Computing memories

[DanC]

I was discussing with my brother discussing how uber-cool technology is these days. (He's a fairly new "convert" to the "real world" outside of AOL.)

I know I'm not the "oldest" guy in the forums - but I've been around the block a bit. I thought it might be fun to share some memories of being a geek in the "good old days."

You other old farts - feel free to add YOUR anecdotes.

What we now have at our fingertips power and speed that would have absolutely made us giddy 20 years ago. I still remember how "fast" my first 486-33 was. Now - I'm impatient if I have to wait more than 3 seconds for a page to load. How times change.

One of my fonder memories of growing up was when my brother took me to his work, and we played a scintillating game of tic-tac-toe with a reasonably polite machine called a Burroughs L-3000. This particular machine accepted its programming via punched paper tape. :Q

I remember when disk drives were fragile boxen the size of a stove or refrigerator - costing tens of thousands of dollars -- and one molecule of dust, or a hair, or a bump, or a sneeze would send them into a grinding, sickening mish-mash of heads, platters, and ground-up data. Now? Gracious. I have a bloody 80 GB main HDD. I could easily have afforded the 120 - but why bother? I'll never fill this volume -- I don't think

I began programming using Basic BASIC on IBM punch cards (nope... not the little ones... the big ones.)
If one card got out of sequence... TOAST. No compile. GIGO. Guess how easy it is to drop a 24" tall stack of punch cards on the floor?

Anyone else remember RPG?

Ahh... then there was my first "real" PC. It was a beaut.

Intel 8088-2 Processor - 8 KB of RAM! - and a good 'ol RGB monitor.
20 MB HDD!

I also had (insert dramatic music here) - a Bernoulli box! Yes - a 20+20. Those - were (as I recall 8" floppies) 20 MB removable storage. WOW.

We'll all doubtless remember alot more - but I thought maybe some of this might be fun for the younger guys to hear about... the days when EVERYTHING was command-line.

 

[MDE]

I remember the DOS days and having to type in "win" to get into Windows 3.1. I was about 7 or 8 then, and I've been hooked ever since.

 

[n0cmonkey]

I started on a 286. I remember netbooting my first sparcstation 10... Oh wait. That was about a month ago...

Everything can still be command line. Graphics eat up valuable cycles.

 

[CyGoR]

I do have some experience with very old pc's.. Last year I started a new study and in our class room there are douzens of VERY old systems, from the first Apple to a 16bit computer/printer in one which works with cartridges.. Also a few HD's which are so big I can fit almost 2 pc's in
I'll try to take a picture next week if this topic is then still openend, it might be interesting to see for someone who has actually worked with it

 

[Coquito]

Originally posted by: MDE
I remember the DOS days and having to type in "win" to get into Windows 3.1. I was about 7 or 8 then, and I've been hooked ever since.

 

[trevinom]

Originally posted by: Coquito

Originally posted by: MDE I remember the DOS days and having to type in "win" to get into Windows 3.1. I was about 7 or 8 then, and I've been hooked ever since.

I started with an 8088 that was using DOS 1.1, if I remember correctly. It had 2 half-density floppy drives and a 10 meg hard drive If I remember correctly. I can't remember if I was using a CGA monitor or if it was mono.
My first 2 years at FSU, I remember taking a FORTRAN class, in '89, and their lab still had a teletype that had to be used to get a printout of your programs. For those that don't know what a teletype is, it basically is a typewriter with a keyboard built in that allows you to print your display as you go along.

PS, I remember working with SIPPS which were in 80286's I believe.

 

[r0tt3n1]

Geez, I must be a newb! Lost my computing virginity on a 486SX. :roll:

 

[Pokey]

Well, if I don't count the Atari with the basic cartridge, my first "real" personal computer was a 8088 I think, with amber mono monitor. I wrote a basic program taken from a book that drew a compound curve, a simple parabola that formed a kind of wire-frame mound. Took about ten minutes for it to display but we were fasinated by it.

Cured me of wanting to code though........................

 

[GeoffS]

Anyone else remember RPG?

Remember it? I still code in it on our AS/400s!!! However, it's nothing like the RPG you probably remember... it's actually got IF statements now!

My first was a Radio Shack TRS80 Model 1 Level 2.... 16K or ram, b&w monitor, and a cassette player as the offline storage!

 

[EvilWobbles]

My first computer experience was also a TRS80 Model II or III I think....anyone remember the big BREAK key on the TRS80?

My first computer I owned was a 486DX-33 with a GASP 210meg hard drive. That thing cost me more than my next two computers combined.

