Old farts reminiscing about computers

[pcdefl]

I'm 56. First played with BASIC on a Time Share terminal with punched paper roll reader/writer, talk about SLOW input, but much faster than the keyboard.
Next learned FORTRAN IV on a IBM 360 with punch cards. That was the first university learned language.
After that Intel assembly 8085, hex coded and hex inputed, a huge pain. Next the Intellec, my first job: PL-M 80 programming using the Intel os and the ICE to run the generated binary code directly on the intel boards for PABX development, with polling the decadic phone terminals and software debouncing of the pulses, with the data bus multiplexed with 32 timeslots for 32 simultaneous conversations on each channel. A lot of programming also on a TI59 with magnetic card reader! For servo and stability problems solving and up to 9*9 matrix calculations for circuits at IST. Personaly doing Z80 programming on a ZX81 Sinclair machine, 1kB plus 16 KB RAM to interface to filming equipment for stop motion animation control of Super 8 cameras for animation... Worked with Data General 8600 (I think!), VAX VMS, Control Data workstations (they were SGI rebadged), moved to original SGI equipment, created a multimedia centre, did control from an SGI of a 16 mm camera to copy Pixar method with a 35 mm camera, the year they finished toy story I, and from all that a student moved on to win a BAFTA and an Oscar on CGI special effects

 

[MyJoule]

Back about that time, I remember a company selling a box with an array of solenoid plungers that sat on top of the IBM Selectric keyboard -- one plunger for each key below it.. and the box connected to a computer turning the typewriter into a printer. Pretty low tech, but I'm guessing a pretty cheap solution for makeshift office printers.

That must have looked pretty funny- The nice thing about Selectric I/O terminals they had a set of 48V solenoids that drove the ball. If I remember correctly it was EBCDIC coded and we just used a LUT in a PROM to do the conversion from ASCII. Then the solenoids were all driven by 2N2222's connected to the PROM data lines. The rate the ASCII came from the TRS-80 was controlled by a crude 555 timer that was returning the RDY line back to the TRS 80 All in all it was simple but elegant. and you could still use the Selectric as a typewriter since the solenoids were buried inside the Selecritc. The other funny thing I remember, we shipped these all over the country on Greyhound bus- since this was before UPS or FedEx were very popular and bus fare for a typewriter was something like $40 max no mater where we sent them.

 

[pcdefl]

4C should be 1024 not aprox 1000 but you all know that

 

[TEG]

Back about that time, I remember a company selling a box with an array of solenoid plungers that sat on top of the IBM Selectric keyboard -- one plunger for each key below it.. and the box connected to a computer turning the typewriter into a printer. Pretty low tech, but I'm guessing a pretty cheap solution for makeshift office printers.

 

[pete8314]

Love the robot typewriter!

I don't want to brag, but I am published

 

[Cottonwood]

So far I count four of us who cut our teeth on Dartmouth's Time Sharing System. I wonder who else is out there?

Yup, I am one of those four, around 1970.

Anyone else program a tube based computer with drum memory, no core, no transistors? Of course the Bendix G-15 was almost as old as me when I programed it as a teenager.

From Bendix G-15 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

 

[HankLloydRight]

We had a Univac 1100 at Penn in the early 80's. I did a lot of cool stuff on that machine. I would spend hours reading the docs stored in one of the terminal rooms. I was also in that LISP/Pascal CS 101 class at the time. I found a command line system utility that would do a really great job at re-formatting (i.e. pretty-printing) my PASCAL programs. Nobody else knew of this program (and it's dozen of command line parameters to make it work really well). So I told a few friends about it. They started to use it. So, to help out everyone in the CS 101 classes (hundreds of students), I made a public command file that embedded all the params and returned the formatted program.

Then word quickly spread and EVERYONE started using my little public batch file (not just in my class).


Then I got the neat idea that since people are submitting their code (read: homework) to my formatter (basically a batch file), I could take their code and copy it into my private directory for later "analysis". So I started getting copies of everyone else's homework. That was fun to review (although I was better than 95% of the class, most of the code was crap). But it started taking up too much space in my account, so I turned it off. And no, I never turned in or used anyone else's' code for my own homework assignments. I completed the assignments long before anyone else. After a few weeks of this, the administration caught wind of this "tool" and then issued a statement that anyone using the formatter would get an F for their projects. I don't know how they'd tell the difference between someone just doing a really good job at formatting and someone using the tool.


The second thing I did was alot worse. During the summer sessions, I got a job as a "consultant" in the terminal rooms to help summer students with CS assignments and usage of the UNIVAC. There was a skeleton admin crew during the summer, usually just one main operator and someone to distribute the printouts, and me. Well, occasionally the main sysop would leave for dinner and ask me to "watch over" things while she was gone. Of course, being a good sysop and security minded, she would log out of her terminal before leaving.


