For me it was a timeshared PDP/11-70 which was located several miles from my high school. We had two "fast" DecWriter II's running at 300 baud that were used for normal interactive programming and two ASR33 teletypes that we could punch our assignments on offline and then upload later when an LA36 line was available (had to set the acoustic coupler line speed to 110 before we swapped the DB25 connectors between the LA36 and ASR33). I still have some old punched tapes and yes they still have the smell of the oil! Fun thing I used to do was punch actual readable messages into the tape. There were ways to send ASCII symbols to the ASR33 punch that caused characters to be formed by the punched dots. My favorite was "DOES NOT COMPUTE!".
Sometimes, I miss that old tech though I really would not want to have to make a living now working with it. Much prefer Linux/Windows/MacOS and C, C#, Node.js and a few other languages I picked up over the last 40 years. On Tuesday, December 31, 2019 at 8:21:32 AM UTC-5, joenixie wrote: > > The first computer I ever got to 'play' with was a PDP8/E in high school. > 3 teletypes and a dec writer for terminals. I loved the smell of paper tape > in the morning! > > -joe > > On Monday, December 30, 2019 12:25:58 PM CST Nick wrote: > > Ooh. At 20:21 there's what looks suspiciously like a DEC PDP 8/E on the > far > > left... > > > > On Sunday, 29 December 2019 22:53:32 UTC, Terry Bowman wrote: > > > > > > *What the Future Sounded Like* (twelve seconds in): > > > > > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KkW8Ul7Q1I > > > > > > > > > Terry Bowman, KA4HJH > > > "The Mac Doctor" > > > > > > "For 30 years I have been trying to set the story straight about the > name > > > HAL coming from IBM with one letter added to each. That was > > > pure coincidence. HAL stands for Heuristic Algorithmic > computer."—Arthur C. > > > Clarke, 2001 > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/34f8795a-ac12-4033-871d-405ff08c60cb%40googlegroups.com.
