Old farts reminiscing about computers

[pcdefl]

I used one of these back in 1977!!

View attachment 99021
As junior high school students, a friend and I used to sneak into a university science library below-ground time share terminal room to play a version Star Trek on these teletype machines. It would take two or three minutes to print out quadrants of the universe complete with the Enterprise, Star Base, and evil Romulan Warbirds. Imagine the noise with 20 of these cranking at once. I still incorporate the password we somehow acquired into those that I use today, and for some reason have a roll of the paper nearly a half-century later. I think the college course I later took covering FORTRAN and BASIC (yes, punch cards!) lead me to a totally unrelated career.

And from 1978 until 1982 I "upgraded" and used intensively one of those punch cards keyboards!! to write BASIC FT (Fast Translator) and FORTRAN IV to be run on an IBM 360 machine!!
Does these bring back "good old" memories!!
Thank you for posting the images!

Yet another 50-something-year-old here who grew up in Silicon Valley.

I first learned to program in BASIC around 1974 when I was about 10 years old.

My mom enrolled me in a class at the People's Computer Company storefront community center in Menlo Park, CA. Does anyone else here remember that place? I googled around but couldn't find any pictures of what it looked like inside the center. PCC is better known for publishing the computer magazine Dr. Dobbs Journal.

Anyway, they had 2 PDP minicomputers (donated old PDP-8 systems, I think), a couple of Teletypes, and an optical paper tape reader. It was all low-key and low budget. At some point one of the machines developed a flaky memory that caused it to periodically crash. When I was around, it became my job to reboot it and reload the runtime system from fan-folded paper tape through the optical reader. Later on, the optical reader died and for a time I had to resort to loading the paper tape using the slow mechanical reader on one of the Teletypes.

Even before then, my dad (who worked for IBM) had a teletype installed in a spare bedroom at home for awhile where he could work by using an acoustical modem in a wooden box where you would place the telephone receiver after dialing the access phone number.

It was similar and possibly identical to this:

1964 Antique MODEM Live Demo - YouTube

Occasionally I would go into work with him on the weekend and he would write programs in pencil on a standardized sheet of grid paper. After he had a few pages ready he would hand them to me and I would walk down the hall to the punchcard room and create punchcards on something that looked like a cross between an IBM electric typewriter and a paper money counting machine at a casino. It was very likely an IBM 129 Card Data Recorder like this:

Silicon Valley was an odd place to be a kid. I once found several blank 3-4" silicon wafers (used for making computer chips) sitting in the street gutter outside my home. Another time I found a Signetics semiconductor chip catalog book sitting on the lawn of the playground at my elementary school.

Later, my junior high school got a couple of Imsai 8080 boxes and I taught myself simple machine language programming. When I wasn't in school I would sometimes stop by the Computer Plus store in Sunnyvale which carried some of the earliest personal computers. I either didn't know or had forgotten until I just googled it now but the store was run by Steve Wozniak's brother, Mark.

Around that time I also got my first computer, a TRS-80 -- my dad was too cheap to buy me an Apple II and I was too lazy to get a paper route to get my own.

 

[omarsultan]

I also was a disassembler. More often than not, rather than attempt to put them back together, (often they were broken items anyway), I'd cull the switches, bulbs/led's and components from them and use them to build something else...

Me too - my parents would get so mad. I would play with things until I got bored then take them apart to see how they worked.

 

[TEG]

Me too - my parents would get so mad. I would play with things until I got bored then take them apart to see how they worked.

Me too...

 

[scaesare]

I guess I was kind of fortunate as that I had a seemingly constant stream of those often-broken items. My dad knew how to fix TV's and radios (along with most other electrical items), and as a result friends and family tended to supply the house with stuff to fix. Things that couldn't be, or weren't worth being, fixed, were often autopsy candidates.

