Oldsters

[pwabrahams]

Apparently there are a number of older geeks like GreyGeek who hang out here. Personally, I very much appreciate GreyGeek's contributions and answers to questions. I'm 75 with a long history of geeking; my proudest long-ago accomplishment was writing a PL/I compiler for the CDC 6600 back in the 1970's and bootstrapping it from the IBM 360. It still astounds me to think that my $10 thumb drive has far more and faster memory than that multimillion-dollar machine (in 1970 dollars) with its 128K (or was it 256K?) of 60-bit words.

There was a time when one person could know a good part of what there was to know about computing. How things have changed!! Both the complexity and variety of software have exploded, so a single individual can only know a miniscule fraction of what is going on.

[woodsmoke]

Re: Oldsters

LOL that is a kewl story!

Makes me think of when I was in the Navy and did data analysis for "ROPEVALS" Ready Operational Evaluations" in San Diego on the data analysis on an IBM 360 series machine. These were the days of the "clean room" and technicians in white smocks. One day the card reader messed up and the Navy people went nutso from the admirals on down and they called in their "expert". The officers then went nuts getting COFFEE on I don't know how many carts spread around....which I thought was rather odd.

But one of the full timers there said "just wait and watch".

This guy come in with hair down to his rear in a white "muscle" t-shirt, torn jeans and sandles.

He held his hand out with his first finger extended and a looie put a coffee cup on it.


The guy saunters into the clean room and another looie has a chair for him and a small table with a note pad and pencil. We are listening on a speaker system.

He mumbles something about "turn it on" or something. They turn it on. He listens for a while, drinking his coffee, and writes something on the pad gets up and mumbles something like "that will fix it" and left.

The techs then did whatever it was and a short while later it was humming right along.

I don't think he could do that today even with a knockoff laptop!

Ahh those were the days!

PPS, I've told this story before so if somebody has read it, I apologize for repeating myself, I'ts just that I'm oldern' dirt!

woodsmoke

[oshunluvr]

Re: Oldsters

I'm not quite as "experienced" as you all are - I'm 49.

But I started computing in 1976 punching cards for an IBM 360 (must have been a popular computer) in Fortran IV. It was the school system accounting computer and we were the first class allowed to program with it. It counted as a math class. We would punch cards for a week or so, the teacher would take boxes of cards at the end of the school day to the administration building and run our programs. Then the next day we would get our printouts (anyone remember 132 column green and white striped paper with the holes down each side?) and debug and do it all over again. My recollection was our 1960's model computer had 4k of memory and had been a gift to the school system from some business in my home town.

Imagine my shock when, in 1983, I arrived at my first duty station as an Air Traffic Controller (Kansas City Air Route Control Center) and I discovered that the (at the time) most complicated piece of software in the world ran on an IBM 9020D - which was four 260's cobbled together. These computers ran our entire nations Air Traffic System until 1989 when they began a five-year-long phasing them out for newer models.

Our radar scopes had these large well-built trackballs we used as pointers for data entry. A couple of us younger guys discovered if we spun the trackballs as fast as we could and repeatedly clicked the "Home" button simultaneously, it would cause the whole system to freeze building wide for a few seconds!

Man, we're we playing with fire...

[ardvark71]

Re: Oldsters

I'm not quite as "experienced" as you all are - I'm 49.

Neither am I, I'm 39.

My first experience with computers was in elementary school (1980-1982.) I can't remember what the name of the system was (it was possibly one from Commodore's PET series) but the computer itself, the monitor and keyboard were all one unit and to run any programs, you had to attach a specialty made cassette player to it and wait a few minutes for it to load up.

Not long after that, my parents bought a VIC-20 and we spent almost all of our time playing games on it.

Regards...

[pwabrahams]

War story

As long as we're telling war stories, I'll tell my favorite.

Back in the late 1950s, one of the national labs had a large and expensive disk drive they had gotten from IBM. They had it for several months and then they started having head crashes where the reading head collided with the surface. So they asked IBM to have a look at it. The IBM folks brought the drive back to their facility, examined it closely, repaired it, and returned it to the lab. It worked perfectly -- for a few months. And then the same thing happened.

