From: Larry Colen
On Feb 1, 2013, at 8:49 PM, Bob Sullivan wrote:
Ya, you young wipper-snappers have it easy.
In my day, our mass storage device was paper tape or
a cassette recorder from Radio Shack.
You had Radio Shack? We had to go to Marconi's Wireless Cottage.
Plus, we were so poor we had to save the holes from the tape and
glue them back in so we could re-use the tape.
That was easy compared with putting the sparks back in the spark gap.
Damn! Y'all just triggered a flashback.
After Sputnik, the Ford Foundation gave our local schools a grant for an
enrichment course in math & science. My daddy was on the school board,
so I got the honor of spending the summer recess of my tenth year IN
SUMMER SCHOOL!
Number systems, matrices, truth tables, logic circuits ... Napier's
Bones, so we got to *make* our own slide rules.
And in honor of Blaise Pascal, we got to do the whole damn thing in
French (which BTW, I still do not understand one word in ten - I
remember less French than I do Latin).
The "highlight" of the whole summer was a visit to the University of
North Carolina math department where we were allowed into the gallery
room that let us look through a window down at UNC's brand new Univac
computer.
And as an added treat, we were actually allowed to touch a roll of paper
tape that had been used to run one of the programs.
Meanwhile, all of my friends wasted their summer vacations riding
bicycles, playing games, going to the swimming pool & other frivolous
stuff.
C'est pour rire ... pas!
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