What happens when you are older than some colleagues...

[kyonides]

Yesterday I was talking to some colleagues and one of them didn't remember what the name of the cassette was. Just as a simple, innocent test I asked him if he knew what a floppy was... He didn't answer either, the females colleagues didn't say anything about it.

Man, sometimes I kinda feel like I were still leaving in the Atari era...

[askrieger]

Re: What happens when you are older than some colleagues...

"Atari isn't that one of those new-fangled machines with a 6502 chip?", asks the guy who's first home built computer had an 8008 CPU.

[arochester]

Re: What happens when you are older than some colleagues...

1) My brother is younger than me. He did a degree in Computing Science. He had to take a wad of punch cards into university.

2) It is interesting to watch police dramas on TV. Once they didn't have computers. Then they had monochrome (green?). Then they had color. Then they had flat screens

[dibl]

Re: What happens when you are older than some colleagues...

Only a person who has fed 8-inch diskettes into a "reader" understands why they are referred to as "floppy".


Now for the truly arcane trivia: What was the original phrase that was abbreviated to form the name of CPT Corporation (a once famous word processing system vendor of the '70s and '80s)?

A: Cassette Powered Typing

[GreyGeek]

Re: What happens when you are older than some colleagues...

Ok, WITHOUT Googling, what is a KSR-133 ??

[dibl]

Re: What happens when you are older than some colleagues...

Ok, WITHOUT Googling, what is a KSR-133 ??

I surrender!

[GreyGeek]

Re: What happens when you are older than some colleagues...

The 10cps keyboard-paper tape punch device I used in grad school in 1968 to punch my quadratic equation solution into a role of yellow paper tape, which was sent to the CDC 6600 in Dallas for processing. I got back either a printout of my program with the resulting solution to the quad, or a listing of errors. If the latter, it was back to punching a new role of tape with the corrections. One typo and you started over. Makes you really appreciate a WYSIWYG editor! 8)

[Snowhog]

Re: What happens when you are older than some colleagues...

My 'first' PC was a *blazingly fast* Leading Edge 8Mhz 8088 processor PC. It had a whopping 640K of RAM. I don't remember the size of the HD, but it wasn't large! Had a 9-pin dot-matrix printer!! Oh, and it had a dial-up internal modem - 300 baud!!!! Ah, those were the daze.

[aged hippy]

Re: What happens when you are older than some colleagues...

Nostalgia is a thing of the past.

[bobcollard]

Re: What happens when you are older than some colleagues...

Hey, been there, done that. Built a Sanyo 8086 with two 5 1/4" floppies, no HD, started with 64k of RAM, piggybacked another 64k on top of the original chips, then, added a 640k videoboard for 768k, more RAM than an IBM at the time. All from a kit taking a Micro Computer Repair course with NRI First system was MSDOS 2.7 with external modem and dot matrix printer. Don't forget the green screen monitor, all of 12" diagonally. Ahh, memories.
Now a days if you don't have dual core running at 2Ghz or better with 4GB ram and 160 GB HD you are sucking air. I'm now running Kubuntu 9.04, KDE 4.3 on a laptop, can you believe it? We've come a long way baby!
Bob
Robert Collard
Springfield, IL

[Detonate]

Re: What happens when you are older than some colleagues...

I went to my 50th year high school reunion last night.

My first computer.

http://tinyurl.com/mbgcwe

[GreyGeek]

Re: What happens when you are older than some colleagues...

I went to my 50th year high school reunion last night.

My first computer.

http://tinyurl.com/mbgcwe

How many were there?

My 50th HS reunion is this September, but I am not going. There were 500 in my graduating class and six of them died on graduation night as the result of several drunken decisions. Besides, I never had any fun in HS. It was too boring.

My first computer was an Apple ][+ I purchased in September of 1978. Sold it three years later for more than what I paid for it. Used the cash to buy an IBM PC.

[Qqmike]

Re: What happens when you are older than some colleagues...

