Submit a box of cards to the mainframe clerk, come back in a few hours and collect the box with the printout. Sit down and debug the bastard, hit the card punch machine to generate the corrections and stick 'em in the deck.
Rinse and repeat.
Good times.
My first computer was a Tandy HD 1200 with a monochrome monitor and a 10 MB hard drive and 640 K ram. I had it for 5 years and learned to program on it and made some money No Windows, just DOS and a lot of typing and studying. I built my second computer myself, putting two 10 MB hard drives in it.
I'm actually 37 years older than that. When I was born, a "computer" was the size of a house, cost $1,000,000, and there were only a few dozen on the planet. The first computer I ever used was an IBM 360. First owned was a IBM XT clone, DOS 5.0 + Windows 3.1, 1996.
I am windows 3.1 and DOS old...
Also remember we had an Amstrad green screen with a game called "Bomb" that I can't even find screenshots for... (name was hand-written on the floppy disk - not sure that was the actual name)
I don't have earlier pictures but my shoutcast on my adsl line from 2000 1 Windows 2000 Pro Desktop and 1 Win 2000 Pro shourcast server and NetBsed based firewall I think they were Pentium 133 and 200 (desktop)
Hahaha! You wanna see OLD?! Our first computer was an IBM XT, purchased used from a friend and full of kids' games like Reader Rabbit and Mario Teaches Typing and Oregon Trail. We also had a dot matrix printer, a noisy little thing.
Older. In school early 80s, we wrote code by pencil on a paper form with a grid, one character per square. These all got sent to Winchester Castle and someone typed them in and sent us the punched cards and results a few days later. Painfully slow and prone to mistyping. Corrections and repeat.
Then two Commodore Pets to share between 20+ students and we could make our own mistakes in Basic, in real-time.
Ahem years later, and having fun coding for "work".
I'm not THAT old, but my first computer was a Packard Bell with Windows 3.1 and an onboard 16k modem. My best friend had both a Commodore 64 and a PC with Windows 98 on it.
1st big computer task was writing PhD thesis in 1982-83 on Apple Mac. IBM XT in 1989 first in a long series of PCs in later Canadian government job. Several Dell precision mobile workstations most recently & just got what's likely my last work computer. So over 40 yr+ career have seen many changes!
Ooooolder. I was shopping online via modem for the USMC in the 80s. First computer that wasn't a college mainframe was a trash 80. Had an 8088 that played the starting drum bits of "Back in Black" when booting up. Still looking for a usb 5-1/4" drive to transfer some disks!
Once, I used a multi-boot setup on the same PC with DOS (some extracted from Win98, with LFN and FAT32 support), Win 3.11 for Workgroups (yes, it was OK with the mentioned DOS version), Win 98, and Win 2k.
Older! No mouse, no internet, CP/M operating system. No GUI - just a green screen with 80 characters per line. A little dot when you started the machine - you needed to know what to type next to the dot to get something to happen.
Windows 96?!? And bruh, I started my first real office job and it was Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, and there was one PC on our floor that could go out on the external internet...
Way older actually. First learned to program computers on a teletype machine in high school. First software program I wrote as a professional was using z80 assembly language back in 1982.
I can't find a photo of the first computer I ever used, but in uni I wrote MONECS Fortran using mark sense 80 column punch cards and waiting for the output at a printer not too far from the one pictured. Stood in line to feed the cards in, then getting the deck rejected. Painful.
Only if you lived in a parallel universe are you familiar with Windows 96. I upgraded a company to Windows "95" from Windows 3.11 for workgroups so I'm actually older.
Comments
Rinse and repeat.
Good times.
My 1st PC was an IBM AT. Running MS-DOS.
After that, I switched to a Unix-like OS and almost came full circle.
Also remember we had an Amstrad green screen with a game called "Bomb" that I can't even find screenshots for... (name was hand-written on the floppy disk - not sure that was the actual name)
Ahem years later, and having fun coding for "work".
I am THIS old. 😭
Of course if that was a “Tandy”? I’d still be”that” old🥴🤣
My first was 98, and I miss the big ol' beige boxes...
My first computer was an Ohio Scientific Superboard II 😬
than social eng.
Older
Macintosh old.🤣🤣