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RJE terminals with remote card readers and line printers. Big honkin’ computer centres shared between organizations. Dreaming of Cray time. Excitement about
by jleyank 4y ago
RJE terminals with remote card readers and line printers. Big honkin’ computer centres shared between organizations. Dreaming of Cray time. Excitement about the new Vax. SGI about to explode along with graphics engines. MIPS and megaflops. Incipient arpanet. Unix was new and amazing. Chess and checker programs and competitions. PLATO and other educational/multiuser environments. RMS and EMACS and the lisp machine war. Hackers inspired by mit. There’s more but that what I remember quickly. Forgot…. Lots of PDP-11’s.
And everything was social. Admittedly the society was a little off but it was pleasant and supportive. Given that the hardware was shared there was no choice. The micros were starting but they hadn’t made things impersonal yet.
- cratermoon 4y agoChain printers loudly stamping 132-column printouts on pin-feed green bar paper.
- jschveibinz 4y agoI once witnessed a girl transporting her Cobol code (card decks) to the computer center in a wagon. The wagon tipped over, and she just collapsed into a ball and cried. It was very sad.
- jleyank 4y agoI suspect everybody did that once. Learned to sequence number things and draw a big black diagonal along there top of the deck. And ibm sorters…. Lots of rubber bands and keeping the card box. Like backups, “oh shit” is a harsh teacher.