Love the discussions

[ajg617]

Remember the 180k single side 8 inch floppies?

I had the notch punch to flip it over for a whopping 360k!

Bill

You'll be happy to know they are still in use

[Captcolour]

Programming with Hollerith cards anyone? Or loading boot code via front panel switches? OK, putting one foot back in the grave now.

Chris

Yep. Was a DEC computer with all the toggle switches to boot up.

[Captcolour]

My dad was a computer programmer/analyst for the NY State Division of the Budget. In the late 60s, I would earn some extra money proofing punch cards. Remember you wrote out all your code on paper, so you had to proof the cards to make sure they were correct. He programmed in COBOL.

I learned Fortran in college in the late 70s. I was a co-op student and while working, figured out how to calculate and print contour plots on an ASCI printer. While at school in my fluids dynamics lab, while everyone else was doing hand calculations and plotting for distillation columns, I wrote a program to do this. Got my only C grade because the instructor said that computer plotting wasn't accurate enough! I probably should have turned around and sold my code at the time to large chemical companies.

Taught myself visual basic and wrote a manufacturing package to keep track of the plant statistics by shift and by run. Back then you had to write using subroutines because there wasn't enough RAM to hold the entire program. You wrote a high level program that called subroutines to do specific calculations, then had to release them to free RAM to bring in another. Back then you had to be very efficient in your programming. That ended years ago.

[dazcon5]

Programming with Hollerith cards anyone? Or loading boot code via front panel switches? OK, putting one foot back in the grave now.

Chris

My first FORTRAN programming class in high school, miss one space or semicolon and nothing would happen.

[fez111]

VIC 20, Commodore 64 then Commodore 128. Got me a floppy drive and I was screaming fast.

I once had a Vic 20 and I STILL have a Commodore 64 in a box in the basement with a home-made power supply, the Commodore 'floppy' disk drive, and Commodore dot-matrix printer. Couldn't give any of it away at a garage sale 30 years ago...Maybe its worth something now???

[docque]

I once had a Vic 20 and I STILL have a Commodore 64 in a box in the basement with a home-made power supply, the Commodore 'floppy' disk drive, and Commodore dot-matrix printer. Couldn't give any of it away at a garage sale 30 years ago...Maybe its worth something now???

I would say yes if they were over 50, drunk and had poor judgment. lol I had so much stuff in the basement, gave them to my son because he was going to make millions. Not it is all sitting in his basement to be passed on to his son.

[Malco1]

Some of the discussions on here are so fun. Remember growing up and hearing, "When I was younger I had to walk up hill both ways to school"? That has turned into, "Back in the day we had 1200 baud modems and it took us two hours to download a picture of a cat."

And please don't get offended but does anyone remember the ASCII image of the woman? Oh, we had it rough back in the day.

We used to make those with radio teletype (RTTY)on ham radio.

[Malco1]

Programming with Hollerith cards anyone? Or loading boot code via front panel switches? OK, putting one foot back in the grave now.

Chris

Yes sir! used them for inventory

[Malco1]

Atari 800 with a cassette tape drive. Spent hours typing in code from a magazine just to play a simple game.
I later converted that computer to run PACKET on 2-meters and was so blown away with how many digi-peaters I could link up so that I could watch radio-tradio live up in the bay area. Those were the days!

Don't forget the trash 80

[jjbbrewer]

You'll be happy to know they are still in use

If you need any, let me know. I have an unopened pack & a drive with a S-100 interface.