For Computer Dinosaurs

[SkipVought]

Meet The Thing King...

http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/the-thing-king/

Skip,
[sub]
Just traded in my OLD subtlety...
for a NUance![/sub]

 

[kwbMitel]

Can someone help me understand if this is satire or not.

I've never been a MAC guy and only touched my first PC around 1984/5 (Dos 3.x era).

I know things were weird back then but this is a whole new level of weird (If not satire)

**********************************************
What's most important is that you realise ... There is no spoon.

 

[SkipVought]

This is a mainframe timesharing satire/analogy.

Skip,
[sub]
Just traded in my OLD subtlety...
for a NUance![/sub]

 

[edfair]

The workshops were main memory. The warehouses were generally a reel of tape.

Can remember an oil company doing their credit card billing on a little 1401 with 1.2k of memory. Maximum on that system was 16k.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[kray4660]

I indirectly worked with an IBM 360 at college, it was tied to an IBM 370 at another campus. I remember how they explained that programs had 64K chunks of memory that they used. They had a name for it, but I do not remember what it was (+40 years ago). We also had a mini computer on campus that had 16K of memory and a removable hard drive (10 MB).

 

[SamBones]

I believe that 64k chunk of memory was called a "partition". At least it was on the 360/370s I worked on.

 

[kray4660]

They used some sort of time slicing for those partitions. Each partition got a bit of the CPU time until it moved to the next partition. It is possible that it could do I/O when the CPU was not working on that partition.

 

[SgtJarrow]

Great read....just Great!

Robert "Wizard" Johnson III
U.S. Military Vets MC
CSM, CSPO, MCPD, CCNA, CCDA, MCSA, CNA, Net+, A+, CHDP
Data Integration Engineer

 

[2ffat]

I suddenly feel old. The youngsters don't understand mainframes and I remember programming them.


James P. Cottingham
I'm number 1,229!
I'm number 1,229!

 

[kray4660]

So the forgotten programming languages from college. Watfive (not sure of the spelling, simple version of Fortran), Fortran, COBOL, PL/1, assembly language (IBM 360/370), machine language on a IMSAI 8080. There are probably others that I had to learn at the time and never used.

 

[edfair]

My intro on the 1401 was machine language to do the "penny a day" program on a single card. Missed that it was a signed positive compare to break out of the loop and lost 4 pages on a 1000lpm printer before I could get it stopped.
Real work, fixing punched card machines, then took over my life.
No more programming until I next did machine language on a SWTP 6800.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[SkipVought]

I got a mimeographed copy of A FORTRAN Coloring Book in 1979, how I learned the basics. Remember punching up a FORTRAN program with a fourier transform for an EE lab in 1963 or 1964.

Skip,
[sub]
Just traded in my OLD subtlety...
for a NUance![/sub]

 

[strongm]

>SWTP 6800

ooh - the first microcomputer I ever got my hands on.

 

[edfair]

strongm's comment:
"ooh - the first microcomputer I ever got my hands on."

Still have several that will eventually come back to life. All in the original cabinets have gone on to collections. This is one I passed on:

http://www.vintage-computer.com/swtpc6800.shtml

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.