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Richwood · 01-13-2018, 03:30 AM

My first computer job was as a Navy Data Systems Tech working on a Univac 1103A vacuum tube system. No CRTs or other displays. Punched cards or paper tape input and printed output with the on-line output to a Friden Flexowriter electric typewriter with pinched tape reader. Major data dumps were to mag tape which was printed out on a off-line line printer. The Univac was the first commercial computer with core memory, a whole 4K of 36 bit words. Secondary memory was magnetic drum and tertiary was Univac 1 magnetic tape drives.

Incredible the advances since and my first personal computer was a Xerox 820 CP/M computer with floppy drives and 64K of RAm. Wordstar was the word processor and SuperCalc was the available spreadsheet for CP/M.

Remember the first color display for the IBM PC? 640 x 200 dots which made for horrible fonts on screen. Yuck. Businesses almost universally went with the non-graphic monochrome monitor with it's much more readable character font and 640 x 350 resolution as I recall.

The e-ink display, even the early ones at 150 DPI or 167 DPI, are huge improvements over the early CRT displays IMO.

01-13-2018, 03:30 AM	#243
Richwood Astronomy Nut Posts: 519 Karma: 3700000 Join Date: Oct 2017 Location: Reno, NV Device: Kindle (All), Kobo (Multiple), Sony (most) and Nook Glowlight Plus	My first computer job was as a Navy Data Systems Tech working on a Univac 1103A vacuum tube system. No CRTs or other displays. Punched cards or paper tape input and printed output with the on-line output to a Friden Flexowriter electric typewriter with pinched tape reader. Major data dumps were to mag tape which was printed out on a off-line line printer. The Univac was the first commercial computer with core memory, a whole 4K of 36 bit words. Secondary memory was magnetic drum and tertiary was Univac 1 magnetic tape drives. Incredible the advances since and my first personal computer was a Xerox 820 CP/M computer with floppy drives and 64K of RAm. Wordstar was the word processor and SuperCalc was the available spreadsheet for CP/M. Remember the first color display for the IBM PC? 640 x 200 dots which made for horrible fonts on screen. Yuck. Businesses almost universally went with the non-graphic monochrome monitor with it's much more readable character font and 640 x 350 resolution as I recall. The e-ink display, even the early ones at 150 DPI or 167 DPI, are huge improvements over the early CRT displays IMO. Last edited by Richwood; 01-13-2018 at 03:32 AM.