1963, the days of "manly" computing! At the end of the semester, all the card punches would be busy. You would spend hours in a room with 20 card punches banging away, waiting for your program to come back. Then...You'd have to wait for access to a card punch machine to correct your syntax errors, before you could resubmit the deck to the input clerk! Lots of bad coffee from the coffee machine and candy bars.
The early time-sharing networks were much faster/better for running and debugging, but they got extremely flaky at crunch time daily. They would send out desperate broadcast messages for 'somebody to please get off !' Sometimes they stayed up and sometimes they crashed. 10 years later, I ended up working for a company that still ran ordering and billing on a Univac III. I've got a memory board somewhere with magnetic donuts on it. Each donut was a bit Hundreds of them were organized in rows on the board, each donut threaded with a horizontal wire and a vertical wire. Energize one vertical and one horizontal, and that bit changed from 0 to 1. My worst story was the EE grad student teaching my introductory computer course. One of the EE undergrads pointed out that he had spent a year assembling a computer board the size of a classroom blackboard - full of transistors. Early integrated circuits came out and he was 'toast'. In the time it took light to move across his 20 foot board, the IC had the answer. We're just a bunch of 'girly men' today! Regards, Bob S. On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 07:40:59 -0600, Paul Sorenson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 1963 - Intro to Numerical Control - UW-Madison. Card punch, card reader, > IBM 1620 (50K housed in two boxes each the size of your dining room table), > no tape drives, all punch card output. Programmed in ForGo, a combination > or Fortran and Gotran. Stand in line waiting for your job to run, run the > cards through the card reader/printer and get *Program not accepted, line > xx, line xx*, search for/correct the syntax error, re-punch the cards and > run the whole process again. > > Aahh, those were the days of *manly* computing. <g> > > Paul > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "John Francis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Sent: Tuesday, November 16, 2004 11:17 PM > Subject: Re: Home Computer Prediction From 1954 > > > William Robb mused: > > > > > > When I was in grade 8, which would have been 1970, I guess, the > > > university installed a punch card terminal in my high school and all > > > of a sudden, we had a computer science program. > > > We did our little programs in basic, and the bundles of cards were > > > sent off to be run through the computer. The next day, we got back > > > tractor feed sheets of our work. > > > Grade 9 we graduated to Fortran. > > > > Beat you by around five years; I got to use a Stantec Zebra on a > > summer "Numerical Methods, Statistics & Computing" course. > > > > We didn't use no wimpy high-level languages - programming was in > > autocode. It's amazing what you can do if nobody tells you that > > it's supposed to be difficult :-) > > > > By 1970 I was using an Atlas and a 360/44, amongst other systems. > > > > > >