The experience was repeated once more, and then the IBM people realized that they had to look at their procedures much more closely. The very last step, before they gave the device back to the labs, was to inspect it. And the very last step of the inspection was to place an "Inspected" sticker on the drive. Well, they glued the sticker onto the drive right next to the air intake. And after a few months, the glue dried up and began to flake off. And into the air intake it went!!

[woodsmoke]

Re: Oldsters

pw


woodsmoke

[Detonate]

Re: Oldsters

Well, I'm only 1000110 years old. But my first college course in data processing was learning how to wire those panels to sort those cards. That was in 1967.

[dibl]

Re: Oldsters

Well, I'm only 1000110 years old.

Wow -- Detonate, you sure know how to make 111100 feel young!

[Detonate]

Re: Oldsters

Only 10 kinds of people in the world, those that understand binary and those that don't.

[tdockery97]

Re: Oldsters

I love those posts you guys. Makes me feel young at 62.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Oldsters

I am only 2.2 Billion seconds old!

[GreyGeek]

Re: Oldsters

Well, I'm only 1000110 years old. But my first college course in data processing was learning how to wire those panels to sort those cards. That was in 1967.

After I got out of HS in 1959, and flunked the Army physical, I decided to go to the Barnes School of Business in Denver to learn that "new thing" called Data Processing. There I learned how to use banana plugs on the control panels of IBM 402 Tabulators, the 514 Gang punch, etc... After nearly a year I graduated, and at the top of that class. But, even at nearly 19 I didn't look a day over 14 and I could NOT find a job. By chance my dad had heard of an academic scholarship to a college in central Nebraska.

I never did another thing with or in computing until I took a graduate course in Numerical Analysis. In it we had to program an CDC660 main frame by using a KSR-133 keyboard, at 10 cps, to type holes into a roll of yellow paper tape. Those holes represented a Fortran IV program to solve a quadratic equation, and three other problems. Only a couple of us finished all three simple problems in that semester because typing two or three dozen lines of code with that keyboard and not make any mistakes was difficult to do. But, at least, I learned how to program for the first time. It was another 10 years later, in 1978, that I bought the first Apple ][+ sold in the state of Nebraska and learned how to program Apple BASIC ][. Since then I have learned at least one new language a year .... until the day I retired. Now, I am slowly forgetting everything I had learned. I used to know the At No., At. Wt, electron configuration, melting point, boiling point, density, and other chemical properties of all 92 naturally occurring elements, and many of the synthetics known at the time. Now, however, I am not sure were "B" is in the chart, to say nothing of its At No. Wt, etc... At times it feels now as if I never went to college.

[woodsmoke]

Re: Oldsters

Lol
I never learned ALL of that but since I carried a pocket periodic table in my billfold when I was in country, the couple of other shore spotters thought that it was rather odd that I was memorizing that stuff between firefights!

I'll tell NEW kids a secret about how to get along with the boss.....

When he(or she) is chewing you out and spittle is drying on his lower lip, and you don't want to actually laugh in his face:

a) stare at his lower jaw or an ear.
b) either "double" numbers like 2 x 2 = 4, 2 = 4 = 8, and continue...
or)
c) go through the electron config series, 1s1, 1s1 1s2, 1s1 1s2 2s1, 1s1, 1s2 2s1 2s2, 1s1, etc. and so forth!

The first time I rode a winch line down onto my ship, it turned out the DesronCommander took affront at me doing that and chewed on me for about fifteen minutes in the Captain's Cabin, not five minutes after I went aboard and I just stared over his shoulder at the Captain......who was laughing his A@@ off and ran through the config series over and over and over!!!

I had a rather hallowed status on that ship after that!

ahhhh those were the days!

woodsmoke

[dibl]

Re: Oldsters

At times it feels now as if I never went to college.

Yeah, I know. Most of the "facts" of 1970 just don't seem to be true any more.

However, they did teach you critical thinking, did they not? There is the value of the education, IMHO. Not the "facts", but rather the way you consider them.

[Snowhog]

Re: Oldsters

Well, I'm just a mere 1.704074 × 1021 picoseconds old, as of my last birthday.

My first exposure to personal computers was my mothers Apple IIe. Back in 'those days' I was into the role playing game Dungeons and Dragons, and I built a Basic program that allowed me to generate D&D 'characters' base on the charater parameters in the D&D Player Guide. It worked very well. I was in Senior High School back then.