Chit Chat Thread for the week of September 01, 2008

How OLD are you guys? I am over 60 and my first computer was a Commador 64 and a 4 function pocket calulator. I do remember 8 track tapes and adding machines with tapes.

My first computer was an Apple II. Loved that little machine, but it was my last Apple. Had 2 or 3 8-track players, and still use an adding machine that has a tape. I'm so old that I used a Frieden calculating machine to do regression analysis problems. It could take up to an hour to solve a problem that todays desktop computer will solve (and graph) in less than 30 seconds. Since the majority of my adult age has been in the computer age, I love them, and buy the latest and greatest as soon as it is available.

Joel

NFL kickoff weekend.... Redskins V Giants

When I started in computers, there were no PCs, only mainframes that filled huge rooms in huge buildings.

I'm over 60, too.

(B.P.C. - Before Personal Computers)

Reminds me of the army.... radio teletypwriters.. 60wpm max... angry26's.... mos 053... hmmmmm.

When you win, you're an old pro.
When you lose, you're an old man.

-Charley Conerly
Football player
25 Jul 2005

Books. Notepads. Pencils. Pens. Calculators. Paper. Did I say Books?
Why so much?

I started in plan 55 back in the 60.

They say the average Cell phone has more computing power than they used to send Apollo 11 to the Moon. I read this before the new smarter phones came out.

Ok now we will show age. I still have my first leading Edge comutor with the 8088 processor and 10mb hard drive. I have a number of 5 1/4 floppies and the drive from them. cassets player and 8 track tape player and recorder with 8 tracks to play in it. Also a large number of 3 1/2 floppies. I also have a large collection of 33 lps some never opened. and a 13 channel programable vcr.

My first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000...lol.Black and white no sound,and w/ a top speed of 1MHz.All the programs were stored on a regular tape drive,or u can buy magazines and type the programs into the system and then u could save it on tape.I got mine back in 1982.

finally football startin up

Computer was a Radio Shack Coco with a whopping 16k memory. Tape storage. Had to upgrade it to 32k because programs (which I had to write because there were none) were getting memory hungry.

Awaiting the remnants of Hurricane Hanna in MD. Hope it's not another Isabel !!!!!

Hanna just going by us here in Ormond By-the-Sea Flor-i-duh. Quite a bit offshore - we got 40 mph gusts with sustained 35 mph. About 1 " rain so far.
Md. will probably get drenched looking at the latest forecast track with TS winds.

Certainly more computation power than existed on the entire planet during WWII.

Anyone have any experience with the "Suretype" feature of Blackberry Pearl?

My first was Apple II+ with 48k memory and an external floppy drive. A friend had a "Trash-80."

People sometimes poke fun at Bill Gates for having said, "1 meg should be enough for everybody." Back then, 1 meg was enough for everybody.

We also used excess RAM as "virtual disk." Now we use hard drive as "virtual memory."

I am a distinguished 45, and my first computer was either the wrist watch with an address book on it in the late seventies as a teen, or a TI-30 calculator, or an HP-41C programmable calculator right around 1980 or so, or my commodore 64 computer; after programming on the Apple II in high school. From there, I went to a Compaq Transportable, and have had several iterations of laptops or portables through work since then. My favorite was the GRID laptop in the Army in the mid-80's. Now, my pocket pc has more power and memory than any of those first computers.

My parents, now 68 and 65, have a calculator as their most advanced piece of technology. While the area they live has had touch tone phones for twenty years and gotten rid of the party line; they still use the rotary phones.

My first computer was a Radio Shack model with a black and white monitor and they didn't even have the internet.You dailed the number on the phone and then plugged into the computer real quick.Not sure what we called them back then but you connected to a private site with not much of anything to see or do.When I moved up to a commoder I thought I was in high cotton.The rest is history.

Hate it. Real pain helping users set up e-mail. Love my BB Curve. Full QWERTY keyboard.

I'll be 45 in January.
My first computer was a Timex Sinclair TS1000. I even had the latest and greatest 16K memory upgrade that plugged into the back. From there I graduated to a cutting edge Commodore VIC-20 with a cassette tape drive and a modem. Had to run a tape for about five minutes just to load the modem program. If you turned off your computer, you had to reload any program you intended to use all over again. I used to log onto a friend's single (of course) telephone line BBS. Man, those folks with the Commodore 64 computers were a cut above, but I had fun anyway.

BTW, I also remember 8 track tapes. I have a player that has RCA outputs to hook into a stereo. Recently someone donated a large bag of 8 track tapes to my agency (some never opened). After a number of staff had NO idea what they were or how they would be used (they did have album cover labels on them), they called me in to look at the odd rectangular boxes. Naturally I grabbed them and brought them home. Maybe one day I will put on bell bottoms, hook up the 8 track player, sit back and enjoy a can of Tab or Champale!

