Nerd memories

The bit that makes me laugh (and cry) is the "Please insert disk 12" made me remember that window$ 95 came on multiple floppies and you'd be installing it and the very last disk would nearly always return the error "Cannot read data, please re-insert the disk"
 
Its a long way back . When I started as a Cobol Programmer in 1980 it was all green screen and you had to book a session on a terminal max stay one hour . All mainframe based job submission on punched card . We thought we were state of the art and leading edge , mainframe operating system was also done using a tray of punched cards .

I remember when system control language was used to run the Cobol programmes and we discovered certain hexidecimal characters which would trigger the buzzer on each terminal and we were full of it when we wrote a loop programme which sent the hex character to each green screen in turn and set the buzzer off to give a crescendo of car horn like sounds . I recall one of the leading SCL writers managing to construct a loop programme that placed x characters at various points on the screen to create a crude Christmas tree which flashed on and off .

Its seems so long ago when you even compare it to what Tony has shown here . It just shows how brilliant Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers were during the War I could not hide my delight when Alan Turing was awarded the greatest person of the twentieth century.
 
The first computer I played with was the Apple IIe in high school. Like Captain Clutterbuck has said it was just a green screen. We had to follow a programme that at the end done some fancy thing of which I can't remember. The next computers we got were the Mackintosh. Only two for the senior classes but a colour screen!. It was like now going from a monochrome screen on a mobile phone to a colour screen. You knew you weren't going to go back.
 
I never even SAW my first computer!! It was at Uni Wayyyyyyyyyyyyyy back. It too worked on punchcards, but we didn't have a fancy punchcard "typewriter" we used a paper clip to punch out the appropriate (and usually Inappropriate slots) We were all allocated 30 seconds of computer time each, per WEEK, to do our assignments.
You would submit your stack of punched cards to your tutor one day and a couple of days later you would be given your results. If everything went smoothly you got a print out of what you had done (On dot matrix paper). If things DIDN'T go smoothly you could end up with anything from a pile of chewed up cards (because ONE of them had a slight bend and the computer then "ate" everything....a bit like the old cassette recorders used to do.) to nothing at all.
The weird thing was that the computer had a mind of it's own. Sometimes it would look at all the cards and say "This is going to take more than 30 seconds" and abort and all you got was a single sheet of paper with that message typed on it. BUT.......sometimes it would run the program and then just STOP when 30 seconds was up and you could end up with hundreds of sheets of paper with "time expired" typed in small letters at the bottom of the last page!!
 
That is going back a bit! I remember the times of 5.25" and 3.5" floppy disks. The heady days of swapping through several 3.5" disks just to watch a cut scene play through in the game Wing Commander series. High tech times!
 
The first computer for which I wrote programs was located about 80 miles from the VAX terminal in the public library where I worked. in 1976. I was writing in BASIC just for fun, but when my library position was defunded, that fun led to an academic year at the local community college studying computer programming and systems analysis, with curriculum emphasis on COBOL, which I never used. That year led to a second Associate's degree. Then, because I had taken the FORTRAN IV course as an elective and I already knew BASIC, I was hired by Corning Glass Works as Process Control Programmer in one of the factories where most of the production line computers were programmed in Industrial BASIC, but the newest one was programmed in FORTRAN IV.

I was in the factory for four years before transferring to the Engineering Division, where I spent the dullest year of my life writing accounting programs. During that year, the division bought a few of the early IBM PCs. They looked like toys to me, so I was in the office evenings and weekends playing with Lotus 1-2-3, the only program that came loaded on them. As I result, I learned a bit about operating a PC and about the software, so I transferred to one of the engineering departments in the role of PC "expert".

After four years in that role, the company fell on hard times and disbanded the Engineering Division. At the same time, one of the librarians in the Research Division's Technical Information Center quit. The supervisor had to hire from within the company and I was the only employee with the required Master's Degree in Library Science who was looking for a job, so I was hired. There, I wrote programs in a proprietary language to automate the library catalog and the circulation system, making the catalog available online to all company employees. I also did the usual book cataloging and classification, as well as providing some of the reference service. That's the job I retired from.
 
Reminds me when we had an ICL 1904* inHarrogate but fed data by telephone from Leeds through a RJE (remote job entry) - all on punched tape. They punched everything twice top ensure no errors!

Then once a year we had winchester with a year's worth of data on our more local DEC machine which we could analyse. But if we wanted a graph we had tore-input the figures onto an Apple Macintosh which could do this.

Eventually I was one of the team that were involved in its replacement and expansion to cover all the systems. Roughly a £1m budget.
 
Does anyone remember these things??

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The first real portable personal calculator!
At the time we were NOT permitted to use them in the University Entrance Exams! Apparantly not everyone could afford one, so they were banned in all exams.

Today people pull out their phone or calculator to add 5 + 5!
 
Actually I was also using a circular version of the above called a Kane Computer when I was flying. It was a navigational aid but also a calculator. In fact I still have it!
They were used for years, in fact if you look back at old WW2 films of pilots etc, especially in bomber aircraft you will see them using exactly the same piece of kit!
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Back when I was in college in the 70's, they had a computer in the library, probably a mainframe. The keyboard was three feet long, each key was a one-half inch square and when you pressed any key it would deliver this really loud clunk that you could hear all over the library.
 
I know it's not a computer as such but we bought our son a Comador 64 way back when dinosaurs ruled the earth, we couldn't afford a new one so bought second hand. We were trying to work out how to use it to check it out for hours, it broke us! We eventually got our 7 year old son up at 2am to show us how to get it going! Took him 3 minutes, we knew then we were not going to be joining the techno generation.
 
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