For the *real* computer guys

[RickM]

I still have a 5 MB "shoebox" hard drive that cost about $2k back in the 70s. BTW, aren't those punch cards called Hollerith cards?

[Thomas Owen]

Back in my day I had to get up a half hour before I went to bed, walk 48 miles to work, pay the mill keeper to allow me to work, and when I got home my father would kill me just for the Hell of it!

A kids today think they have it rough!

[thabaer]

You guys are going to give me nightmares I thought were long gone...

360-40s, CCPs, 7track 200FCI tape, BCD, 1401s, 1620s, 7090s ---- AAHHH!

I was a bit offended by those snot-nosed upstarts using OUR car for a silly manual!!

(excuse me while I go shuffle the deck)

[Chuck Moreland]

Now the "old timers" are bragging about the early days of the Internet!What have we come to?

That ain't old.

When I was growing up, we were so poor we had to share a card punch machine with a family down the street .

And I used to know 8086 assembly code backwards and forward. I even wrote an operating system single handedly. I still have a copy someplace.

[N11Porsche]

The first 35 years of my life, we didn't have personal computers. My first computer was an Apple IIe with 64K of memory, a 5 1/4" disk drive, 13" amber monitor and no hard drive. All programs were loaded into memory from the floppy drive. Programmers had to be real inventive, working under the 64k limit. That was considered lots of memory, back than. (I like it better today and am not boasting about being so old 57 isn't exactly one foot in the grave, yet.

I just loaded Spiderman on my computer for my grandkid, The game takes over 1 1/2 gigabytes of harddrive space! You need a minimum 32m/b video card with full transform & lighting capabilities, 128 m/b of memory and at least a Pentium 3 processor. These are "minimum requirements just to run the game!!

[ljonespwc]

... our elementary school (grade 6 for me) got its first few Apple ][ computers back in 1979. I played Oregon Trail until the janitors kicked me out of the computer room. I also clearly remember giggling when I first learned about PEEKs and POKEs.

[nostatic]

I've got an audio cassette that is entitled "A Tour of your Mac 512KE"

I remember in junior HS (1974?) running a TI terminal w/acoustic coupler modem and playing star trek (it would print the "star map" after every turn. We went through a bit of paper...

[thabaer]

Silent 700s, bdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbdbd

I still prefer the rumble of a flat six.

Yah know, I just realized why all these yung'uns get carpal tunnel syndrome. They never built up their fingers on an 026 punch or a KSR33!

As much as I hate to coin a phrase off of the evil one, it would be nice if Porsche parts costs were following MPs; that is as long as you didn't have to turn off the key, get out, close the doors then climb back in and restart because it stopped running on the highway.

[911pcars]

Oh yeah? I remember trying to read and understand the operating manual for a CPM computer. You thought writing code was tough. I actually stared at a blinking cursor for days before I could figure it out - bought books on the subject. Then I moved on to try to manage memory allocation in DOS to get computer software to co-exist - bought books on the subject. Looking back on it, what an incredible waste of time, but that's what I had to do ...... to write a letter.

Computers are a little better nowadays. You can tell by the fewer number of computer book titles.

Sherwood Lee
(never made it to computer geek)
http://members.rennlist.org/911pcars