On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 12:35:41AM -0500, Russell L. Harris wrote: > * Miles Fidelman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [080529 23:28]: > Back about 1967, the ASR33 was coveted by those of us whose only means > of input and output was the 80-column punch card. > > "Output?", you say? Yes. For printed output, you put the deck of > output cards into the card hopper of the line printer -- the chassis > of which was a cube about four feet on a side. But inasmuch as the > printer broke down on a daily basis, you quickly learned to read the > holes in the cards. > > I speak of the days of Fortran-II running on an IBM 1620. Back then, > it often was necessary to load the compiler (another deck of punched > cards) before loading the application. >
And with such computers, we went to the moon. I mean we generically: I was a year old in 1967. However, I remember in high-school having multiple-choice exams where we had to code punch cards with a 4B pencil. By the time I needed to learn fortran, it was chaper to buy a new IBM PS/2-70-A21 386 with 4 MB ram, OS/2, and Fortran than it was to buy the computer time from the university; just barely. When I also had to do AutoCad it was defintely cheaper even after buying AutoCad. Of course, I'm typing this on my VT520. Doug. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