Compuserve was the first thing in internet. Nothing more than a chat room really.

At $6.00 an hour, you learned to read and type fast!

I'm 55.

72 here - and having a ball !
First puter TI-94A
16K memory, no monitor - had a ball with it !
Had to be around 1981-1982

I think Chicago would go nuts if you had the Cubs vs White Sox in the Series.

Go Cubbies!!!!!!! This is our Year!!!

Commadore 64 with the 5 1/4 disks then i found a 128 with a 3.5 disk drive. thought that was the king of the road till i got a hold of a 300 baud modem. really screamed down the phone line. now look at the dsl and cable. geeeesh.

My first computer was an AT&T 6300 that I bought thru work in the late 80's. I got it with a 20 meg hard drive, but they upgraded them to 30 meg for free. I thought there was no way I would ever use that much disk space! And the hard drives were about 4 inches in height.

I still have the 5 1/4 inch floppy drive and still have some old games on those floppies. I was still backing up my Quicken files on those floppies until I bought a new tower a few years back and could not fit the drive in.

Was an Apple IIe at school. I remember using a regular cassette tape to save my programs. The first computer I owned was a Macintosh 512Ke (the e was for enhanced because it had a SCSI port). I loved that machine!
-Kathy
(who is glad to be back after an unscheduled hiatus caused by being laid off from work)

today, probably the last "triple" digit temps here for 2008! Kool!

Stay healthy!

N

I remember the 360 model 40 well, it had 24 KB of memory and no operating system had 2540 card reader, programs were loaded from binary punched cards at startup. 2411 mag tape drives and 2311 stacked storage units.
All the equipment filled up a room, and didn't have any computing power as we know it today instead it did addition by repeated increments of the same command over and over again rather than having any multiplying hardware.

I remember 8" floppys , then 5.25" and I even owned a dual 5.25 IEEE drive, then my first Hard drive was a 30 mb , it took a couple years to fill it, and , used to operate a PC bulletin Board back in the early 80's. The world's first gigabyte-capacity disk drive, the IBM 3380, introduced in 1980, was the size of a refrigerator, weighed 550 pounds (about 250 kg), and had a price tag of $40,000. (I didn't own one), today I have a 300 gig hdd it's 1" thick and fits in a shirt pocket I paid $110.USD for it.

So no need to feel old, Yes we have seen a lot and don't forget you had to change the channels on the TV with pliers because the knob was striped or broken and even had to get up to do it.

These are things that give us experience and the knowledge to help others. without us, the things in our brains would just be documented facts and no one to tell the story first hand, they would just be museum pieces and soon that's what they will be.

So we have witnessed and partaken in the whole cycle of computers so far. don't feel old, feel blessed, to have been part of it.

Bob

Yummy...and cheap!

yum indeed

I got a bunch of them - if you're interested.

I remember a machine at school that had the old style "core" memory. Each bit consisted of a small magnetic ring (like a tiny donut) with 3 wires running through the hole. The polarity of the magnet indicated whether the bit was on or off, and could be changed by running a current through the appropriate wires. The cool part was that it was non-volatile, whatever was in memory would remain intact even if the power went out. The bad part is that it was huge in physical size, yet tiny in memory capacity.

When I helped my son pick up some furniture he bought off the craigslist, he and I whipped out our cell phones and PDAs to write down the address.

My dear DIL grabbed a pen and a notebook.

Some basic stuff never loses its usefulness.

In school?!? I worked on those memory stacks daily. The 3 wires were called "X" "Y" and "Inhibit" if I haven't lost too much of my memory.

You forgot the "sense" wire that picked up the pulse when the core switched. Some stacks had 2 inhibit wires, each parallel with the x & y.

That's right, I forgot the sense line.

Can you imagine working in a factory stringing 4 pieces of insulated transformer type wire through those little ferrite donuts? Good grief! I wonder if that was done by hand, considering how long ago we are talking about? I never saw the manufacturing process, I only did the installation or the replacement of the whole stack in the field, in a customer's mainframe.

From Wikipedia:

Forrester's coincident-current system required one of the wires to be run at 45 degrees to the cores, which proved impossible to wire by machine, so that core arrays had to be assembled by workers with fine motor control under microscopes. Initially, garment workers were used.

Here's the whole article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_memory

So yeah, someone *did* wire that by hand - yikes!

But I may be the last post for this weeks Chit Chat.
It's 12:30 am here in California, so let's see what happens.

joemac

One more

Anyone else think the regular season should be extended by another two games? Maybe have one less pre-season and add it and one other to the regular season.

Got an apple picking trip planned for this weekend -- hope the weather holds up for me.

Have a great week everyone.