From: "D. Glenn Arthur Jr." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Careening Wildly OT: was [Re: A pic from second roll of film
in MX]
Date: Wed, 13 Apr 2005 01:47:02 -0400 (EDT)
Jumping in mid-thread ... 'cause I can't resist
retrocomputing as a topic.
Peter J. Alling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I had a professor who had his entire programming output on Hollerith
> cards. His reasoning was that they were more stable than magnetic
> tape. I wonder if he kept a reader...
Well that's one thing about punch cards -- you can read them
manually if you don't have a reader. (My dad taught me to
read the punches when I was ... oh dear, I can't remember how
old I was but I was about half as tall as I am now -- I wasn't
tall enough to be allowed beyond the shallow end of the
swimming pool. Admittedly I had to look up some of the
punctuation that I didn't run into often enough to memorize.)
In high school, I hand-punched cards (handheld card-holder
with grooves that lined up with the rows of the card, and
die-cut cards with easy-punch-out bits -- punched out a hole
at a time with the tip of a ball-point pen), but fortunately
not very often. They were for a programmable calculator.
(A desktop beast with nixie tubes. And for youngsters reading
this, nixie tubes are indeed cute, but not quite as cute as
the name 'nixie tubes' is. I miss nixie tubes.)
Paper tape, which _I_ have some program listings on, is even
more straightforward to read (though the card/line-oriented
format may make up for that when it comes to total ease-of-use).
OTOH, I've got a lot more code on a) open-reel 8-track,
b) open-reel 9-track, c) QIC-20 -- from at least three
different operating systems, d) QIC-40 -- from at least
two operating systems, e) Phillips cassette -- three or
four different encodings, f) a wee type of cassette that
I don't know the name of -- two or three data formats,
g) 5.25" diskettes -- SSSD, SSDD, DSSD, DSDD, DSQD (bet
most of you haven't seen _that_ one!), DSHD, h) 3.5"
diskettes -- DSDD and DSHD, both CLV and CAV but I _think_
they're all soft-sector (I do have a hard-sector diskette
someplace for show-and-tell but I think it's blank), and
i) Zip disks. I don't think I have any old Iomega Bournoulli
disks or 8" floppies (the reason 5.25" and smaller is called
a diskETTE), but I might have something on a DEC removable
hard disk pack.
Some of those I can still read easily ... for now. Some
I can read after doing some repairs on old machines in the
basement. Some I _might_ be able to read after some
research and installing components I've got in boxes or
asking around for hardware to borrow. And some I'm
extremely unlikely to be able to find anyone able to read
them. *sigh* (Anyone have access to an HP3000 and feel
like doing me a favour?) The rotating media are in so
many different formats it's not funny: Unix and Xenix
mountable filesystems, tar, MS-DOS filesystem, MS-DOS
backup format, Lisa/Mac, TRSDOS, TI-99/4a, CoCo, Atari 800,
Apple II, Vic-20, Commodore 64, Amiga, Wang, CP/M, and
I've probably forgotten a few.
Except for a few where I never had my own machine of the
right type, it's my own damned fault for not copying them
to more modern formats when doing so would've been easy.
But it still serves as a non-hypothetical example of the
advantages of low-tech, human-readable media. (Alas,
modern _size_ requirements for storage often make human-readable
formats impractical for many types of data. Images, however...)
Ironically, the oldest format, and the one I can read
without a machine, is one that I still have a working
reader for and machines that can deal with the format
of: paper tape. (But this does remind me: I need to
put a new ribbon in the TeleType -- it's printing kind
of faintly lately.)
(Amusingly -- at least it amuses _me_ -- I'm pretty
sure little ol' so-very-much-not-a-EE me could put
together an RS-232 paper tape reader from scratch.
At least a battery-powered one (I've got a poor track
record with power supplies, letting the smoke out
of voltage regulators -- see "not-a-EE" description
immediately above).)
Oh, and _just_in_case_ ... I've got a scrounged 8" floppy
drive in the basement (loose, just a bare drive) that
I'm pretty sure the floppy controller in a TRS-80 Model III
can be made to talk to. 'Cause, y'know, I've been
caught without an 8" drive in the past, when I worked for
the US Army, and it was a major headache. Irate colonel
who couldn't understand why I couldn't fold it up and put
it in a 5.25" drive (I am most certainly _NOT_ making this
up or just repeating an old joke -- he actually got on my
case about it ... come to think of it, most of my headaches
there came from colonels); getting a friend in a different
agency (DoL) to read it for me; spending a day getting the
data back to my office via UUCP. So when somebody trashed
a computer that had an 8" drive in it, I yanked the drive
Just In Case.
Just like when somebody set fire to the grocery store I
was in and I'd left my camera at home, I decided to always
keep a camera with me, just in case. (Tonight it was the
K2 with a 50/1.4 and the K1000 with the 100-300/4, and
I've decided that big zoom is a bit much to hang from
my shoulder when I'm also lugging a guitar _and_ a
double-bass and the recorders and the music bag. Urk.
Fortunately I got away with leaving the ashiko in the trunk.
*Whew* Wasn't sure I'd get around to working in something
camera-related. I feel better now.
-- Glenn
