I enjoyed that, there mere mention of Shaw AFB brought back memories of serving there in the late 80s leaving just before the first Gulf "war" broke out. anecd

I enjoyed that, there mere mention of Shaw AFB brought back memories of serving there in the late 80s leaving just before the first Gulf "war" broke out. anecdotal part goes here. Being in IT back then was fascinating, the secure comm side systems were Burroughs of the generation just after tube computers went out of style. Complete with paper tape booting or switches and lights. The main system which I was on was a Sperry 1100/70 using cards as the main input from on base customers. Those transitioned into images on a 360k diskette when I was leaving. The system data was mostly stored on tape (autoloading reel) and there were three disk packs including one we joked was kick start (seriously, if you swapped packs and it didn't spin you faced away with your butt on the edge and swift flat to the side hit it with your boot). It was that diskette that got me into programming. I started with Turbo C and Turbo Pascal settling on the second. The tool we were provided by Sperry would upload the card images one line at a time. On our Sperry branded PCs (same as IBM/XT) it could take longer to upload a deck than to run one through a card reader and the personelle group had the equivalent to three boxes. I ended up digging into the emulator software, the arcane manuals we had, and whooped up something in TP that did it in a tenth of the time. From that point on it was off to the races for my desire to program.