On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 10:06:19AM -0400, Edward Croft wrote: > On Fri, 2003-09-05 at 09:49, Kenneth Goodwin wrote: > > <SNIP> > > > Dropping your first punch card deck on the floor and having > > to manually > > resort the entire deck of 500 cards because you did not > > bother to number the > > cards using columns 73-80 of the cards so the card sorter > > could do it for you.....a mistake YOU NEVER MADE AGAIN. > > (mostly because the olde timers you worked with were having > > such a great > > time over your mistake....cause they told you so.....)
Been there, done that. Fortran IV was where it was at! At the time I took my programming languages course, we took APL, Algol and PL/1. C wasn't invented yet. We also studied Fortran, Cobol, and Assembler (good old IBM 360 at that). Don't forget about the original ASCII art though - a box of punch cards to produce two pages out output, with many of the lines overstruck 3-5 times. I had some beauties. You'd call the computer room and ask them to change the ribbon in the printer, and then run your deck through. The operators sure knew what was happening by the sound the printers made, and would cuss your name... I kept a few boxes of these until it I moved in 1990 and just couldn't justify hanging on to them any more. I had them for over 10 years though. I've booted 11/70s so many times I'm sure I could walk up to one today and toggle the switches for the boot loader just by instinct. > Sheesh. > I remember Hollerith cards but fortunately never had to deal with them > except to learn about them just in case. Glad I missed that, though I > still had to wait for the operator to release my compile jobs on an HP. > I remember the most infuriating thing back in the old days of > programming, when it took half a day to compile, was missing that f---- > '.' in COBOL. > I always wondered what happened to you old geezers. I remember the whine > of an RA60 pack winding up. Loading files from mag tape. Hell, the first > program I wrote was on a VIC 20. Imagine how concise you had to program > back then. Today they are very sloppy. They just tell you that you need > a bigger machine. You ain't lived until you've written the overlay code for RSX-11M. Pick which libraries are in memory at any one time - you've only got 64K to work with. I've worked with 800bpi tapes, spent 250K for a pair of tri-density (800/1600/6250) tape drives, etc. Them were the good old days, when you dealt with techs that had to know more than just which board to swap. I still judge a tech's competence these days by how old he (and very rarely she) is. Those of you complaing about bandwidth should remember the early days. 300baud acoustic modems on a Silent 700 terminal with thermal paper. At my first job, we paid 60 cents per 1000 characters transmitted or received. Those charges could really add up! My first infinite loop as a time-sharing customer racked up a $150K bill. Luckily, the vendor (I.P. Sharp - remember APL?) didn't charge us. Time for my Geritol... -- Ed Wilts, Mounds View, MN, USA mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
