Well Lee some of us also remember punch cards and Fortran IV. Egads, are we really that old?
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Well Lee some of us also remember punch cards and Fortran IV. Egads, are we really that old?
Dave Anderson
Chester, NH
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PL1 and cards at Penn State in the late 1970s. I learned a little Fortran and COBOL on the side later when my spouse at the time was a TA at a college checking and grading assignments and got really sick. We needed the money, so I "ghosted" for a couple weeks. At PSU, the system was so massive and slow that you'd submit a deck and then wait something like 30 minutes before your work printed out, usually with the message "didn't run" or something similar to basically tell you there was one or more stupid mistakes in the program that you had to go find manually.Originally Posted by Dave Anderson NH
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The most expensive tool is the one you buy "cheaply" and often...
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When I was in college in punch card days I was a little older than most students. I liked to work at a table at the end of a large room with card readers and printers and a zillion students. Some thought I was a teaching assistant and after a while started lining up for advice on their programs (usually, "why am I getting this errorPL1 and cards at Penn State in the late 1970s. I learned a little Fortran and COBOL on the side later when my spouse at the time was a TA at a college checking and grading assignments and got really sick. We needed the money, so I "ghosted" for a couple weeks. At PSU, the system was so massive and slow that you'd submit a deck and then wait something like 30 minutes before your work printed out, usually with the message "didn't run" or something similar to basically tell you there was one or more stupid mistakes in the program that you had to go find manually.! It was great for me since with years of self-taught software development experience I could usually quickly spot their problem, suggest a fix, and learn something in the process.
I remember one frustrated guy with a stack of cards lamenting how he'd been their for hours. The poor guy was basically shuffling the cards and rerunning in hopes the errors would go away! I suspect he ended up in some other field.
My first few years working for the gov lab all work was through punch cards. You could drop your coding sheet off at the computing center and a room of operators would key in an submit the stack punch cards. I preferred to punch and run them myself. It was years before we went to software development by CRT.
Over the years I became fluent in Fortran, Pascal, PL1, BASIC, C, C++, a bit of HTML, PDP-11 and 6809 assembly language, and some others I can't remember. Lisp, not so much...
I still have punch cards and TTY paper tape in my computer museum collection (along with some PDP-8 core memory).
core_memory_s.jpg
In the process I designed and built a lot of hardware from scratch too, drawing and etching traces on PCB. These days, I'll stick with the peacock incubators and the excavator!
circuit_boards.jpg
JKJ
Contributor
Did that, too.
Yes, yes we are.
Yoga class makes me feel like a total stud, mostly because I'm about as flexible as a 2x4.
"Design"? Possibly. "Intelligent"? Sure doesn't look like it from this angle.
We used to be hunter gatherers. Now we're shopper borrowers.
The three most important words in the English language: "Front Towards Enemy".
The world makes a lot more sense when you remember that Butthead was the smart one.
You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much ammo.
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I'm looking at a picture of me taking my grandson on his first motorcycle ride, he was 3, He starts collage in the fall and I have a Great grandson starting first grade in the fall and one that just turned 1 year old, so I guess I'm getting there.Daytona and I last week LOL .jpg
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Rabbit RL_XX_6040-60 watt Laser engraving/cutting machine
Lasercut 5.3
CorelDraw X5
10" Miter Saw with slide
10" Table Saw
8" bench mount 5 speed Drill Press
Dremel, 3x21 Belt Sander
[OP]
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This goes right to my main point of this thread....Well Lee some of us also remember punch cards and Fortran IV. Egads, are we really that old?
We're getting ready to move into a new house sometime later this year -or maybe next year - depending on when they get it built.
In the meantime, we're getting rid of stuff we no longer need/use. My wife asked me about the huge stock of floppy disks & old CDs, DVDs and Zip disks & hard drives I have that I've been meaning to transfer everything off of and onto a 2 TB drive.
Well, I retired back in 2011 and since a lot of that stuff I haven't enven thought of for a good 10/15 years prior to that - - I'd deem it all useless. I should go through all of it and make sure there's nothing on them, but, that's too much trouble.
"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." - John Lennon
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My thought is the tree plated now will be my legacy many years beyond my time.I am still interested in planting trees, but more so tomato plants, so fewer perennials, and more annuals.
Today there is someone sitting in the shade or enjoying the fresh fruit from a tree someone planted many years ago.
jtk
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."
- Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
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post 17,
its usually me saying im probably the only one here who doesnt have a cell. Ive stood in line ups before with 10 people heads down in their phones and said I feel left out no cell, they all start laughing. I think there are places where people have not much more than a lion cloth and still they have cell phones. Asked a customer to make me a shoe phone, no luck. when panasonic puts a cell phone in a digital bridge camera then ill have a cell.
Contributor
Old computers?
Back in the mid-late 70's my folks and I were making good money engraving & painting keycaps for
these computers, aka Character Generators-
SystemConcepts.jpg
15-ish years later I made the clear plex edge-lit signs and hacked out the words in the header panels for 5 of these
'buildings' for BTS for the NAB '91 trade show- Betacam SP, and Character generators-- that's some old stuff!
BTS-91a.jpg
Pretty much everything this equipment would do can now be done with a $100 smart phone and bluetooth...
yeah, I'm feeling a bit 'dated'...
========================================
ELEVEN - rotary cutter tool machines
FOUR - CO2 lasers
THREE- make that FOUR now
ONE - vinyl cutter
CASmate, Corel, Gravostyle
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when I had a recording studio editing was done with a razor blade. Studer Dyaxis was the first commercial digital editing system I saw. They used nixons speech and took words in and out simple and fast out of the "people have to know if their president is a crook speech" Now 10k pro tools and probably others blow away what could be done in the past with a million in gear. Still some have old school rooms with tape and Neve consoles.
Contributor
If you really want an old computer done right, you have to do it yourself.
http://megaprocessor.com/
It's a "home-built" computer made with discrete transistors, zero integrated circuits...basically 1960-ish tech.
megaprocessor.jpgmegaprocessor.jpg
Yoga class makes me feel like a total stud, mostly because I'm about as flexible as a 2x4.
"Design"? Possibly. "Intelligent"? Sure doesn't look like it from this angle.
We used to be hunter gatherers. Now we're shopper borrowers.
The three most important words in the English language: "Front Towards Enemy".
The world makes a lot more sense when you remember that Butthead was the smart one.
You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much ammo.
Contributor
Agree totally with Roger Feeley...
Member
I walk my dog most mornings. SWMBO pays for my phone so if I fall, I can call her.
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