Remember the days when ‘computer store’ had a completely different meaning?
I wonder if these new fangled things ever caught on.
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Oh my, the 70s were certainly ugly looking. How did you survive back then?
I always thought the computer rooms in Team Fortress 2 were a bit of an exaggeration, but after looking at this they are spot on.
I’ve picked around the “What Ever Happened To…” articles a few times. Interesting reads about computer history from a first hand source.
The old #5 crossbar at the phone company punched out cards for trouble shooters to read. They punched a pin through the card, but not a round hole. IBM had a patent on round holes punched in cards.
Jeez, in 1982 I was learning to program FORTRAN on punch cards made on consoles that looked just like the one at the top. What a PITA.
One of my first “real” jobs was using a punch card machine and the holes were rectangle, not round.
#3. IBM has a patent on round holes!
Noooo!
PLEASE!!!
Dont show this nightmare…
The computer NOW hae more power then the IBM 360/30 i was TAUGHT ON..
Playing HUNT THE WUMPUS,
Star trek on TELETYPES..
Battle ship..
CHESS that had to PRINT each move…
Looks more like the 1960s to me. If anybody wrote a truthful “How Computers Work” book today, no publisher would take it.
Ahh, the good old days. Too bad people don’t have to enter their blog entries using punchcards, they might put more thought into their posts.
I can almost remember when people only had one radio in the home. Because it was a piece of furniture. The same held true for most of the Tvs that followed. And now we’re right back to some homes having one really large $2000 HDTV.
It’s a good thing computers DIDN’T follow the television industry’s dictates. Or we’d all have Crays and nothing else! Thank God Apple and Commodore kept us out of mainframe hell. Or IBM would have never even tried to compete with a PC model of their own. Even Xerox’s executes weren’t interested in making anything small.
Apple Computers made the first really practical personal computer, that anyone could use. And a lot of other brands quickly followed suit. So it’s difficult to remember them as being the first. They were the true garage based startup business, that directed the trend toward smaller and easier to use PCs.
But garage based startups are a thing of the past. Wall Street won’t allow it anymore. And we’re not likely to see the innovations they spawn, again for some time, until startups are allowed to start very small, once again. Without corporate monopolies always eating their lunch.
#7
Looks like we started near the same place. Back in highschool in the 70’s I lost my computer virginity on an old TTY with a 300 baud accoustic coupler and papertape reader/writer, playin startrek till I got bored and finally printed out the basic code. Then I started changing the code and viola I became a programmer. After school I thought I’d join the navy and work with real computers. Little did I know that there I’d be working with 2nd gen Univac – logic cards with full sized transistors (no chips), iron core memory, registers with lights and switches, bigger than a refrigerator. I’ve been a keypuncher on IBM 29, used that IBM sorter with it’s curious breadboard and patch cables. You think fortran was bad try COBOL compiled from a stack punchcards. Things have changed. They took the greatest invention of mankind and turned it into some kind of communications appliance.
#11 – I think I’ve got that beat. I first programmed a Burroughs ElectroData E101 computer, made during 1957. It was owned by John Hopkins University, until the 1960s. Then they donated it to the Maryland Science Academy (probably as a tax write off). And that’s were I got to spend a summer of my pre-teen youth, programming it. Whenever it hadn’t broken down.
http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/102627317
http://tinyurl.com/6dpc5e
It wasn’t pretty, but I did manage to get a Fibonacci series program running on it. Before I could program it to play Tic Tac Toe, it overheated again, and wasn’t available before the end of the summer course. I think I may have beaten Bill Gates by a year or two. But my family wasn’t wealthy, like his. So my high school couldn’t afford a computer for its students to play with. And I didn’t touch another computer until the Air Force, when I was fixing them. And I bought my first (and last) Radio Shack TRS80 computer. Which I modified a bit to display lowercase and reverse video characters on screen. I programmed it mostly in Basic, though I had its Z80 assembler too. It was just too limited to do much of anything with. But I have to say its on-chip Basic editor was the best I’ve seen of any 8-bit PC. With my Apple IIs I picked up on 6502 machine language, Apple’s Basic, and Pascal Basic. But I never wrapped my head around C++, because I thought it too would become obsolete by the 1990s. I’ll stop bragging now.
WELL,
i went to the C64, 64/128, then the AMIGA 2000, then had to goto the INTEL/Windows..
LOVED the amiga..
Stereo sound and BETTER graphics then the 286/386/486 and MOST pentiums..
GOD we are old..
I was amazed at the amiga lasting as long as it did, on a 16/35mhz system BEATING a P200..