What's your geek / tech background?

[SteveRiley]

The principal means of interacting with the 370 in 1986 were green-screen terminals that emulated punched cards. I think the terminals were made by Hazeltine; I'm pretty sure they weren't 3270s. The terminal ran in two "modes" -- a line-oriented editor mode and a command mode. Once you had completed entering your program, you pressed a "Submit" button and, a few moments later, received a JES2 message indicating that your "card deck" was successfully read. So the mainframe still thought it was being handed a deck of punched cards!

Off in the corner of the lab lurked half a dozen card readers/punchers. Every so often I'd turn in a lab on cards, just because I could. The profs hated it, of course -- they wanted to see continuous printout of your program's code and output.

[SecretCode]

At school (I'm not going to work out the exact ages I was for each thing) ...
The school had an Alpha Micro minicomputer - a server box and a bunch of terminals. We did some programming in their version of Basic and some messing around in their CP/M style OS (and weird file system which I don't recall details of).
Meanwhile I got hold of an Acorn Atom computer with a 6502 8-bit processor and a massive total of 4 kilobytes of RAM (I think you could get a cheaper model with only 2KB) - and a cassette tape storage system.
I earned some money working in a local computer shop selling EEPROM erasers and Commodore 64s and stuff.
I built some Airfix model ships, but didn't go very far with physical fiddling.

Before university ... did a temporary job for IBM.
After university ... worked for IBM.
During various periods at IBM I learned APL, some PL/1, VM/CMS, TSO, scripting languages (not that they were called that then) EXEC, EXEC2 and REXX, the XEDIT editor, and heaps of other things. Plenty of networking tech because that was my job. Not so much in the hardware side, either professionally or for fun, though I've wired up a few toys based on PCBs and so on.
During summer vacation I travelled in Australia and supported it with a job working on a manufacturing company's IBM mainframe (and Olivetti word processors which were pretty advanced), using some of the skills learned at IBM.

While employed at IBM OS/2 came around and we began the long shift from 3270 mainframe terminals to OS/2 and then Windows 95 PCs and moving from the aforementioned tools to OS/2/Windows batch files and VBA macros for Ms Office.

At IBM and subsequent employers, I generally had a laptop which I could take home (after laptops were invented, that is ... and I don't mean the sewing machines with orange monochrome screens we used to take to customer sites for networking projects), and I didn't think much about exploring beyond the choice of software picked by the employer. Somehow I never got into the appeal of Apple.

Gradually I broke free; got an email account independent of the company's (which kept failing); bought laptops/desktops for my own use and for members of the family; and started exploring other applications.

I think my first serious exploration of Linux was with the Smoothwall firewall. Learnt about bash and the file system and the GNU world, and that there were desktop editions of Linux (Smoothwall certainly wasn't; no GUI). And tried Ubuntu in a virtual machine ... possibly an earlier version, but 8.04 Hardy Heron was the first version I made serious use of. Then I moved to dual booting, and though I still have a dual boot because I think I should preserve the pre-installed windows you get with most hardware, if I use Windows I do so in a virtual machine. Even when I have to for work.

I've continued messing around with programming for OS-level utilities and office suite macros, and stuff like that, getting to grips with Delphi (Object Pascal), Visual Basic, some Javascript, some PHP (when forced to e.g. for vbulletin mods), Java, the Eclipse IDE, bash, Perl, Python and more.

What was the question again?

[SecretCode]

The principal means of interacting with the 370 in 1986 were green-screen terminals that emulated punched cards. I think the terminals were made by Hazeltine; I'm pretty sure they weren't 3270s. The terminal ran in two "modes" -- a line-oriented editor mode and a command mode. Once you had completed entering your program, you pressed a "Submit" button and, a few moments later, received a JES2 message indicating that your "card deck" was successfully read. So the mainframe still thought it was being handed a deck of punched cards!

And the network had things like RJE, remote job entry, which was treated as couriering a deck of punched cards from the mainframe you were logged in at to the mainframe you wanted to execute it on. And receiving back a virtual print job.

80 columns input, 132 column printout. Who could possibly ever need more?

[SteveRiley]

The school had an Alpha Micro minicomputer - a server box and a bunch of terminals. We did some programming in their version of Basic and some messing around in their CP/M style OS (and weird file system which I don't recall details of).

No way! My high school had an AM-1000. Kitted with a Control Data disk cabinet (5 MB interal, 5 MB removable platter), four VT-100 terminals, and a ribbon-eating DECwriter. I learned BASIC, Pascal, and assembler on that thing. Wrote my own editor because I didn't like VUE. Got hold of the assembly source code for LOG.RUN and, uh, made a nice little back door for myself.

One day the repair guy came to swap the dying internal drive. He stuck around a while and chatted with us geeks. He liked to sit on the disk cabinet. Pointing to the DECwriter, he said, "Hang on to that thing, it's a real asset." I said, "Well, at the moment, our disk cabinet appears to be your ass-set." Much geek laughter ensued.