So I would logon to my account (not a sysop account) while in her office. This one time, I wrote a little script to spoof the logon screen, capture her login, password, and account code, write it out to my account, log me out, and present a real logon page. So I'd just leave that running right before she got back.... good times, good times.

Then there was the time I was drunk and got caught red-handed trying to hack into my boss's account. His password was "iamgod" and he was an arrogant *******.

 

[pcdefl]

So far I count four of us who cut our teeth on Dartmouth's Time Sharing System. I wonder who else is out there?

Not Dartmouth's, 1977 at Navy school Paco de Arcos near Lisbon, the Time Sharing terminal was at a corner, no one used it, it connected to the central computer in Lisbon, the school payed a monthly fee for the thing plus the phone bill when connected, I started to use it and learned alone. At one point the phone bill got the attention of the school's director. They did not mind paying the fee for the terminal, they could day "we are modern, we have a computer". But someone actualy using it, that was another story, the phone bill killed it, some time after I started using it they removed the terminal. And I moved to the university where the IBM 360 was waiting for me

 

[bollar]

You are only as old as you wanna be!

... says the guy whose day job is as a CICS Systems Engineer on an IBM Mainframe.

Wow!

I haven't even thought about CICS/VS since 1982. I guess that dates me as well.

 

[aronth5]

ah the good old days! What better way to transfer files than a 300 baud acoustic coupler modem.

 

[ohmman]

ah the good old days! What better way to transfer files than a 300 baud acoustic coupler modem.

I once spent a longer-than-advisable amount of time trying to do a negotiation with another modem at my friend's house. With my voice.

 

[Cyclone]

Wow!

I haven't even thought about CICS/VS since 1982. I guess that dates me as well.

I was a presenter at IBM's InterConnect Conference earlier this year about System Z talent and was told I'm a unicorn -- a Mainframe Engineer in his 30s and this isn't "just a job". Honored to be able to have some of my Fitz requirements and RFEs get into the CICS/TS 5.x product line.

 

[green1]

I once spent a longer-than-advisable amount of time trying to do a negotiation with another modem at my friend's house. With my voice.

I knew someone who could whistle 2400 baud, was a neat party trick... ok, I didn't get invited to the cool parties...
I definitely could identify pretty much every connection rate by ear though for quite a while, but then again I spent almost a year doing internet help desk in the days of dialup...

 

[LMB]

(LMB spouse)

First machine, in college, was an IBM 1130 (unrelated to Digital PDP-11) in Fortran.

Then IBM 360.

Then, and way cool, wrote (and hand assembled) an assembler, loader, and editor for a just-decommissioned Minuteman 1 missile guidance computer. No core, just many 384 byte tracks on a ruggedized miniature drum memory. The (few) registers were just special tracks which were one 24 bit word long. Initial programming was by touching wires together while watching a signal on an oscilloscope. Also, it was shipped in a big wood box still in the original nose cone. Prolly radioactive too, but we didn't check. Loved those Sixties...

 

[redi]

... says the guy whose day job is as a CICS Systems Engineer on an IBM Mainframe.

CICS is still alive and well. But don't tell anyone.

 

[tga]

This thread is great! I'm 47. Started out playing with a PDP-8 w/ mag tape and a teletype with paper tape reader/punch in elementary school. I remember crashing it a lot. Then we got an Apple II. In high school we got a bunch of Commodore CBM machines (the commercial PETs). They had 48k RAM, with the upper 16K of the address space switchable via a toggle on the side to select a 16k BASIC ROM or 16K of RAM, which could be loaded with Fortran, Cobol, Pascal, etc. Spent some time teaching myself a bunch of languages.

At home I had a Commodore 64 with the 1541 floppy (later my parents upgraded to a C128 for my younger brother). We also had a TI-99/4A and a Atari 2600. I convinced a friend of mine to get the BASIC programming cartridge for the 2600. What a POS. He never let me live that down.

I spent a lot of time digging into the guts of the C64. Hacked up some random hardware add-ons for the i/o interface. Learned 6502 assembly inside out, and wrote a bunch of games with friends in 6502 assembly.

I used to hang out at the local Radio Shack and play with their TRS-80's until the kicked me out. Same with the local Apple dealer (hang out until they got sick of me).

I went to Dartmouth and was a CS major. My class was one of the first to be encouraged/required to buy Macs after all the dorms were networked with 230kbit AppleTalk. Later I worked with a guy who co-founded the company that built the AppleTalk to Ethernet gateways in the dorms (Cayman System Gatorboxes).