We actually had one of these at the house, which was fun stuff as a kid... I was in charge of testing for my Dad:

 

[physicsfita]

I guess I was kind of fortunate as that I had a seemingly constant stream of those often-broken items. My dad knew how to fix TV's and radios (along with most other electrical items), and as a result friends and family tended to supply the house with stuff to fix. Things that couldn't be, or weren't worth being, fixed, were often autopsy candidates.

We actually had one of these at the house, which was fun stuff as a kid... I was in charge of testing for my Dad:

View attachment 99207

Oh, yeah! Dad had a portable tube-tester, too! I remember testing tubes for him -- good times.

 

[mrElbe]

I remember tube testers in drugstores.
For a few years, the SAGE computer at the missile base in North Bay Ontario was kept alive with tubes bought in Poland. Pretty funny, NATO buying tubes from the 'enemy' during the height of the cold war.

 

[HankLloydRight]

In the 70's my dad had a PDP-8 (with 4K of donut core memory) hooked up to a Flex-o-writer with a punched tape reader (or maybe two readers?). He ran a collection business and would basically use the PDP-8 and the Flex-o-writer to do mail merge and print collection letters. I think one tape was the form letter, and the other was the list of names and addresses. Anyway, I was probably 10 or 11 at the time and a very curious kid. I noticed that each data "row" of the punch tape had three big holes, one little hole for the sprocket, and then five big holes. Obvious to me this was some kind of character encoding, as I think it operated slow enough to see the tape and the print head move at about the same speed.

Anyway, I asked my dad what would happen if you turned the tape over (upside down), and reversed it (so the sprocket still lined up and the tape when backwards) and tried printing that? I think he was stunned that I could even suggest that and was afraid to try it since it might break something. But I convinced him that it's just 7 holes, and what could go wrong? So we did it, and sure enough, it printed something sort of resembling english words and text, but not exactly. It was a pretty fun experiment for a 11 year old and that my dad was willing to try it on very expensive and business critical equipment at the time.

Anyone here who is more experienced with this equipment care to chime in?

 

[SteveS0353]

My first real hands on experience with a computer was at university in Australia in the early '70s. My undergraduate thesis involved programming a PDP-8 with 4k of donut core memory to control a digital music synthesizer. It was a combination hardware & software project, with lots of wire-wrapping from the computer I/O circuit to the synthesizer, and writing the control software in FOCAL. I remember having to boot the PDP-8 in the mornings by keying in the bootstrap loader from the front panel switches (clear accumulator, clear link, ...), which would read the OS into the core from paper tape. Good times!

 

[Zapped]

Reading this thread sure brings back a lot of memories

$7,000 Apple 2e in the early 80's
VisiCalc
Fortran and Pcode compilers
Intel 186-386 PCs , Borland Delphi
Windows 1.x

The company I work for is still running programs built on Delphi 7.0
Not in the Cloud just yet.

 

[perkiset]

$7,000 Apple 2e in the early 80's
VisiCalc

Ah, Visicalc and the Apple ][ ... that was pretty awesome. I was the chief instructor at a computer school in California in the early 80s teaching Visicalc (among others, like Magic Window" - do you remember that one?). But then there was this awesome new software that we began teaching as soon as it came out, "Lotus 1-2-3." Then later dBase III made way for Paradox - sounds like you were right there in the thick of all that as well.

Intel 186-386 PCs , Borland Delphi

The company I work for is still running programs built on Delphi 7.0

Delphi ROCKED. I authored a language called iRobot in the mid 90s with Delphi to control processes and systems in the travel industry, there are some people still using it today. Then I shifted to Kylix with Apache shared objects to create websites prior to PHP's rise to prominence. Object Pascal is still one of my all time favorite languages.

Not in the Cloud just yet.

Worth the time to look it over mate. My latest business is cloud based execution of radiation oncology systems, we're treating about 12K patients a day. PM me if I can help with any questions, sounds like we'd get on just fine.

