my thesis, which I had stored on a standard tape in tar format (in 1988). I found a fellow who still had such an old tape drive, and he transferred it to a CD for me -- over 15 years later. No issues at all with data longevity. My thesis was in troff, and it ran through groff without a hitch. Try that with a modern word processor. For kicks, I took the code that I used for one of the larger calculations in the thesis. I ran it on the Compupro, and it took about 8 hours to execute. On a 500MHz PIII it took a few tenths of a second. On a modern computer you get into round-off error if you use a shell timing routine. That is much faster than the mainframes of the era; even the VAX 8600s of the day took about 5 minutes to execute the thing. Remember that this VAX was the hot box of the day, and it routinely supported well over a hundred users. Many more stories, of course, but I'll end here for now. I still have the Compupro, BTW, and it works as well as it always did. So much for keeping it short. Last edited by DrJ; 5th August 2008 at 07:13 PM. |
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When I was 9 my parents bought me a TI 99 4/a, a friend a few years later got a Commadore 64 and they had cooler games. So I started programming so I could make cool games for my TI!
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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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Am I the only person who thought DrJ's story was awesome?
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I love when DrJ tells his stories. They always bring back memories of looking through Byte(when it was thick as a phone book) in the 80, dreaming of Vax machines and saving money to upgrade to floppy from my cassette tape drive...
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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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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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