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Floppies!? Kids these days. My High School had an actual, physical computer, a Data General minicomputer. We used teletypes that printed on a continuous roll of
by raganwald 16y ago
Floppies!? Kids these days. My High School had an actual, physical computer, a Data General minicomputer. We used teletypes that printed on a continuous roll of cheap paper.
The computer used removable media: 12" removable "Diablo" 5MB hard drive platters. One had four user basic on it, one had single user basic, and one was locked away with the software for grading students.
Memory management was primitive: BASIC ran in RAM, and if you used single user basic, you had 4x the RAM and therefore room for 4x the program. When swapping drives, you had to boot the computer by toggling the CPU's three instructions into the front panel.
I wrote a massive Star Trek adventure game in single user basic. Friends would actually creep into the lab overnight so they could play by themselves.
- jdee 16y agoLuxury! I used to have to snip endless chads out of punched cards to represent the very zeroes and ones of the program i was writing! Thanks to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo
- JonnieCache 16y agoGo for the original: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eDaSvRO9xA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eDaSvRO9xA 1948's finest.
- lamby 16y agoYou were lucky. When I was a lad there were only 3 Yorkshiremen in that sketch.
- iuguy 16y ago3! Paradise! We never had 3 Yorkshiremen, we had to make do with a pair of pythons, a goodie and Doctor Frankensteins' henchman. And we didn't even have an abacus to program on, we had to make do with fingers and toes and pretend they were turing compliant. And some of us didn't even have toes or fingers!
- osipov 16y agoBack in my elementary school days we had to compute with an abacus!
- raganwald 16y agoBefore going to school, and thereafter in the summer, I do remember writing WATFIV and SNOBOL programs on punch cards, but I used a card punch machine to create them.
- bootload 16y agoone thing about coding by punchcard is permanence compared to floppy, hd, online ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/247968267/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/247968267/
- Vivtek 16y agoYou had cards? We had to use a hammer and awl to punch the holes into vellum that we tanned ourselves.
- hc5 16y agoI'll just leave this here :) http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1992-09-08/ http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1992-09-08/
- ghostDancer 16y agoOne more :) xkcd Real programmers :http://xkcd.com/378/ http://xkcd.com/378/
- billswift 16y agoThat is a rip-off of an even older User Friendly strip.
- samic 16y agoLOOLL! such a laugh!! Tnx
- russell 16y agoYou think you're joking. I remember having to use a $5000 box of real fan fold vellum to print a short document as specified by some govt contract or other.
- thwarted 16y agoYou had zeros and ones? We only had ones, until one day someone discovered a zero when he accidentally subtracted two ones.
- jmaygarden 16y agoI worked for a company in 2005 that was still maintaining Data General minicomputers for test-range radar tracking systems. The original "radar program" in Data General assembly has since been ported to C for new development, but those old systems are still ticking just fine.
- cipango 16y agoI'm guessing they didn't have you sign a NDA?
- jmaygarden 16y agoEverything I stated is public information. Here is a brochure that specifically states that a Data General machine is being replaced with a new system using the radar program written in C. http://www.esdradar.com/brochures/VME%20upgrade.pdf http://www.esdradar.com/brochures/VME%20upgrade.pdf
- kschua 16y agoI was really surprised to see this question asked. I had always assume it was a given that people knew that A: and B: were for floppies. Just brings back memories of the days when I had one floppy drive. I had to load MS-DOS disk, then swap to my game disk. Then when I had two floppy drives, I was jumping for joy. Now I don't need to swap disk. The pain of installing MS Office 4.3 with a dozen floppy. Ah ... the memories
- Lazlo_Nibble 16y agoWe had a PDP-11/34a running RSTS/E v7.0-07. About 50/50 split between VT100s and printing terminals, plus one Tektronix and later on a few GiGis; storage was two washing machine-size RK07 drives (swappable 28Mb dual-platter cartridges the size of a small trashcan lid) and two RX02 8" floppy drives. We found some undocumented escape codes for the VT100s that let you play "music" on the keyboard by turning on keyclick and cranking up the autorepeat on insane levels. Someone bought DUNGEO (the original version of Zork) from DECUS too. Man that was fun. I still have all my 8" floppies -- loads of BASIC programs, and a lot of content from the message-board system we wrote for it. You could enter posts using VT100 escape sequences to create animations. I figure there's a 50/50 chance the disks are still readable, since the bits are the size of small cats -- someday I'll find someone who can dump them for me.
- mkramlich 16y agoI also wrote a Star Trek adventure game in BASIC. Must have been a rite of passage for kid programmers. :)