Dan Minette wrote:
Do you remember the math machines - kind of mechanical computers - that they used to have. If I recall correctly, you would type in a number pull a lever, type in an operation and another number and pull the lever and it would calculate the answer. My Dad used to take me to work with him on weekends and sit me down on those things (I was ~ 11) and we played on them for hours. Obviously this was a few years before the hand heald calculator was introduced.
OK, since we're playing the oldest stuff game here. What is the oldest computer everyone here has worked on? I think mine (which I've mentioned before) is the oldest, but I'd be curious to see who might beat me. :-)
How many here ever used a slide rule?
An Uncle of mine worked for Digital (I think, did they have an office in or around Princeton N.J.?) and he sat me down at one of their Mainframes (circa 1969), but I remember not really having a clue as to what to do.
When I was in the service we got what must have been a precursor to the personal computer. It was a stand alone Tectronics computer with a mag tape drive (the cassettes were between the size of an audio and a video cassette). You could write short basic programs on it (it came with a stack of manuals) and it had a primitive Star Trek game on it. This was in 1977-1978.
In 1981 when I got out of the service and started at the company I'm still with, we had a PDP 1160 for servo control and data acquisition. Anyone else use the DEC Edit program to write school papers? It kind of resembled HTML the way you put formatting characters before and after text. I didn't write code back then (except rudimentary Basic), but all our stuff was written in Fortran 77 (I think). Remember the big 12-15 inch diameter disks for those things. They had a removable cover and you inserted them into a slide out drawer that was a behemoth in comparison to our cd drives today.
I had a TRS-80, but well after they first came out. But I also had an Epson laptop with a mini cassette drive and a 5 line LCD display. I think it had Wordstar and visicalc. I think I still have it here somewhere.
Hell in ten years we'll all have wearable computers with wireless links to the net that will be accessible almost anywhere. The video interface will be in our glasses or on the back of our wrists and we will be able to manipulate them vocally. They'll be integrated with our phones, cameras, televisions and music players, and we won't know what to do without them. 8^)
Doug
Doug
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