College: Got to carry the Winchester 20mb hard drive for a New England Digital Synclavier in my lap to demos (because those were too fragile to put in the back of the van with the CPU), wooo 16 Bit!!

From there, I went to a private high school in New England where I learned Basic on a teletype connected via a 110 bit per second modem to the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, the world's first time share computer system.

So far I count four of us who cut our teeth on Dartmouth's Time Sharing System. I wonder who else is out there?

While an undergrad at Dartmouth, I took a music class taught by Jon Appleton, one of the inventors of the Synclavier and founders of New England Digital. I also TA'ed for Tom Kurtz, one of the heads of the DTSS project. They still had systems running into the early 90's.

Over time, a few of the adults in my neighborhood got really into IBM clones, so I used to read the huge Computer Shopper cover to cover and find deals. We'd go to computer shows and they'd have me tell them what to buy, and I'd get something for helping out.

The Computer Shopper and computer shows... Good times.

The real geeks were building S-100 buss computers with Z80 processor back in '77. I remember wire wrapping dozens of memory chips on a 5"x10" board yielding a massive 16K of memory for my "super" home computer. Software was loaded from a cassette tape player of course. Total state of art hobby computing!

I used to lust over the H8's in the Heathkit catalog, along with the ham gear and other cool stuff. My uncle built a Heathkit TV and stereo.

I had one of those 150-in-1 electronic project kits! My uncle got it for me as a Christmas gift on year. I loved that thing! On the quiz, I got all 10 correct, which surprised me.

Me too! It was awesome. I also used to build a bunch of those Radio Shack solder-together kits. They came in a plastic box (clear top, red perforated bottom). You used the red bottom as a breadboard to wire up the kits.

Back then, Radio Shack had employees who actually knew something about electronics. I botched the assembly of one of the kits and couldn't figure out what I had done wrong. I took it to the store, and one of the employees debugged it and fixed it.

Over the last two years I've been buying and playing with RGB laser projectors (think "Laser Floyd"). Lots of fun.

More info re projectors please?

I don't want to brag, but I am published

That reminds me - I remember getting some Commodore magazine to publish an undelete utility I wrote, but I didn't save the magazine. Wish I had! :frown:

 

[freds]

Ahh my first computer was a FADAC which was a army computer for the field artillery its memory was a roughly 32k rotating disk where you had to account for the disk rotation speed for it fetch the next instruction to execute and it was a 31bit machine where the logic was on circuit cards with individual transistors each card was about seven inches by five. Repair consisted of removing cards and first applying an eraser to the contacts. You programmed it in octal on paper and then went over to the rat rig to cut a paper tape on the teletype machine.

Upgraded to my first personal computer which was sphere 6800 that actually had a video display of 32 by 20 or something like that with 4k of memory and audio format for saving and reloading programs. Mine had memory problems so had to manually key in a program to read a specific memory cell off of timer interrupt so every 64 byte wouldn't forget it's contents.

 

[astrotoy]

In college we used an IBM 7094. This was in the mid-60's. I learned Fortran IV and then in grad school in the late '60's we had a CDC 6400 and the monster CDC6600. Still on punch cards. Had to compile the program, and then run it. At home, my first computer was an Exidy Sorcerer, a Z80 machine, which had 32K RAM which I boosted up to 48K. I remember loading in the OS and the word processing program using a cassette deck. This was in the late '70's. I bought a real floppy drive, Micropolis 8" drive! When the IBM PC's came out, I got one, because it had the killer app, Lotus 1-2-3, which I bought Version 1.0. THe computer, bought from Computerland, was around $3000 in 1981 or so, and Lotus was $500. No hard drives yet, but two 5 1/4" floppies. I joined a local computer club and we did a group purchase of one of the early external hard drives. It was the size of large shoebox, $1100 (group price) for a 13MB drive. Of course we were all talking at the club meetings how we would never fill up the drive.

 

[Ames]

Anyone else cut their teeth on an Atari 400/800 machine?

Atari 8-bit family - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

We got one for Christmas in 1979 and it was a great start for me in the world of computing. Sat along side our Atari VCS game machine that we got the Christmas before.

I had one of those in my Teen years. Remember Rescue on Fractalus, Ballblaster, Archon? I wrote my first game on that machine. Brilliant.

Alex

 

[ggr]

There's a long story that goes with the photos, but I don't have time to type it at the moment. I started in '71 (simultaneously) with APL on an IBM 360/50, and a programmable (via little punch cards) calculator with nixie tube 10-digit display; I think it was made by Canon but not sure.