@ Detonate,
Slide rules -- I kept mine, all sorts of them (really proud of the small but expensive ones ). I used them in an engineering program, circa 1967-69. Remember "significant digits," keeping track, doing the rounding in a long sequence of operations. At the end of which, if the "answer" was supposed to be 3.46, you better not have gotten it 3.45 or 3.47.

@ GreyGeek, your quadratic solutions ...
reminded me of Sophomore year, Rose Polytechnic Institute of Technology, 1968, a professor hired me (Work-Study) to help him make a computer generated movie demonstrating differential calculus. I programmed the IBM mainframe (in Fortran IV) to print out (dot matrix) the sequence of graphs illustrating the difference quotients as delta x -> 0 to demonstrate the derivative (= slope) of the quadratic at a given point. Tons of graphs, as delta x -> 0. The prof then photographed the graphs to produce a movie (of sorts, somehow). And ...

... same time period/school, we had a "Computational Lab," filled with various old adding machines. The prof in charge of it hired me to be the attendant, and while on duty he had me doing all sorts of crazy calculations (using the machines) to chase various numbers (e.g., expanding pi or e; infinite series convergence; Fibonacci numbers; transforms; etc.).

1974,Graduate school (Indiana University), on the CDC 6600 ... I was so used to using punched cards and printouts that when we got "CRT terminals," I resisted using them, feeling they were a bit too abstract, preferring the more tangible, hard-copy way.

There ya go

[GreyGeek]

Re: What happens when you are older than some colleagues...

@ Detonate,
Slide rules -- I kept mine, all sorts of them (really proud of the small but expensive ones ). I used them in an engineering program, circa 1967-69. Remember "significant digits," keeping track, doing the rounding in a long sequence of operations. At the end of which, if the "answer" was supposed to be 3.46, you better not have gotten it 3.45 or 3.47.

In grad school I used a Post VersaLog in a leather binding case. Still have it. It is haning from a hook in the ceiling of my office. Every once in a while I get it out and play with it. Much of the work of using a slide rule was keeping track of the decimal place in your head. If you weren't any good using a slide rule your future in science was going to be short. Then, one day, the prof in my numerical analysis class (which doubles as a computer sci class in those days because we were learning fortran) brought a Singer Friden EC-132 http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/friden132.html My sliderule was retired that day.

@ GreyGeek, your quadratic solutions ...
......
1974,Graduate school (Indiana University), on the CDC 6600 ... I was so used to using punched cards and printouts that when we got "CRT terminals," I resisted using them, feeling they were a bit too abstract, preferring the more tangible, hard-copy way.

It took some of my classmates almost an entire semester to complete the FOUR assigned programs using the KSR-133 and paper tape. A couple never got to the third program. The school I attended had purchased 1.5Kb of core from the bank which owned the CDC 6600 (I heard it was called 6600 because Control Data Corporation priced it at $6.6M) for $1k/month! During the few weeks after the prof brought in the EC-132 we did the four quad problems and a couple dozen more to boot. The best time to do the physics and NA homework was after midnight because of the waiting list. In 1974, while attending a teacher's convention, I saw an digital calculator on display. It featured a 9 digit red led display, 4 functions and a control key. Powered by a 9 volt batter it could play continuously for 2 hours. It was about twice the size of a deck of playing cards and cost $299. One year later my gasoline credit card, Phillips, offered what they called the Bomar Brain for $40. It was a four function, control key, AND memory, with a red led display. It ran on a 9 volt battery too, and IIRC, the battery lasted about 8 hours of continuous use. You turned it on, did you calculations and turned it off. Bomar went bankrupt one year later.

[arochester]

Re: What happens when you are older than some colleagues...

1) Slide rules... We had two Otis King calculators. An "ordinary" one and a logarithmic one. A cylinder equal to a slide rule 66 inches long. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otis_King

2) I remember going with my brother to buy an HP Scientific Calculator. We traveled from Newcastle to Edinburgh. It cost about £64. You can now by similar for about £3.