Greg Stewart wrote:
>
> Nope, hadn't that particular thrill...but I do remeber the card readers and tape..
assUme you mean "mag" tape here... :^)
> And, only heard about the plug boards when I was first learning programming.
"Wrote" more plugboards than I care to remember (IBM407 Accounting Machine if
anyone's wondering).
> I remember my first internet experience was playing Star Trek on a DEC terminal
>through a telephone coupler as a modem link. I *did* like the hundreds of lights on
>those modems, though... looked real cool when I was 12 years old!
In the early '60s, the NORAD computers were tube-type and a core dump consisted
of taking a Polaroid of a wall of neon bulbs... Talk about lights!! :^)
Couplers were around for longer than they shoulda been... but then again, I had
the opportunity to work on solid-state 2400baud modems in '64, 1300b tube-type
in '63... anybody notice this was pre-RS232...? :^)
Now, I *am* feeling old,
Pierre
> > No one remembers the Diablo drives, 5M fixed & 5M removable (soft sectored
> > cartridges made for some fun when mounted on a hard sector drive :)
> >
> > But that was "high tech" compared to storage which consisted of paper tape,
> > punch cards, mag tape... Of course, even these were great when compared to
> > programs "written" on 30"x30" (if I remember the size correctly) plug boards
> > with loads of wires and the odd diode to prevent backflow. That was about the
> > time it took an entire weekend to sort a few thousand "records" (cards, one
> > column at a time) if not too many cards were "eaten" by the sorter which
> > required a trip to the 026/029 machines... Then VM appeared on the
> > IBM360/67... Ahhhhhh!!! :^)
> >
> > Retired (not yet 55),
> > Pierre
> >
> > PS: The best "flashback" was watching a co-worker go airborne... he was
> > sitting on a chair which he rolled over bubble wrap while pulling out a DEC
> > power supply drawer... :^) :^)
> >
> > Greg Stewart wrote:
> > >
> > > I remember when a 10MB hard drive was the size of pizza, fit into a
>refridgerator-sized beast ofa cabinet, and PCs had 8 & 1/2 inch floppy diskettes!
>
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