Quote:
Originally Posted by Penforhire
Joe, many of us are old enough to have also used punch cards (52 card pickup, grrr). That's my word association for Fortran ("Fortran? Punch card!"). And don't forget tape drives (load failure in my Commodore PET because the tape stretched?!). The 8" floppy fad didn't seem to last all that long. Must be because they were terribly fragile (hey, but 2-sided 8" got you all the way up to 200 KB of storage, IIRC). Seems like 5.25" use lasted a very long time but maybe that's just my personal exposure to it.
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I'm old enough to ahve used punch cards, but I didn't start using computers until after the Apple ][+ ( 2+) came out. My first computer was a Sinclair ZX-81 with 1 kilobyte of memory. Cost me 100 dollars. Later bought the 16 k expansion for 50 dollars. 1984.
Had a DEC VAX 11/780 at university. 6 VT(don't remember the number) vacuum tube, valve, terminals on one campus. 4 terminals at another campus. One modem port. 1986
From home I used my Amiga A1000, a 1200 baud modem, and a VT100 terminal emulator to read Bitnet email. That was in 1989.
At an earlier university, in 1976, I saw a paper tape reader hooked up to a computer being used to operate light and sound cues for theatrical productions.
The Master Lighting person made the tape during dress rehersal. During production, one of the other lighting techs would play the paper tape, speeding it up or slowing it down, if the action or actors speed up their speechs or slowed them down.