And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
I lived in a commune in Baltimore in the 70's, and we had a restaurant outside Johns Hopkins University. There was a computer guy who talked about getting mail via computer on a thing called DARPAnet. Seemed weird. Then later in the mid 80's I worked for a company outside D.C. A guy there was on temporary assignment from California, and he paid his bills back home on this internet thingie. Seemed weird. Then in the late 80's I worked with Boeing and Microsoft in Seattle. A guy at Microsoft talked about sending a message to someone in Hong Kong using a thing called email where the person he contacted could see the message instantly and reply right then. Seemed weird. And there were ads on television about doctors who could hook their office computers to telephones and modems and do doctor stuff anywhere in the world. Seemed weird. Now my watch has more power than any of the tech. Hell, it has more computing power than the first space shuttle used. Seems weird. Well, stay weird, World, stay weird.
In the late 1960s, the Marines in the computer room at Kaneohe Bay MCAS demonstrated a rudimentary (by today's standards) form of e-mail. The system was used mostly administrative work.
In mid-1970s, us college students had access to terminals in the computer lab. The mainframe was offsite at a university. Several colleges were all on the same system. It worked like an instant messaging program using punch cards. Mostly for running stats for research and a venue for cooperative dialog between team members at different campuses.
Sign everywhere, DO NOT TURN OFF TERMINAL. Of course, some dweeb did exactly that. It crashed the entire system and hundreds of students were understandably very wroth.
In late 1960s, I took a job at Sun Bank. I was a peon on the team making silicon wafers. The wafers were the size of hockey pucks to be sliced thin and sent to various users.
In "77 I was in operations working on a large scale Honeywell 6060 mainframe. The floor was about the size of a grocery store. We had over 100 disc drives that were about the size of a washing machine and the discs had a capacity of 1 Mb. The A/C system probably cost as much as the computer itself and there were 2 locomotives out behind the building running the whole thing. There were 4 processor modules, about the size of a 4 car garage with 1,024K of RAM between them. It seems nuts now to think that that was one of the most advanced systems on the planet at the time.
In the ancient days when I was in high school, in between chipping arrowheads from rocks, those of us in advanced placement math could learn Dartmouth A Basic on an archaic terminal. We would type in the program to be punched on a strip of paper tape about 1 1/2 inches wide; and when we were done we would feed it into a reader and it would be teletyped to a GE computer [model 2000?] at Denver University. It would teletype and print out the results.
When I went to the University of Colorado, I took FORTRAN IV and ran it on a CDC 6400 computer at the computer center. We had to type our programs in at the computer center on IBM Model 26 keypunch machines. These were on Hollerith cards. Nowadays, no one knows what a Hollerith card was. We would add the appropriate header and footer cards and make offerings to the high priests in the Computer Room Sanctum. And a couple of days later come back to see if and what we had screwed up.
Today I have an archaic Dell desktop, and given where I started out, I am happy.
FORTRAN at Georgia Tech on a Univac 1108, cards on a 26, 24 hour turnaround time near end of term. CS department had the CDC 6400.
I managed to get all three high speed line printers doing pages of asterisks at the same time, you could hear it outside the temple. One of the priests looked at me through the window and pointed, I nodded my head.
Hollerith cards (12 rows, 24 columns) were done in the 30s, so almost nobody alive has ever used them. The IBM 026 (and all further) keypunch machines used 12 row, and nearly always 80 column IBM cards.
In the early 80's I was in the USAF going to mainframe computer maintenance school. The state of the art Perkin-Elmer 3220 mainframe was still under warranty and all we were allowed to do was operate it. The mainframe we were allowed to take apart and put back together was an 8 bit BUIC computer. Both systems had less computing power and memory than the watch I had in 2001.
Too bad Moore's law ended around 2012. Right now, the smallest transistors have around a 4nm gate. If Moore's law had continued, they'd have been subatomic by now. Things are still improving, but in different ways, different directions. There are 3D transistors instead of planar. I bought a replacement computer two months ago, and instead of a mechanical hard drive, it's a solid state drive. Incredibly faster, but we expect that. Electrons can move much faster than gears and metal pieces.
I'll stop here, but I also programmed on punch cards in my first programming class.
My first experience coding was on a TTY terminal, using 8 column or row paper tape in Basic…. In H.S. 1968. There were 10 high schools in the Denver Area that were loaned those terminals and we were linked with the main frame on the University of Denver’s campus……. And ‘death’ to the student who entered a program with an infinite loop! Good Times!
I lived in a commune in Baltimore in the 70's, and we had a restaurant outside Johns Hopkins University. There was a computer guy who talked about getting mail via computer on a thing called DARPAnet. Seemed weird. Then later in the mid 80's I worked for a company outside D.C. A guy there was on temporary assignment from California, and he paid his bills back home on this internet thingie. Seemed weird. Then in the late 80's I worked with Boeing and Microsoft in Seattle. A guy at Microsoft talked about sending a message to someone in Hong Kong using a thing called email where the person he contacted could see the message instantly and reply right then. Seemed weird. And there were ads on television about doctors who could hook their office computers to telephones and modems and do doctor stuff anywhere in the world. Seemed weird. Now my watch has more power than any of the tech. Hell, it has more computing power than the first space shuttle used. Seems weird. Well, stay weird, World, stay weird.