I remember writing basic programs but luckily I had 5 1/4" floppies to save my work onto.

Thanks for the trip down Memory lane Dan!

 

[n0cmonkey]

A friend of mine had an Atari with DUAL floppy drives! It was great. Best gaming machine in the neighborhood.

 

[JonB]

My High School in Cincinnati (Princeton class of 70) was given a small IBM 360 as a tax write-off by General Motors. I took computer programming as a junior just so I could see the beast. It used punch cards, so using the card punch keyboards was a trip, but what I do remember most is "the big red button." The instructor was so proud to describe all the reasons you should NEVER push that button, because it would kill power to the IBM and the winchester drive stacks and the magnetic core memory would go dead. You wore lab coats to enter the special air-conditioned room, and you had to stay quiet (for some unexplained reason).

All in all, a very religious experience. 32KB of magnetic core memory, lots of tape drives, and those multi-layer cartridge loading Winchester drives.

I sure am glad technology improved, because that thing was a PAIN IN THE ASS

 

[RaySun2Be]

Ahhh, the memories.

The first "computer" I messed with was a roommate's computer chip on a circuit board from Radio Shack. Can't remember the processor type, but it had 8K memory, you hooked it up to the TV (black & white) and programmed it using a couple of switches. Binary only. 1s & 0s.

Then a few years later, took an "Intro to Computers" course at a local community college, where I programmed COBOL using punch cards. Fell in love with programming at that point.

Later that year, dropped out of college (music degree) and went to a tech school, where I learned to program BASIC on a Commodore PET, COBOL, RPG I, and ASSEMBLER on a TI-990 and IBM 360. I loved Assembly language, short, sweet, and all powerful. Hated COBOL, to dasm wordy. Got a job programming in COBOL, of course. :rol;

Didn't get back into the PC scene until a few years later, when I worked with an IBM PC with 2 5 1/4" 360K floppies. Then an IBM XT with a 10 Meg HD. Programmed some BASIC stuff on an IBM AT 6mhz, 1Meg memory (640K usable by programs, we used the remaining as a RAM drive), and a whopping 20Meg HD running IBM DOS. Boy, did we think that was more HD than you could ever fill up. :roll:

You had to set the IRQs for cards (modems, video, etc.) by setting switches on the card itself.

How about the modem speeds? 300K, 1200K, 2400K. Lightening fast. Then got to work with a synchronous 9600K line, and that was mind boggling fast.

Moved up the ranks of PCs, IBM PS2 60 (12mhz), and on and on until today's speeds. Also kept moving up the ranks in mid range (AS/400) and IBM mainframes as well.

I didn't use Windows until WIN3.1. Tried new releases, hated it, removed it, kept using DOS until 3.1, and then I spent as much time in the command line as I did in Win31 itself. Maybe more...

 

[OhioDude]

One of my fonder memories of growing up was when my brother took me to his work, and we played a scintillating game of tic-tac-toe with a reasonably polite machine called a Burroughs L-3000. This particular machine accepted its programming via punched paper tape.

OMG, Dan! You just brought on a flood of nostalgia! I learned basic assembler on a Burroughs L-9000. By the time the 9000 came along, they actually used a cassette tape station to store programs. You could still store data on punch cards or you could delve into the latest data storage technology... stripe ledger cards! The 9000 actually had a rudimentary data communications processor in it so you could hang a terminal off of it and run programs from your desk without having to sit at the console.

You want to talk about having to be efficient with your code? This baby had 64K of RAM and that had to hold both your program AND the data. These were machines that people ran their businesses on!

I still have a Burroughs Series LT/C Assembly Language Programmer's Quick Reference Guide in my desk drawer. It's a little 54 page assembly language reference manual (copyrighted in 1970!) that fits in your shirt pocket. I was in college and the Burroughs techie that taught me Assembler gave it to me. Pages 42 through 48 layout the compact paper tape codes for all 128 available characters in USASCII, EBCDIC, and BCL so you could "decompile" a program by physically looking at the paper tape! :Q

Then I learned COBOL on a Burroughs B700 that had a removable cartridge disk drive the physical size of a washing machine. That baby stored a total of 4.6 megabytes of data! (That's MEGA, not GIGA.) This machine was used by Malone College to store and process student records.

Next there was the Burroughs B800 (a huge upgrade over the B700) that had a whopping 144K of RAM and could run more than one program at a time. The OS was called CMS and the kernel was called the MCP - Master Control Program. (Remember the movie Tron?)

Man, I could go on and on!!!

