On Mon, 2004-05-03 at 16:02, Terry Polzin wrote: > On Mon May 3 2004 03:58 pm, Charles Curley wrote: > > > A bunch of tadpoles on this thread. IBM 360s, PDP-11s, all new > > stuff. _I_ worked on the world's first silicon based computers, in a > > project on what is now called Salisbury Plain, England, about 5,000 > > years ago. > > > > So there. > > So you were the one responsible for counting the criters on Noah's Ark? Perhaps working with the Druids at Stonehenge? Not quite as old as some of these other farts - only started using Linux at 0.98 (ran Coherent for a while before that) but my first computer language was Algol on the Burrows B5500 in 1966. Tied up the whole room-full-of-computer to do a single plot on a pen plotter from punch cards. Then moved on to BASIC on a paper TTY in 1969 - talk about ahead of its time for interactive computing! On through booting a Data General Nova (billed as a mini-computer - only one rack) with front-panel octal codes entered through front-panel switches, reading the OS, FORTRAN compiler, and programs from paper tape, until we got really advanced by adding the 8" hard sectored floppy. After years of FORTRAN code submitted on punch cards to mainframes, and getting line-printer hardcopy output several hours later, finally (1977) got to work on a monochrome Tektronics graphics terminal - if you got on the sign-up sheet in time you might get it for an hour a day to plot the output from your batch job you put in on cards the day before (unless it had failed to run with a syntax error or core dumped - yes real magnetic core - then punch a few new cards and resubmit.) Output was a screen copy to a thermal printer. CP/M on a Z80 provided the first "desktop" experience. The IBM 8088 PC with a 10MB HD and a $10k price tag was living in the lap of computer luxury in those days, but the Commodore VIC-20 - with a 32KB home-brew memory expansion box the size of an (old-style) telephone - was something one could actually afford personally. Could display about 20 character lines on your TV screen. Ran BASIC and had a cassette tape drive that could load neat things like a Forth interpreter, and of course the occasional primitive game. Only later came 5-1/4" SSSD floppies. (DD and learning about the hole-punches to save a buck came later still.) Then on to the Commodore 64 which could speak advanced things like Pascal and Lisp, and could fit a few more characters across your TV screen. (Others were experimenting with early Apples - remember the Lisa? - or TI and Atari home machines.) Then came the Amiga followed by Commodore oblivion. Meanwhile back at work, moved from CDC-6600 batch-mode computing to a Vax 750 with VT100 terminals (a cool $0.5M in 1983) and a $30k+ Tektronics graphics terminal all it's own, color no less! Still doing pen-plots for color hardcopy output, but at least the computer could do other things at the same time!. Supported 12+ users on RS-232 serial ports - ran our own wires all over the building. Ran Fortran and this new C stuff nobody had much experience with, except the guys down the street that had something called UNIX on a PDP-11 in a back room. Moved on to MicroVAXen for the heavy computing and many people got IBM ATs or "IBM clones", many still at 5-digit prices and with DOS. Then Sun Microsystems popped up - some left-coast (and probably leftist) radicals, but they made killer scientific workstations with a graphical OS (eventually even X-windows) at competitive prices. The days of the VAXen were numbered! (Linux vs Windows comes to mind. ;-) Ah well, enough lost productivity. Those were the [good|bad] old days! Phil