 

[AB4EJ]

I may qualify as an old fart at 64 (in 2 days); learned to program in 1969 on GE-235 time sharing system which we got at my private high school on NSF grant. Used the Teletype ASR 33 and acoustic coupler. Shortly thereafter was at Virginia Tech in EE program. They had never experienced an incoming freshman having computer skills, so told me to wait until Spring Quarter when there would be an intro to programming course. No way! I found out I could sign up for an account and pay for my computer time myself; so I set about learning to make the plotter create interesting charts (this was punch cards into IBM 360-65). Over spring break, I found the charges for running my program went up by a factor of 100 (i.e., $3.00 instead of $0.03 per run). I went to complain; it seemed that some unscrupulous students had been doing contract data processing work for local companies, and paying for it at student rates - so they did away with the student rates. When I complained to the director about this, he offered me a job on the spot! So, as a freshman at VPI, I had an office in the administration building - wrote software to do all kinds of things - FORTRAN, COBOL, and let's not forget PL/1 (that was my favorite at the time).

Then, there was no computer engineering major - so I had to build my own by majoring in EE and taking as many computer courses as possible as electives. All this morphed into a great career - still programming and directing teams (mostly C# now).

First PC was an Atari 800 - which I used to write my first published book (came out in 1987), put out by Marcel Dekker. I expect at the time I was the first person to supply them with as electronic manuscript with the typesetting commands already built into it...

 

[HankLloydRight]

"Lotus 1-2-3." Then later dBase III made way for Paradox - sounds like you were right there in the thick of all that as well.

You seemed to have jumped right over "Symphony".

Maybe intentionally.

 

[scaesare]

Mitch Kapor and Philippe Khan are shaking their heads right now. Probably along with Ray Noorda and Lou Gerstner.

 

[perkiset]

You seemed to have jumped right over "Symphony".

Maybe intentionally.

LOL Well, you are absolutely right that it deserved jumping over - as I recall it came out just later than 1-2-3, and was not as well received - I don't even think we built a class around it. But it was an exciting time

 

[mspohr]

You seemed to have jumped right over "Symphony".

Maybe intentionally.

You forgot Foxbase!
I built a business on Foxbase back in the day... first working multiuser dBase. My development network was IBM PC clones, a 5 MByte hard drive (full height) and ARCNET.
(Sold the company before Microsoft bought the language.)

 

[perkiset]

You forgot Foxbase!
I built a business on Foxbase back in the day... first working multiuser dBase. My development network was IBM PC clones, a 5 MByte hard drive (full height) and ARCNET.
(Sold the company before Microsoft bought the language.)

We jumped right past Fox from dBase III into Clipper. I recall Summer '87 to be the best of that breed, especially when combined with "B-Linker" which did paged memory swapping and dynamic link libs. That, combined with some special sauce we wrote in C to get super performance from a couple things lacking in Clipper created a pretty awesome toolset that we also made a lot of money on.

Man those were the days

 

[HankLloydRight]

Yeah, I did all of that. I was right out of college and working at a financing authority that had a few dBase apps (and Symphony, too!!). Then I found Foxbase and LOVED it. I built several more apps using it, and I think Foxbase+ which added a lot of text-based UI features.

Also, my first experience with Y2K problems happened there in 1986 when I built an equipment pool loan billing app in dBase and used 2-digit years.. except these were 30 year loans going well into the 2000s. So from that point forward, I always used 4-digit years. It wasn't until more than 10 years later that people started really worrying about Y2K.

Then I went back to b-school in the early 90's and was responsible for generating/maintaining the student phonebook, and wrote a few Clipper apps to run on the LAN so students could update their own information at the beginning of each year and summer (for a summer phone directory). As much as I loved Foxbase+, Clipper was 10x better and more fun to develop in.

While in b-school I was hired to build a couple of apps in Paradox. Ugh, I hated that compared to Foxbase and Clipper.

