The way we were (was Re: [TriLUG] No more Linux on WRT54G???)

[Rick DeNatale]

On 11/15/05, Greg Brown <gwbrown1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/15/05, Mark Freeze <mfreeze at gmail.com> wrote:
> > In the 80's I used to be a cobol programmer for Amsouth bank in
> > Birmingham, AL.  I remember when we were first getting pc's and they
> > gave me a 40MB drive to put in one of the boxes.  At the time I
> > thought to myself "Man, 40MB!  We'll never fill this thing up!"
> >
> > Regards,
> > Mark.
> >
>
> Oh man, I remember when my grandmother, an IBM retiree, got access to
> one of those 5 meg "side slap-on" harddrives for her XT.  I couldn't
> believe that she had 5 megs of storage!!  This was at the time when I
> was running stuff of insertable cartridges in my PC Jr.
>
> Oddly a friend next door got an apple.. with a color printer and the
> ability to save data to cassette tapes.  I was quietly envious though
> it took me all the way to OS X before even considering an Apple for
> anything other then a door stop.
>

I started out with computers back in 1971 at the University of
Connecticut, where I had exposure to both the IBM and DEC worlds.  My
first class involving programming used an IBM 1620 Model I for Fortran
II.

I then started hacking on the IBM/360 Mod 65 running OS/MVT which was
the state of the art at the time.  IIRC that machine, which was the
largest general purpose IBM 'puter at the time (The 75 and 95 were
scientific machines) had a whopping 768 KB of core memory.  Of that
512 KB was third party memory, the installation of which required
reworking the central processor to add additional address lines.

Most programming was done using punched cards and either Model 26 or
29 keypunches. The real test of macho wasn't knowing either vi or
emacs, but whether you knew how to make a card to program the keypunch
to set tab stops, and autosequence the deck.

One of the first software near-disasters I witnessed was when some
friends of mine were taking a graduate compiler course, and during
integration one of them dropped their card deck.

--
Rick DeNatale

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