KSR33 terminals. Yep, remember when you would go to a newspaper’s news room and hear those things hammering away. They had a characteristic smell.
From: Bill Prince Sent: Sunday, July 10, 2016 9:23 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [AFMUG] cnMaestro On-Premise Do I remember paper tape? The first "computer" I worked on was actually just a teletype machine that used an acoustically coupled modem to tie into a mainframe (or something) at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis (I started college at the Brainerd State Community College, which was an extension of the U of M at the time). We would type our programs into paper tape, then upload them via the modem connection for execution. When we did graphs, we printed them out in ASCII format on the teletype. Quaint I guess you would call it. Later, the physics department got their first real computer, which was a desk-top thing made by Olivetti. You would program it through its console, and record the programs on a magnetic card that was about the size of a Hollerith card. I think it had a maximum program storage capability in the neighborhood of 120 instructions. Thankfully, it had a couple dozen registers that you could "borrow" to store program instructions, and if you were clever, you could stretch your programs to over 130 instructions. It had two lights on the front, one red, and one green. The green light would blink every time it executed an instruction; about one or two instructions per second (yes, you could watch it as it executed the instructions). Floating point instructions were much slower; they would take 3 or 4 seconds to execute each instruction. If you had a program fault (like divide by zero), the red light would come on, and it would halt. If you knew your program well, you could tell where in your program the fault was by counting the blinking green light flashes and speed. The first computer company I worked for did not have a "boot" function. You had to fat-finger the boot in through the console. It was a 20 or 25 instruction program that everyone had to memorize. I also learned to write "diagnostics" by fat fingering in programs through the console. Interestingly, the machine was a 24-bit machine. Worked well with either 6-bit "BCD" (pre-ASCII?), or 8-bit ASCII. Ahhh. the good old days. bp <part15sbs{at}gmail{dot}com> On 7/10/2016 7:23 AM, Ken Hohhof wrote: Remember paper tape? I remember entering the boot code from toggle switches to read the OS from paper tape. And I have a vague recollection of a 2 step compiler or maybe assembler where not only was the source code on paper tape, but the intermediate step was punched onto paper tape and then read back in. Or maybe that’s a bad dream I had. From: Forrest Christian (List Account) Sent: Sunday, July 10, 2016 2:59 AM To: af Subject: Re: [AFMUG] cnMaestro On-Premise Some of my really early work was helping to program a system which used a z80 cp/m system for motion control. The compile step was long enough for a coffee or soda break. Assuming the compiler finished without errors, the link step was long enough to walk to lunch, get lunch, and come back. And still not finish. At some point we figured out that the process was disk bound (floppies are slow). So we built a ram disk card for the s100 system to speed things up. I think the cp/m driver for that card may have been my first z80 assembly code. Cut the time to almost nothing.. Sadly, that ended our forced lunch breaks. On Jul 9, 2016 11:11 PM, "Chuck McCown" <[email protected]> wrote: How about compiling a fortran program on an Apple IIe and going for coffee, then a half hour later coming back to see your first syntax error. I had a TRS-80 too. And the Timex Sinclair Z80. From: Ken Hohhof Sent: Saturday, July 09, 2016 7:28 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [AFMUG] cnMaestro On-Premise I remember submitting punchcard decks and waiting a couple hours for the printout off the mainframe (CDC 6400). From: David Milholen Sent: Saturday, July 09, 2016 7:15 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [AFMUG] cnMaestro On-Premise Got me by a few years in 1979 was my first :) On 7/9/2016 12:13 AM, Chuck McCown wrote: But that is not very long... I wrote my first program in something like 1968. From: Mike Hammett Sent: Friday, July 08, 2016 7:20 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [AFMUG] cnMaestro On-Premise I've been running VMs for ten years. :-p ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions Midwest Internet Exchange The Brothers WISP -------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "Chuck McCown" mailto:[email protected] To: [email protected] Sent: Friday, July 8, 2016 8:17:05 PM Subject: Re: [AFMUG] cnMaestro On-Premise It is astounding to be witness to such an acceleration of technology. I remember when VMs were scary experimental. And it was not all that long ago from my perspective. From: Mike Hammett Sent: Friday, July 08, 2016 7:11 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [AFMUG] cnMaestro On-Premise You run it as a VM on your platform of choice, though mine is VMWare. It auto sets up the whole environment, OS and all. ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions Midwest Internet Exchange The Brothers WISP -------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "Chuck McCown" mailto:[email protected] To: [email protected] Sent: Friday, July 8, 2016 8:07:42 PM Subject: Re: [AFMUG] cnMaestro On-Premise I am not much of a VM or linux guy, so please forgive my ignorance. But does this mean you have to run it on an Ubuntu machine? From: Mike Hammett Sent: Friday, July 08, 2016 7:04 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [AFMUG] cnMaestro On-Premise It's very easy to install, comes as an OVA built on Ubuntu 14.04. It has a nice TUI for the console to do things like changing IPs, console password, etc. The web UI has an 8 - 16 character password requirement. #shittypasswords ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions Midwest Internet Exchange The Brothers WISP --
