A story of computers

[GeoffC]

A computer story


WARNING : Some pictures in B&W, old fashion in clothes, early SMS messages and a whopping 8kb ram on a PC ......

[Peverel]

Originally Posted by GeoffC

A computer story


WARNING : Some pictures in B&W, old fashion in clothes, early SMS messages and a whopping 8kb ram on a PC ......

Blimey that is pretty cool. I refuse to admitt how much of that I remember though lol

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by Peverel

Blimey that is pretty cool. I refuse to admitt how much of that I remember though lol

me too .... surprised no card-readers were shown ...

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by GeoffC

A computer story


WARNING : Some pictures in B&W, old fashion in clothes, early SMS messages and a whopping 8kb ram on a PC ......

Cool Really enjoyed that, and it had some great music on it too.

[DixieGal]

It looks like the old NASA sets from "I Dream of Jeannie." Oh wait, sorry, I meant to say, "It looks like current computers at NASA."

[ladyjane]

We still have one of those IBM down the basement..............(did I ever mention my husband was a pack rat) now hes a Mac man...umm 2 huge desk tops and a new macbook pro. Good thing I got my reader before he goes off on another binge.

[MickeyC]

I took a course in Fortran back in 1972 and, as part of that, the school took us to the 3M plant in Baltimore where they manufactured big main frames. One of the stops on the tour was this huge open bay room filled with literally hundreds of women who were sewing.

They would take a frame (about the size of a playing card) and thread a needle with wire and run it through the frame and a small iron core in the middle. Then they'd run another wire through and finally a third.

This was one bit. The first wire put the charge on, the second read the charge and the third replicated it so you wouldn't lose memory reading it.

And they'd stack these up to make a hundred bits or a thousand bits depending on how powerful the machine was meant to be.

[wodin]

Originally Posted by GeoffC

A computer story


WARNING : Some pictures in B&W, old fashion in clothes, early SMS messages and a whopping 8kb ram on a PC ......

My first computer, an Atari 400, had 4K of RAM, then I piggey backed the chips and hand wired the address lines and blew it out to 16K.

[jgray]

Originally Posted by cassidym

They would take a frame (about the size of a playing card) and thread a needle with wire and run it through the frame and a small iron core in the middle. Then they'd run another wire through and finally a third.

That's core memory, named for the tiny ferrite (donut-shaped) cores. When I was in the Air Force, the F-106 fighters that I worked on had core memory and a large magnetic drum as part of the flight computer. The flight computer was probably the most modern part of the aircraft. The circuit boards were chock full of TTL chips. The first F-106 rolled off the assembly line in 1957. BTW, if you lookup F-106 on Wikipedia, some of that information is wrong.

I actually have a large card of core memory that a friend gave me many years ago. I had it mounted in a silver frame, with a reflective backing behind the core memory. Most people just think it is a piece of modern art.

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by wodin

My first computer, an Atari 400, had 4K of RAM, then I piggey backed the chips and hand wired the address lines and blew it out to 16K.

Mine was a TRS-80 with 4kb memory and all capitals. I don't think it even had a floppy drive. This was around 1980.

Regards, Alex

[GeoffC]

my first memory was a school trip in 1970 to the local council who had a computer but all I can remember was a printer churning out accounts !
in 1973 an electronics course introduced me to fortran computing, punchcards and no-access allowed into the rooms where the computer was!!!
programs were written on input sheets, handed in where they were punched out and run. failures were returned, after a week, with instructions to hand print replacement cards, then another week would go by.

my wife had a greater nightmare where she inadvertantly ran a program at work that went into a loop and totally spent the departments monthly budget of top-priority time on the first of the month. in those days the computers were set ups as TSO (time sharing)..

ah .... memories ....

[MickeyC]

Originally Posted by jgray

I actually have a large card of core memory that a friend gave me many years ago. I had it mounted in a silver frame, with a reflective backing behind the core memory. Most people just think it is a piece of modern art.

Can you post a picture of that? It'd bring back memories.

Also, when I was in college, the only computer on the campus was this honking huge mainframe in Administration they used for registration and to schedule classes. But, my senior year, they installed a mainframe in the Life Sciences building and began courses in Computer Science.

Anyway, some of the guys in my fraternity took the course. And one night they told us they had programmed the computer to play (are you ready for this?) Tic Tac Toe. You talk about a dorm full of astonished nerds. We could not believe it.

So we walked over to Life Sciences and they stopped the computer which was batch processing (remember that?) and ran their program. Once it was set up, one of the guys entered an 'X' which was displayed on this 12 inch black and white screen. And the computer immediately entered an 'O'. The whole room gasped. I thought I was seeing the ultimate in machines.