I'm old enough to remember ...

[Andrew Smith]

How crucial it was to get your master / slave HDD configuration correct if you wanted to be able to pump the data through fast enough for video work.

Also, that drives were a lot smaller than they are today.

Andrew

[Pete Cofrancesco]

Looking back on it today sounds pretty racist "Master" and "Slave". So was the computer called the "Plantation"?

[Andrew Smith]

I'm only willing to confirm there was nothing kinky on it. :-)

Andrew

[Donald McPherson]

I came across some 5 1/2inch floppy disk drives the other day.

[Andrew Smith]

I'm old enough to remember news coming through the computer magazines (like a web site but printed on glossy paper) of a development where they had discovered a type of RAM that when you switched off the power it didn't lost the data stored in it. It was amazing.

Andrew

[Andrew Smith]

I'm old enough to remember Windows 3.1 having issues with running out of "system resources". On a whim I thought I would see how many instances of Notepad.exe I could launch. I think the answer was about 18.

Why, yes, I was very bored that day.

Andrew

[Greg Miller]

I'm old enough to remember being excited when I got a CD-ROM burner, because one CD-ROM disc could hold more data than my hard drive.

I'm old enough to want to forget about interrupts and base addresses.

I'm old enough to remember running programs with DOS 6.22. The floppy disc with DOS on it went into drive A:\ and the floppy disc with the desired program (e.g. Word Perfect) on it went into drive B:\

[Andrew Smith]

That's quite true about those new fangled shiny things having more space than a hard drive. Or floppies for that matter.

I'm old enough to remember that one campus of my university had a computer with a CD-ROM drive in the library, and that you could exit out of Windows to DOS. This enabled me to take a disc with the Corel Draw v2.01 clip art collection and copy to a floppy what I wanted to use. It was a 20 minute drive each way from the other campus, but it's what I had no choice but to do if I wanted to unlock the trove of shiny data goodies.

I can also remember just years prior convincing my father to get a 120MB hard drive instead of only a 80MB drive in the new computer we were getting. Of course, a CD-ROM drive for the family computer didn't even get contemplated.

Andrew

[Rainer Listing]

Family computer? You young whippersnappers...

[Brian Dollemore]

Whippersnappers, indeed. My son started his career in computers as a young teenager back in the early 1980's. The hardware was a Dragon (32?), backed up by a cassette player for the necessary software and a decommissioned TV as the monitor. We didn't have a PC in the house until he got his first job after university. The rest, as they say, is history.

[Boyd Ostroff]

Learned ALGOL in a CS101 course as a freshman at the University of Virginia in 1967, we had to keypunch our programs on IBM cards and submit them to the guys in white coats inside the clean room that housed the massive Burroughs B-5500 Mainframe. Then we would come back later and a printout of the program would be wrapped around the card deck with a rubberband. Most of the time the printout would just say something cryptic like "SYNTAX ERROR, LINE 12". Couple years later the university got a time-sharing system with ASR-33 teletype terminals around the campus connected to the mainframe running BASIC, that's when I really learned how to program.

First personal computer was an Apple ][ with a vast 16KB of memory in 1978. It was one of the first 5000 made. Apple didn't have disk drives yet, you had to use your own cassette recorder for storage and a TV for a monitor. It only had integer BASIC in ROM, that's why I went all-in and got 16K memory so I could load floating point BASIC from tape. The 4K Apple ][ didn't have enough memory for that!

In 1985 I got a 512K "fat Mac" and Apple Hard Disk 20. That was a huge upgrade! Here's my daughter playing with MacPaint in 1987, thats's an old Zenith CRT terminal next to it that I used to connect to a VAX 11/750 running BSD unix at SUNY with my blazing fast 1200 baud USR modem!

[Paul R Johnson]

Sinclair calculator - probably about 1974, it did plus/minus/divide and multiply - and was around three weeks wages. Then a ZX80 computer, then Vic20 and 64. I was quite a fan of basic - and had Douglas Adam's Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy which was written in basic and the first text based adventure game - as in:
what can I see
nothing
turn on the light
there is food on the table
eat food

Loved it.

I even liked the Sony, Panasonic and other Japanese MSX computers - then of course Amstrad PCW256/512 with a disk drive! and green screen! Of course I also did all the video formats. I got married in 1980 and got to borrow a Panasonic portable single tube camera - but the person I gave it to didn't;t set it up properly and it of course had a black and white viewfinder and white balance was tricky - so my wife's wedding dress was green. I also recording 16 bit digital audio on a Sony F1 using betamax video cassettes on a portable unit. I loved all this new technology. My stint at a broadcaster introduced me to the MII system instead of Betacam A shame it never took off properly. I've always tried to be in with new products - anyone remember Elcassette - I loved them ¼" tape in a cassette at 3 and 3/4IPS.

[Doug Jensen]

Originally Posted by Boyd Ostroff

Learned ALGOL in a CS101 course as a freshman at the University of Virginia in 1967, we had to keypunch our programs on IBM cards and submit them to the guys in white coats inside the clean room that housed the massive Burroughs B-5500 Mainframe. Then we would come back later and a printout of the program would be wrapped around the card deck with a rubberband. Most of the time the printout would just say something cryptic like "SYNTAX ERROR, LINE 12". !

This is very similar to my experience duing high school in the late 70's. I was learning FORTRAN and had to keypunch the whole program on IBM cards and then . . . send them overnight to the local community college where the printout would come back the next day. A 24 hour turnaround for every chance to debug a program. It forced you to really, really, look at every line of code before putting the cards in the tray.

A few years later I wrote a Yahtzee game for the Commodore 64 that was on par with any computer game back in those days, complete with animated dice and everything. I wish I had that kind of spare time now to dabble in apps.

I was always told that the purpose of math classes were to teach you how to THINK -- not that you'd ever use the actual math in the real world. Well, if you want to learn to think logically and learn to problem solve, take a course in coding and learn how to program from scratch. That teaches you how to think. That FORTRAN class was probably the most valuable single course I ever took in high school or college.

[W. Bill Magac]

The first pc I used at work was an IBM pc with an Intel 8080 processor. It had a monochrome monitor, 64KB of RAM, and a 10MB hard drive. Cost more than $3K USD. I also used an Intel MDS system to write firmware that was burned into eproms. The MDS system used 160KB 8 inch floppies to store programs that took all night to compile. Kids today have no idea how easy they have it. I probably sound like an old man, which I am.

[Boyd Ostroff]

Sorry, but if your first computer had a hard drive and 64K, you're not an "old man" (unless you got a late start). ;-)