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The delusional world of Linux.


kitekrazy

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Whenever I think about the past, it brings up so many memories!

When I sit around with my geezer contemporaries these days, we're not talking about CP/M or Berkeley vs. AT&T as much as about what body parts are failing at the moment. 

Although sometimes I do get nostalgic for vi. Back then, composing a text message was a real skill.

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The very first program I wrote was in BASIC for a high school physics class, punched on paper tape, then sent from a TTY keyboard/printer terminal over a dial up to a time sharing computer system 20 miles away.

The first mainframe I worked with was a Univac. It was octal based, rather than hexadecimal. And it had real magnetic core memory, (the kind with tiny ferric rings for each bit, pre-dating semiconductor  memory). So when we did "core dumps", we were really dumping the "core"! The console operation was strictly TTY. Punched cards were the normal input media used. Also with large numbers of vacuum capstan reel to reel mag tape drives, for sorts, backups, and general I/O. Plus lots of little blinky lights and buttons on the main panel for system access.

My first college level programming class was in COBOL, where programs were first written on paper, then we punched them into 80 column cards and submitted them for compile and run tests.

Later on I worked with IBM System/370 series mainframes running MVS. This was just about the time personal computers were beginning to hit the mainstream, but way before the  LAN/WAN and client/server technology took off with TCP/IP based networks.  Data center computing was mostly still connected with proprietary point to point links, and packet networks were still limited in large commercial applications.

Ahh, the good old days!

Like the kind of days where you could actually walk down the sidewalk without accidentally bumping into somebody staring down at a smartphone, LOL!!! :P

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I somehow missed out on paper tape (NOT complaining! LOL), but also had a class that did the punch cards.  The fun prank was to rubber cement two of the cards together about 2/3's of the way back and put everything back in someone's deck (but weren't those boxes cool?).  They would load their program into the hopper and it would chug along just fine until it hit our "surprise" - hehe...😆

Coleman had both IBM 370's and a nice 4341 mini-mainframe that was prominently placed right in the middle of the school (and named Kermit).  I actually saw one of the techs fix it with a soldering iron!

Fortunately, I'm NOT old enough to have ever seen (or performed) true debugging which is where a tube (or valve for you Brits) has attracted and killed a moth or two so someone has to go in there with a feather duster and "de-bug" the workings!

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9 minutes ago, craigb said:

Fortunately, I'm NOT old enough to have ever seen (or performed) true debugging which is where a tube (or valve for you Brits) has attracted and killed a moth or two so someone has to go in there with a feather duster and "de-bug" the workings!

LOL! Me either, fortunately I started my career in the transistor age, and vacuum tubes were well behind me by that point. For reference, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are a about a year older than me.

And I'm not a Brit, by the way, but thanks for the compliment (I think). I'm an American. From 'merica. :D

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I had COBOL in college too. We had some CRT terminals that you would type on and then would punch out the cards and we also had direct terminals to punch out the cards. Had to be early or stay late to get one of the CRT terminals😦

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3 minutes ago, InstrEd said:

I had COBOL in college too. We had some CRT terminals that you would type on and then would punch out the cards and we also had direct terminals to punch out the cards. Had to be early or stay late to get one of the CRT terminals😦

I hear you! Sitting down at a keypunch machine was the most tedious task I have ever undertaken. Moving to online terminals and virtual data entry was like the cyber equivalent invention of the wheel, or fire, or something  like that!

I took a class in Python programming a few years ago. Just wow!!! Look ma, no compiler!!!

It is so very cool to be able to code, execute, and debug at brain speed (real -time) on your personal computer, without having to wait for a compile step. Interpreted languages are the bees knees!!!

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That 'ol thought experiment.  If you were to suddenly be able to relive your life, but with the knowledge you've gained, what would you do differently?  #1 would be to put as much money into Microsoft when it was first created that I could (and sell it all in August of 1999).  Sure, there are other things, but all of those are only enhanced (or become possible) with sufficient funding!

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2 minutes ago, craigb said:

That 'ol thought experiment.  If you were to suddenly be able to relive your life, but with the knowledge you've gained, what would you do differently?  #1 would be to put as much money into Microsoft when it was first created that I could (and sell it all in August of 1999).  Sure, there are other things, but all of those are only enhanced (or become possible) with sufficient funding!

Absolutely!!!

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