Those were the days!!!!!

 

[networkman]

Ah yes.. my first experience with real computers(not game consoles or arcade type boxes) that I can recall(it's been a LONG time), was passing by a Commodore VIC-20, followed closely by the Commodore C=64.

Those were the days.. playing Infocom text games like Zork and loading them from cassette. :Q That didn't last too long.. my family got a 1541 floppy drive soon after - that was a bit faster. I'd been playing Dungeons & Dragons with my friends for a couple years, so when the game Telengard came out, my parents got it for me for Christmas; I played that for hours on end. Eventually though, the game got boring and I wondered if there was any way to modify it.. Turns out the two main files it ran from were un-compiled and were written in BASIC, so I printed out 137 pages and started looking for some variable, finally finding the parameter for the "Gray Misty Cube" which determined the level settings.. changing that generator value from 1 to 50 to 1 to 200 suddenly gave LOTS of new possibilities. There.. my first computer cheating experience.. why you ask? I'd take my 1st level character, enter the Gray Misty Cube, enter 200 for a level(I left the display at Max 50, so my brother wouldn't figure it out.) and then go open a chest, find some Armor+1600 and a Sword+3000 and then work my way back UP the dungeon killing everything in sight. Hehe.. that was my first introduction to programming too. Self-taught, until I got to code on Apple II's in high-school junior year.

I saved alot of money from summer jobs to get myself a "Lt. Kernel" 20meg hard drive for my beloved C=64, and why not.. I'd also got a 1670 1200baud modem so I could chat and play online games on QuantumLink(a Commodore version of CompuServ for those that don't remember).

I didn't get to experience mainframes until I was in college(circa 1987), those being Prime 750s. But my instructors insisted that we learn the OLD way of doing things, so I have some experience coding with punch cards.. face down nine edge first.

I could go on, but I'll save you all and stop now.

 

[DnetMHZ]

I thought I was the man when I upgraded my 40 meg HD to a 120 meg! Now I don't even think twice about downloading files that large.

 

[CXGJarrod]

My first computer was an Apple 2. Only a 5 1/4 inch drive and no hard disk! Everything ran off of floppies! I was in heaven when I got an Apple 2 GS (With a huge external hard drive - SCSI) The hard drive was a whopping 20 megs! Woot!

 

[Unforgiven]

my first experience with computers was playing a game called hardball (baseball game) on the commodore 64 in 1986 that ran everything off of the 5.25" floppy disks. i remember being so confused by what the $LOAD meant and when he left the room there was no way i could even boot the game because i was so lost my 2nd experience with computing was the next year when i transferred elementary schools and they had an apple 2e that we were allowed to play archeology games and where in the world is carmen sandiego on an entirely green screen. i thought it was the greatest thing ever and i would go to school 2 hours early to play the games. little did i know that i would end up working with computers for a profession for well over 8 years now

 

[yelo333]

My first was an Apple IIe, so young, though that all I knew was how to put the game in the drive, and turn it on. oh, the apples were so much easier then

MY first computer was a 16 mhz 386SX w/ math coprocessor. I used to process fractals on it that took 4 hrs on that thing. I did it on my current comp, and I was hitting 5-10 min on the same pic...

 

[TAandy]

Nobody mention ZX Spectrum 48k or Amiga 1000 yet???

 

[nbarb99]

My first experience was with my Dad's Mac LC with a whopping 40MB hard drive and 10MB of RAM!

 

[Hyperfocal]

My first computing experience was a DEC PDP-11 using a printing terminal over an acoustic coupler modem. Played Adventure (Zork's ancestor) for hours after school, wasting reams of computer paper.

First computer of my own was a Sinclair ZX-81 with the 16kb expansion memory pack.

Then a Commodore 64. Got the assembly language pack and realized I wasn't cut out for assembly programming.


Dasm, I'm old.

 

[kyparrish]

I started out w/ a Tandy T1000 (I think it was) that didn't have a hard drive , I had to load the OS from floppies into Ram every time....BUT, it played Oregon Trail, which was all I cared about

Ahh...the memories

 

[OverVolt]

I started with a Compaq Celeron 633 with a 5400rpm HD and 128mb ram and Win *GASP* ME

 

[Coolkid]

Originally posted by: Coquito

Originally posted by: MDE
I remember the DOS days and having to type in "win" to get into Windows 3.1. I was about 7 or 8 then, and I've been hooked ever since.

I can remember that well

But the earliest i can remember using a computer was an XT we had when i was about 4ish. It only had a basic menu system running on dos (3?)