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The difference between when I started in 1981 and 1959 is the same distance as today vs 1999, when the Dotcom era was going strong, and the web was still relati

• Shivetya 6y ago
  My days in the US Air Force were in mid eighties, we had punch cards. Seriously numbers of them fed to a Sperry 1100/60, later Unisys. VK runs, personnel, would comprise four to six boxes of cards. Storage on the system was a small disk set but mostly comprised of autoloading tapes. It was the various groups we served on base that brought us cards which we loaded and returned. This did result in my learning Turbo Pascal and Turbo C to a limited degree. Sometime in 88 we got a program which allowed maintain card images in simple ASCII format on regular DOS diskettes. The Sperry provided program could take an hour provided no errors to read that diskette and upload it. Through Turbo Pascal I was able to get it down to less than ten minutes for the largest amount with error recovery. I don't know when the USAF stopped using cards but they were there in the early nineties but mostly in diskette formats and not physical cards. The comm center was special to me as it still had a Burroughs system noteworthy for the fact it was the first system they built that did not use tubes. You could boot it from switches but I never saw that done, I did see it booted from paper tape though. On a side note, my father worked for IBM until the nineties when he retired, pretty sure he worked on this beast in the article. I will have to find out what he remembers of those days