ReplyDeleteIn the late 1960s, the Marines in the computer room at Kaneohe Bay MCAS demonstrated a rudimentary (by today's standards) form of e-mail. The system was used mostly administrative work.
DeleteIn mid-1970s, us college students had access to terminals in the computer lab. The mainframe was offsite at a university. Several colleges were all on the same system. It worked like an instant messaging program using punch cards. Mostly for running stats for research and a venue for cooperative dialog between team members at different campuses.
Sign everywhere, DO NOT TURN OFF TERMINAL.
Of course, some dweeb did exactly that. It crashed the entire system and hundreds of students were understandably very wroth.
In late 1960s, I took a job at Sun Bank. I was a peon on the team making silicon wafers. The wafers were the size of hockey pucks to be sliced thin and sent to various users.
In "77 I was in operations working on a large scale Honeywell 6060 mainframe. The floor was about the size of a grocery store. We had over 100 disc drives that were about the size of a washing machine and the discs had a capacity of 1 Mb. The A/C system probably cost as much as the computer itself and there were 2 locomotives out behind the building running the whole thing. There were 4 processor modules, about the size of a 4 car garage with 1,024K of RAM between them. It seems nuts now to think that that was one of the most advanced systems on the planet at the time.
ReplyDeleteIn the ancient days when I was in high school, in between chipping arrowheads from rocks, those of us in advanced placement math could learn Dartmouth A Basic on an archaic terminal. We would type in the program to be punched on a strip of paper tape about 1 1/2 inches wide; and when we were done we would feed it into a reader and it would be teletyped to a GE computer [model 2000?] at Denver University. It would teletype and print out the results.
ReplyDeleteWhen I went to the University of Colorado, I took FORTRAN IV and ran it on a CDC 6400 computer at the computer center. We had to type our programs in at the computer center on IBM Model 26 keypunch machines. These were on Hollerith cards. Nowadays, no one knows what a Hollerith card was. We would add the appropriate header and footer cards and make offerings to the high priests in the Computer Room Sanctum. And a couple of days later come back to see if and what we had screwed up.
Today I have an archaic Dell desktop, and given where I started out, I am happy.
FORTRAN at Georgia Tech on a Univac 1108, cards on a 26, 24 hour turnaround time near end of term. CS department had the CDC 6400.
DeleteI managed to get all three high speed line printers doing pages of asterisks at the same time, you could hear it outside the temple. One of the priests looked at me through the window and pointed, I nodded my head.
Now I too have a Dell.
Hollerith cards (12 rows, 24 columns) were done in the 30s, so almost nobody alive has ever used them. The IBM 026 (and all further) keypunch machines used 12 row, and nearly always 80 column IBM cards.
DeleteI played Oregon Trail on a TRS80...
ReplyDeleteTake that nerdy bitches
You have died of dysentery…
DeleteIn the early 80's I was in the USAF going to mainframe computer maintenance school. The state of the art Perkin-Elmer 3220 mainframe was still under warranty and all we were allowed to do was operate it. The mainframe we were allowed to take apart and put back together was an 8 bit BUIC computer. Both systems had less computing power and memory than the watch I had in 2001.
ReplyDeleteDoes anyone here remember using 8"floppies? When we got the 5 1/2 version we stapled the 8s to a yard stick and used them as fly swatters.
ReplyDeleteAnother comment mentioned the TRS80 (OR Trash-80 :-). These used the 8" floppy, my parents bought one with Visi-Calc for their business.
DeleteMoore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years.
ReplyDeleteToo bad Moore's law ended around 2012. Right now, the smallest transistors have around a 4nm gate. If Moore's law had continued, they'd have been subatomic by now. Things are still improving, but in different ways, different directions. There are 3D transistors instead of planar. I bought a replacement computer two months ago, and instead of a mechanical hard drive, it's a solid state drive. Incredibly faster, but we expect that. Electrons can move much faster than gears and metal pieces.
DeleteI'll stop here, but I also programmed on punch cards in my first programming class.
And none of those systems compare to the intricacies and beauty of the human brain.
ReplyDeleteRead years ago that Apple was using a Cray to design their Macs and Cray was using Macs to design the next Crays.
ReplyDeleteMy first experience coding was on a TTY terminal, using 8 column or row paper tape in Basic…. In H.S. 1968. There were 10 high schools in the Denver Area that were loaned those terminals and we were linked with the main frame on the University of Denver’s campus……. And ‘death’ to the student who entered a program with an infinite loop! Good Times!
ReplyDelete