Good old days

[Enzo]

I took a year of FORTRAN in 1965. We had to enter all information into the computer by punch card. Which meant sitting in the computer lab at an IBM 029 card punch.


We had to submit our card decks to the computer operator, and it would run, and we'd get them back with result printout a day or two later.

Sometimes we used the sorters, like the 82:


We printed out our card decks on a deck printer. Sometimes I wanted copies of a deck, so I could make changes to a small number of cards. So we had a deck duplicator.

All these big whirring, snorting beasts were programmable themselves. There was a hatch down in the base, and a large panel snapped into place there. it was a bed of holes, and wire jumpers with metal contact plugs on the ends were pushed into the holes to connect points together as needed. The plugs stuck out the rear of the board, and when it was put in place, it made contact with the main system board. meanwhile, the plugboard was a sea of multicolored wires looped here to there.

I still have a couple of those plugboards. I find them attractive. I always thought they'd make a fine cribbage board.

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghis ... board.html

[Lianachan]

Nice! The days - those were them.

we'd get them back with result printout a day or two later.

I'm currently working on a 3D model of something (this) and this morning the dense mesh was complete. It's just one stage in the process, and that alone took 32.5 hrs to complete. So, you still get to wait days for some things.

[Lance]

My mother worked as a keypunch operator at the Brookhaven National Laboratory when I was a kid. I got to hang out there after school and use the recreational facilities. It was awesome. But anyway, there was a giant room filled with those. Memories... The best part was when I got to hang out with the operators in the back. Through the double set of security doors was this magical room filled with those old floor to ceiling tape drives, banks of open platter hard drives boxes with panels of blinken-litez.

It took hours on those machines to produce the equivalent of "Hello World".

[Мастер]

It took hours on those machines to produce the equivalent of "Hello World".

As all three of my main computers are now bursting at the seams, their disks nearly completely full, it sometimes takes them a long time to printf("Hello, world!\n");

Very kewl, Mr. Enzo!

[Lance]

Defrag, or the Mac equivalent (if there is such a thing) is your friend.

[Enzo]

Lianachan - that is either a Neolithic bowling ball, or perhaps one of those things you put joss sticks into.


Those key punches have a bin in the bottom that collects the little squares of card as they are punched out. On game weekends, we'd dump those into a bag, and they make EXCELLENT confetti. And the stuff is almost impossible to brush out of your hair. yes, the famous "chads".

Right around 1965, MSU got their new IBM 360, the hottest mainframe on the market. I think it had 64k or RAM or something. There was an observation deck around the windowed lab, and we could watch the blinking lights and spinning tape reels. And best of all, next to one window was a little loud speaker with a volume knob. The thing was connected to SOMETHING in the computer, and we could listen to the 360 computing. Just a droning digital whine, not even as exciting as the dial up modem noise we used to hear.

In helping someone create a "steam punk" version of something recently, I was reminded of the Rube Goldberg computer project of some years back.

http://www.clivemaxfield.com/diycalcula ... .shtml#A18

And if you think your computer is slow:

Watch on youtube.com