Makes me recall programming fortan on punchcards at MTSU. not to mention dialing into the 1st rendition of HOTBBS (Heart of Tennessee) when it had 1 phone line on a RS color computer at 110 baud. When I think about there my 9 and 12 year old sons entered the computing arena, it really makes me think about how so much changed so fast. Where I went to highschool, someone had donated an old DEC PDP-8 running BSD 2.x and with an ORIGINAL vt100 CRT (red and blue paint). we had to boot the thing by bootstrapping it with toggle switches (it could take a while). I seem to recall the OS loaded from 9track tape too. can you imagine how sparsely populated the field would be today if we had never progressed to where we are today???
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Andrew Farnsworth Sent: Wednesday, December 17, 2008 8:37 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [nlug] Re: Back in the old days (was Re: Laugh of the Day and ZX81) In one of my first "real" jobs, I worked on an IBM System 36 and System 38 as assistant operator... I also worked as a user on these systems as well as others (remember CICS?) I think that qualifies me as one of the "some of us" :-) One of the jobs that I had was linking an IBM PC-XT (5 Mb Full Height Hard Drive... very very modern machine for the time) to the mainframes using and IRMA card and software libraries. We created a customized screen interface using the IRMA link, the libraries, and custom code on the PC. Andy On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 9:19 AM, Howard White <[email protected]> wrote: Andrew Farnsworth wrote: > Yep, remember, this was back in the era when multitasking was a > mainframe word and was unheard of on anything smaller than room sized. > Even then, multitasking was very limited and most commercial mainframes > still required a human (or sub-human) operator to manage the workload. > Personal Computers didn't get multitasking until the Macintosh came out > and even then it was cooperative multitasking (software based) rather > than preemptive multitasking (hardware based) and your infinite loop > really would bring the machine to it's knees. > > Andy > You know that some of us worked on those mainframes, Andy. Even then we wondered just _what_ that multitasking was really doing. As far as I could tell, the programmers were the only ones doing multitasking as we had to have eight or ten things to work on at a time while waiting for program compiles to cycle through the queue. In 1979, our company bought a Honeywell minicomputer that was about the size of your average office desk. It had a laminate top on the top to carry that metaphor - it was a _desk_, not a desktop, computer. A killer system it was, too: 128 K of memory (I hesitate to say RAM) and a 10 MB disk split between a 5MB fixed platter and a 5MB removeable cartridge. We had two terminals and two printers connected to the system. It had a real operating system that would have supported more users sessions if there was I/O to drive. Not real fast but got the job done. Howard --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
