On Fri, 2002-09-06 at 16:34, Ken Hawkins wrote: > It sure is interesting to read some of these old war (or is that whore) > stories. I didn't get "into" computers until about '91. the best i can > claim is writing DOS batch files to give a color menu display (rather > than just c:>), and automating common tasks.
Considering DOS, I began with 5.25" floppy disks on IBM ATs, which were built like tanks - green screens, enormously thick case metal and the on-off switch made a satisfying clunk, On these my company used a word processor, Lotus Manuscript, which suddenly vanished without trace and caused a Big Problem because of its closed file format ... I started using Unix in 1990 on SunOS machines. They were disappointingly modern - nothing particularly archaic in them apart from: - the recovery medium was a reel-to-reel tape as it wasn't possible to boot from anything else when things got into real trouble (and fsck took hours to run); - we were doing numerical calculations in FORTRAN, decided it was a bit slow and went for a 68882 accelerator board (the 'workstation chip' was a 68030 running at about 24MHz). The said board was about two feet square and absolutely covered with chips ;) On the other hand, I was one of the many recipients of a University of Edinburgh punched card that year. That was because its high-energy physics section had finally transcribed 20 years of CERN data from punched card to magnetic tape. (I presume these poor people are now transcribing the magnetic tapes onto CD-R or similar ...). Alastair
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