3 ms·
What i love most about it is that's so annoyingly slow that it actually lets you feel how computing must have been back then.
by brunooo 14y ago
What i love most about it is that's so annoyingly slow that it actually lets you feel how computing must have been back then.
- hosh 14y agoYeah, like a good museum exhibit.
- SoftwareMaven 14y agoThe "reel to reel" was still faster than the old cassette player I had hooked up to my old TRS-80.
- duck 14y agoAnd of course you would first have to walk and find that reel about thousands of others and then load it.
- tankbot 14y agoThat was my first computer, with that awful beige Radioshack shoebox cassette player. Oh, the fun days playing Artilery for hours and hours :o)
- nobleach 14y agoCLOAD..... And you had to try it at least 3 times.
- znowi 14y agoYes, indeed. Two observations from my short time at the console. 1. I can distinctly feel the presence of the machine and a dialogue that's going on. Unlike largely transparent computer personality of the everyday use today. 2. Absence of internet distraction coupled with machine-centric environment probably resulted in a more productive developer time. That's not counting hours spent in ardent Spacewar! battles :)
- jff 14y agoRegarding 2, remember that you're looking at a turnaround time of hours to try running your program, unless you were in a special situation. Anytime punch cards are involved, response time goes from seconds to minutes or hours. "Development" would be sitting down, writing your program on sheets of paper (marked out to 80 columns so you know how many characters you get). Then either you'd key it yourself, or you'd send it off to be keyed onto cards. I'm not really familiar with the 390, but that's typically how things would work on a punched-card (i.e. batch) system.
- znowi 14y agoAh, yes. I'm aware of that. I actually read this rather famous book on the subject, "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" by Steven Levy. I thoroughly enjoyed it. All the stories, machines, code and people. If anyone wants to get the feel of those times I highly recommend it.
- xradionut 14y agoWe had the fugly IBM terminals by the time I went to the university. Long lines waiting to key in your assignments, then even longer time awaiting the printouts. Found a nice loophole that I could exploit. Modem users got higher priority on jobs. Plus the TRS-80 Model4P I owned was capable of terminal emulation and other nice tricks to speed up Fortran and JCL assignments. So I sat in the comfort of the dorm room and used the time I saved on EE assignments.
- chiph 14y agoI wrote a VT-100 emulator for my Atari ST so I could do the same thing with the school's Data General Eclipse MV-8000. Much nicer being able to complete assignments within walking distance of the refrigerator. :)