Thanks Bob. Disclosure: I am not a computer people. But that didn’t stop me from messing around with them. Thus I did find this quiet interesting. In particular I was struck by how much I took for granted over the years. As an undergrad, early 60s, I did odd-job data analyses for one of my professors. Using Marchant electronic calculators to do additions and cross-products needed for calculating correlation coefficients. I had no idea I was on the cutting edge! I used old-tech IBM 1401 Accounting Machines which I programmed by moving jumper cables around on a 15-20 pound board that fit into the rack on the end of the machine. Moved on to Job Control Language running early versions of BioMed stat programs on the IMB760. Had no clue that I was using one of the early models of that machine! On to grad school, used the second-ever-built CDC 6500 to process my data while colleagues were running their lab equipment via PDP-8 computers. (IIRC, the Apollo 11 onboard computer was comparable to the PDP-8.) And then the IBM 360 (IIRC) whose boot-up required 2 boxes of cards to initiate/install the OS, then another 2-3 boxes of cards to install the language (FORTRAN or LISP) before we could load programs. Convincing my committee and then the department head and the dean that it was appropriate to substitute FORTRAN for one of my two required foreign language requirements. My early work environment, reading octal coredumps from our CDC 3500 to debug programs designed to capture user input timing...
I won’t go on in detail but suffice it to say that your linked story took me on a trip down memory lane. Byte magazine articles debating the relative merits of MS-DOS vs. the other 1-2 popular OS on the market for 8086 machines. Graphic terminals. Smart terminals. PC’s. Osborn laptop. Compaq computers. Color dot matrix printers for which I had to write the print driver. Word Star. Word Perfect. A friend at DARPA explaining the “desktop metaphor” graphic interface work he was supporting at XEROX-PARC. LISP Machines. Sun Workstations. More PC’s. and finally, the light at the end of the tunnel: Macs! Hypertext. DARpa Net and the 3-week wait to be approved as a user and be assigned a name. USEnet. 256kb modems… We have lived in interesting times. stan > On Apr 2, 2016, at 4:41 PM, Bob W-PDML <[email protected]> wrote: > > An interesting article for the computer people on the list: > > http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35924858 > > B > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
