Ok.....I have to add to the fun...My "first computer" was a teletype machine
that dialed into a CDC (?) mainframe somewhere. No punch cards, just a paper
tape about 2" wide. The only language was Basic. Make a typo, and you had to
start all over again from the beginning.

My first significant program (outside of homework) was a computer dating
service in high school - made a lot of money for the sophomore class. Ok,
after all these years I will confess the truth - the program couldn't run
because we ran out of memory on the mainframe - too much data and we
actually crashed the mainframe at one point. The principal got a phone call
and asked me what the heck was going on. So I had to match everyone by hand.
Everyone got their current boy friend/girl friend, so the program was a huge
success! Those not already dating actually had fun on their "blind date".

Mark

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 1:04 AM, Mark Jarvis <m.jarvis@cox.net> wrote:

>
> O the "joys" of standing in line to use one of the department's hulking 026
> (later 029) keypunches, the tricks of duping a card up to the point where
> you needed to either add or delete punches and then holding one card while
> letting the other feed. Heaven forbid if you dropped a 2000 card box or a
> 3000 card tray and the cards weren't sequenced in cols. 73-80. You learned
> quickly to sequence by 10s or 20s or even 100s to leave room for the
> inevitable insertions. It was well into the 70s or early 80s before we
> trusted tapes and disks enough to give up our trusty file cabinets full of
> card decks.
>
> The binary cards from punched object decks could be folded at one end to
> make a point, arranged & stapled on cardboard in concentric circles (point
> out), and sprayed gold to make a very pretty Christmas wreath. We still have
> one tucked away with the old Christmas stuff. Although it's somewhat the
> worse for wear, it's probably the only one left in existence.
>
> Although I wouldn't give anything for the experiences of those days, I
> wouldn't do them again for anything, either.
>
> Mark Jarvis
> old IBM & GE mainframe, 80s PC, and 90s Unix veteran.
>
>
> Lyle Tuttle wrote:
>
> At 04:33 PM 7/7/2009, you wrote:
>
> You little youngsters don't know the meaning of hardship.
>
> Back in my day you got monochrome and 40x25 characters and counted
> yourself lucky!
>
> Before that it was fuzzy white on black with a dumb terminal and a 300
> baud acoustic coupler.
>
> Before that it was on a dot matrix printer with a keyboard.  Get it
> right quick or you waste a lot of paper!
>
> At least I'm not old enough to have suffered with punch cards
>
>
> I am......while the SDS computer system (16K core) ran 5 real-time
> experiments on the face of the reactor.......and another x-ray diffraction
> counter in another area.......careful!!  Don't drop those!!!
>
> That was a looooong time ago.........
>
>
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