Oh, and while I'm at it, after b-school I was working for a consulting firm and had the chance to use Borland Delphi for a couple of clients. Next to APL, that was my absolute favorite development/GUI platform ever. Wow, I miss that.

 

[perkiset]

Oh, and while I'm at it, after b-school I was working for a consulting firm and had the chance to use Borland Delphi for a couple of clients. Next to APL, that was my absolute favorite development/GUI platform ever. Wow, I miss that.

I purchased Delphi again a few years ago, when they announced their Windows/OSX platform, then followed up with enterprise version of the iOS and Android version. It was as fine as I remembered it, but I've moved so far away from that kind of development that it no longer made sense. But I'm with you, really miss it. IMO the best IDE and class library I've ever used.

 

[HankLloydRight]

But I'm with you, really miss it. IMO the best IDE and class library I've ever used.

Yeah, everything about it was perfectly logical and intuitive and "just worked". Pure elegance.

I expect at the time I was the first person to supply them with as electronic manuscript with the typesetting commands already built into it...

Not exactly the same thing, but in high school (1981) we had three Apple ][s and a dot-matrix printer that used this card-stock yellow-tan paper. I had a paper due in English class that had to be "typed". So I did it on the Apple ][ with Apple Write. (side note, our Apple ][s didn't support lower case on the display, so caps were shown inverted on the screen). Printed it on the yellow card stock paper. Turned it in. The English teacher rejected the paper and was going to give me an "F" because it wasn't "typed". I tried to explain to her that yes, I had "typed" it out, but instead of a typewriter, I used a word processor and printed it out. She still just didn't "get it" and still refused the paper. I escalated this to the principal, and met with the English teacher, the heads of the English and Math (computer) departments in this big "meeting" to figure out what to do, since nobody had ever done this before. The principal finally ruled in my favor and the teacher was forced to accept the paper (I got an 'A'). Then right after word of that spread throughout the school, the computer room became crowded with people using the computers just to do papers, so we had to create rules about who could and couldn't use the computers.

 

[wcalvin]

A personal computer, 12 years before the mid-1970s

I am 76, was a physics undergrad at Northwestern when I tried to do a neural network simulation of the retina in 1959 on NU's only computer, an IBM 650. Punched cards and pegboard. It only ran two shifts and so I could get it all night.

RAM stands for Random Access Memory. That's because it was the successor to the rotating drum memory used in the 650. I would hand-optimize programs so I could avoid having to wait for a full rotation of the drum to fetch the next instruction. RAM was a big improvement.

I was a grad student at MIT in 1961 when their TX-0 was commercialized as the PDP-1. Played spacewar with it.

2nd computer in 1964 was one of only 24 made on an NSF grant: the LINC (Laboratory Instrument Computer). It used lots of analog in and out plus relay closures. Did my PhD thesis in neurophysiology on it, remotely controlling it from down the hall using a rotary telephone dial to give it sampling instructions.

3rd computer in 1967 was the commercial version ($57k on an NIH grant), the LINC-8 which was a hybrid of the PDP-8 and the LINC made by DEC. So I, together with a community of a hundred or so, had "personal computers" long before the affordable machines of the mid-1970s. LINCs were the size of several relay racks, had 2k memories, and mini digital tape drives. Printed output was via a TTY driven by one of the programmable relays; we took Polaroids of the oscilloscopes driven by the digital-to-analog converters.

4th was a locally built CPM machine in 1979 with two 8" floppies; used it for writing my first book INSIDE THE BRAIN; tried to persuade my academic department to buy some for the secretaries. Too soon. Converted to home office.

5th in 1983 was Radio Shack's Model 100, the first laptop. Took it on a float trip down the Colorado River through the bottom of the Grand Canyon while I was writing THE RIVER THAT FLOWS UPHILL (1986).

6th in 1985 was IBM's DOS machine, then a long line of laptops and desktops, another dozen books.