>> Yes, and we had to walk 10 miles in the snow to get there.
>> Uphill both ways.  :)


> http://www.smacdonald.com/songs/boy.html, a lovely sing-a-long by
> Frank Hayes:
>
> When I was a boy our Nintendo
> Was carved from an old Apple tree ...

A lot of that is far closer to reality within the lifetimes of quite a few 
list members (with a little hyperbole) than most younger members may 
realise.
(We usually have no snow where I live but the rough surfaces of our chip 
sealed roads play havoc with bare feet).

Even I, by no means the oldest member can add to the recent litany thusly:

One computer available at the university.
It was "THE" computer centre computer.
It was an IBM BCD minicomputer.
Had a Fortran compiler which took 2 passes to compile as there was not 
enough memory available to fit the whole compiler in the machine at once.
Data entry by punch card as described elsewhere. At least we got to do card 
punching ourselves, - who wants to spend operator time on students. You had 
to book card punch time in 30 minute slots though :-)

At my first place of work after graduation (in Hamilton NZ) we had access to 
one computer. It was located 450 miles away in Wellington. We had no card 
punch - used paper coding sheets. These were couriered across town to 
another company that did card punching. cards were read in there and 
accepted by remote computer. Printout was couriered back, usually next day, 
with cards. One error and it was another day gone.

First microprocessors were the first microprocessors. Never used 4004, 8008 
but a friend did his masters thesis with the 8008. Then came SC/MP & F8. 
Both "interesting" architectures. I built a SC/MP system with binary switch 
input for data AND address, hardware single step of CPU to load data in, 
binary lamp output. The fully mechanical Creed 7B, 48? baud Baudot 
teleprinters (upper case only) were the cheapest and most available hard 
copy. ASR110 was rare and expensive. The super fast 110 baud output was the 
envy of all. Later the 8080, 6800, 8085, Z80, ...

I still have an Osborne 1 ! :-)

First floppy disk was on an MC6800 homebuilt system. Single sided 5.25" 
Shugart at 160 kB capacity (not 180 kB!). Cost $NZ600 or so AFAIR. As a 
floppy now costs about $NZ20 here and in real terms money has gone up 
several times that makes it about $US1000 equivalent for a floppy. Sounds 
too high. Maybe it was "only" $400 at the time.

I imported 3 PCs from Hong Kong (infamous Golden Building). Two were 
standard PCs with 4.77 MHz clock. I got the fast turbo version with 6 MHz 
clock and a full house 640 kB of RAM. Two floppy drives were marvellous for 
development. Far faster than only a single floppy system that many used. 
Amazing what you can do with 2 x 360 kB floppies and 640 kB RAM.

When I bought my 1st XT I went for the BIG hard disk - all 20 MB of it. By 
then 10 MHz clock may have been fairly standard?

A young programmer thought the 8" floppy diskette I showed him was a joke. 
He had never seen a slide rule and had no idea how to use one. Nowadays I 
suspect many would have no idea what a slide rule was / is. (Its a 
calculator that works by having the operator place varying lengths of 
logarithmically calibrated wood (or similar) bars next to each other - a 
mechanically driven logarithms table :-) )(Typically good for 3 to 4 
significant figures).

etc

We have had similar "way back when" sessions previously. Hopefully they are 
both interesting and useful to some who have never experienced this level of 
"performance".

        RM



















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