How many of us remember taking days to download programs? I still remember when the 1200 baud modems came out, and we all were so in love with the improved speed.

But anyone who picked up the phone while the modem was online would make you have to start all over again from ground zero. They'd be in deep stuff, head down too.

(10-03-2015 09:48 AM)bitcruncher Wrote:  How many of us remember taking days to download programs? I still remember when the 1200 baud modems came out, and we all were so in love with the improved speed.

But anyone who picked up the phone while the modem was online would make you have to start all over again from ground zero. They'd be in deep stuff, head down too.

No question about that. But unfortunately that is not the only thing about which they have no idea.

Remember when we had these...



And once we went to these smaller, higher storage capacity ones it was euphoric...



And now kids have these...

(10-03-2015 08:48 PM)UCGrad1992 Wrote:  Remember when we had these...

And it contained the entire operating system too, with only 360K storage.

I remember we had 8" floppy disks that held a whopping 128k (yes you read that right). We hired a college kid to come in at night and do back ups. He sat there for 8 hours studying and swapping disks every 10 minutes.

I go back to magnetic tape reels, banks of 'em, in a building specifically built to house the computer. You typed instructions to the computer into a dumb terminal, basically just a small CRT screen and a keyboard. No mouse in those days.

You can get more computing power in the palm of your hands these days. But that old original mainframe changed the world in many ways, programmed by Carl Sagan's brother-in-law, using mainframe assembler language originally. Unix eventually took over.

Just out of curiosity, how many of us remember edlin?

Remember when ms dos was boss? Remember when you had to type commands instead of clicking on an icon? Those were the days...

(10-08-2015 07:46 AM)UCGrad1992 Wrote:  Remember when ms dos was boss? Remember when you had to type commands instead of clicking on an icon? Those were the days...

EDLIN was the old line editor in MS DOS 1.0. It was later replaced by EDIT, but EDLIN was included in every version of MS DOS. You only dealt with one line at a time, instead of the entire document.

But I still remember when this was how you input instructions.



God help you if you got them out of order too.

(10-08-2015 01:44 PM)bitcruncher Wrote:  But I still remember when this was how you input instructions.



God help you if you got them out of order too.

Can't imagine the size of the "computer" that took those cards either. It t'waint no desktop that's for sure.

(10-08-2015 07:05 PM)UCGrad1992 Wrote:  

That looks more like the one I dealt with. It was an old MODCOMP mainframe.

In terms of using an early computer model growing up, I remember thinking the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model II was the bomb back in the 7th grade. We had a few in my junior high school at the time (around 1980). This baby had a minimum 32K RAM and a 4 MHz CPU (yuk, yuk, yuk).

I remember the development of the first memory modules, with - or without - parity checking, depending on whether it had 8 or 9 pins.

Man have we progressed a long way from there.

(10-08-2015 01:44 PM)bitcruncher Wrote:  

(10-08-2015 07:46 AM)UCGrad1992 Wrote:  Remember when ms dos was boss? Remember when you had to type commands instead of clicking on an icon? Those were the days...

EDLIN was the old line editor in MS DOS 1.0. It was later replaced by EDIT, but EDLIN was included in every version of MS DOS. You only dealt with one line at a time, instead of the entire document.

But I still remember when this was how you input instructions.



God help you if you got them out of order too.

When my older brother was at KU, the enrollment procedure was held in Allen Fieldhouse. There were endless tables holding trays of cards for each section of each class, and if you had the bad luck to get to an empty tray, you'd often have to backtrack and swap out cards for different sections to shuffle your schedule - and fervently hope that when you circled back, you'd find something that would work for you. When I told him that I sat down with a clerk who did it all within a few minutes (even on a dumb terminal primitive by today's standards, it was virtually hassle-free) he wanted to kill me.

He also had no sympathy when I mentioned having to sit around for an hour watching a dumb terminal to see if a program I'd written would compile, because when he took a similar course he'd had to take a stack of cards somewhere, leave them, and come back the next day to see what had happened.

My first programming language was IBM 360 (mainframe) assembler language, which is basically a bunch of MOV statements.

The Job Control Language (JCL) was the real hassle there. The program itself was a breeze by comparison, and it was no piece of cake. But the JCL would drive me nuts.

One of my high school summer jobs was for a software company that created a version of RPG for PCs back when it was still used only with mainframes. I was running debugging software and qc on software protection dongles. That job was worse than data entry.

Hey lets land on the moon

Try it with one of the first generation computers.

(10-14-2015 11:45 AM)bitcruncher Wrote:  Try it with one of the first generation computers.

Looks like telephone switch