[TriLUG] More computer trivia...

[Paul Jones]

my first computer was a mainframe -- unless you could the sorters and 
collators that we programmed in high school but wiring patch boards. in 
1967, we were an odd class; half in "distributed education" that is 
indentured servants to local bank and insurance cos whilst still in school 
and half overachieving geeks who were bound for engineering schools and 
who wanted to be near anything that approached a computer. the geek 
rewired the electronic office equipment in ways that we claimed allowed 
them to become fortune telling devices to the amazement of the poor 
shorthand teacher who was stuck with us in class.
at the end of the year, we got to take a stack of cards on which we'd 
punched out a simple program in watfor (aka waterloo fortran) down to the 
local community college. there they were read into a telephone line 
connected reader and processed at the famous research triangle's 
tucc (triangle universities computer center). this took hours.

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                             Paul Jones
 "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation." Alasdair Gray
                http://www.ibiblio.org/pjones/blog/
  pjones at ibiblio.org   voice: (919) 962-7600     fax: (919) 962-8071
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