On 05/25/2012 04:16 AM, Tom Davies wrote: > Hi :) > First time i went up to Manchester the university had just completed building > a huge building that had been designed to fit the latest best machine of the > day. > > Unfortunately by the time the building work was done a better machine was > small enough to fit on one of the desks in one of the rooms. I'm not quite > sure if that says more about the speed of computer development or the > slowness of English builders! > Regards from > Tom :) Slowness of any government contractor, it is just as bad in the US > > --- On Thu, 24/5/12, webmaster-Kracked_P_P <[email protected]> wrote: > > From: webmaster-Kracked_P_P <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: LibreOffice is listed as an educational > software for math > To: [email protected] > Date: Thursday, 24 May, 2012, 19:30 > > On 05/24/2012 12:14 PM, Joep L. Blom wrote: >> On 24-05-12 16:06, Tony Sumner wrote: >>> On May 24, 2012, Jay Lozier wrote: >>> >>>> This trip down memory lane makes one feeil old. Anyone remember >>>> teletypes with punched tape? >>> Of course. My favourite paper tape story. At AEE, Winfrith, we did >>> serious computing on the IBM704 at Risley in Lancashire. We would type >>> the program onto paper tape and run it though a teletype to send it by >>> phone to Risley. At their end they would punch it out and to check that >>> it was ok they would send it back. At the Winfrith end we then had the >>> original tape and a copy and we would hold these up to the light to >>> check for errors. If there were none we'd phone Risley and say yes ok >>> go ahead. This was a communication protocol, yes? Later we installed a >>> punched card system so we could put the program on cards and fly them >>> to Risley by plane. >>> >>> Tony >>> >>> >> I assume you never worked with the folded papertape used with the DEC PDP-8! >> coded in ASCII. Years before we used an Electrologica X-1 with papertape >> coded in EBSDIC!You could edit the tapes with a manual punch and >> nontransparent sellotape. We thought punched cards were old-fashioned!. >> Joep >> >> > DEC PDP 11 and similar was most of my main-frame and mini-main-frame work > back in the 80's and early 90's. I used IBM main-frames in the late 70's > bunch cards and dumb terminals in then in late 90's with terminals dumb and > smart. In the mid 70's I used a teletype style printer/terminal connected > via phone to a computer 50+ miles way, for my first coding experience, then > went to punch cards before I ever got to use a dumb terminal CRT display and > text editor to type in and edit program code for COBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC, > RPG-II/III, Assembly, and a few other languages. Now people use PCs with > "smart" color coded editors to help them code, edit, and debug their programs. > > I wrote an RPG-III coding editor so it would be easier to line up the cryptic > codes in their proper columns. It was well received at that place that used > RPG-II/III. It took half the time to type in the programs in the dumb > terminals. > > I started my computer work experience when most computers I had "terminal" > access to, or had to load tapes for, were bigger than all my apartment rooms > combined, and then some. I worked a terminal with one that used more floor > space than a basketball court. I remember when a college put up a Bulletin > Board System [via phone modems] that had a brand new 10 MEG of drive space > and the people could not think of why it needed so much space to store files. > 10 MEG was too large to imagine using. Those were the days when floppies > were floppy. > > --- > > Well we really went off thread topic with this one. > > As I stated in the original post, it was interesting that LO was listed under > free Math software. > > Now it seems we are talking about the "grand old days" of computers before > they could fit on a desk. > > I still know many people who do not have the money to buy a computer or if > they have one be able to get online with broadband. In the '50 it was > thought there was no need for more than 50 to 100 computers in the whole USA. > Now there are millions of them in the USA, with people like me having > several desktops/laptops running side by side when needed. Then add their > smart phones, tablet phones, and the wifi reader/tablet non-phones that > people [and kids] thing are a requirement it their lives. Well, this > generation does not appreciate what their fathers and grandfathers had to > deal with when they were working with computers in those early years when the > smallest computer was the size of a stove or refrigerator. > >
-- Jay Lozier [email protected] -- For unsubscribe instructions e-mail to: [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
