Try booting a Burroughs with a 12 hard disk: and if you get a bit of dust/grit/eyelash in the wrong place, instead of booting, it goes brrrrrr and gives you a couple of cubic foot of confetti.
One electrician in the office came into the IT shop. Had an old windows XP computer and needed to pull off a critical config file (18Kbs). We had to dig around the shop to dust off a stack of old floppies and a reader to transfer over the files! Sometimes it pays to keep old hardware as backup...
I'll see your booting off of a 5 inch floppy and raise you booting off of a inch wide reel to reel tape after setting and loading toggles on the face of a 7 foot tall side by side refrigerator sized box housed in a closet sized room that had to be kept at 55 F. And programming on punch cards.
When I was a tool and die apprentice in the 60s we had one each of the two most advanced "computer" controlled machine tools in the world. One, an American DeVlieg Horizontal Boring Machine was programmed with Punch cards, and the other, A Swiss built SIP Vertical Jig Borer ran on magnetic tape.
Lots of Mazdas, but never a Miata. I sold plenty of 286s with a 20 neg hard drive and a monochrome monitor, and that was a good system for a lot of people at the time
Well I have used 8" floppies which most of your followers probably didn't know existed. So anyone who has not used an 8" Floppy or had to load programs from a Data Cassette is a pussy.
oh sorry, no I was thinking the DEC PDP-11 they took up wall space. That's cute in comparison. And yes I have seen those they were pretty common in offices.
Yes there was one rack mount 11/?? in the middle of the computer science lab and 20 or so 11/44 MiniMincs plus terminals on the desks. They still had three fullsized PCBs inside and shedloads of 74series chips (plus the floppies) but then they were only LSI 11s not VLSI.
Yeah they were doing a lot of that back in the 80's since there were not many options. I have seen it done a few times but your teammates were playing a serious game of feed the beast. There was a certain seriousness that was unmistakable. I recall they could jam and error out.
I used to edit TV (linearly, on ¾ & beta am video!) by manually putting my final project into a punch tape. It was usually 3AM, 5 hrs before online, when I realized I’d made a mistake & had to start over.
And if you think that was easy. My first time programming a computer involved me sitting in a room with 15 boxes of yellowish tan index cards with holes in them. Having to stick one card in at a time, take it, and place it in a box on the other side of me. (1978)
Figuring out how to boot a TANDY 1000-A with 640K onboard, but only ONE floppy, so that it would load DOS and then a TSR spellchecker, and THEN go into WordStar... that was fun. It did involve setting aside some of that memory for a RAMDisk (something else kids today have no clue about).
We had two of them (and an old Eagle PC with a Centronics printband printer connected) in the computer lab where I went to college. I kind of got designated as the "admin", as I'd figured out how to set things up so kids could use them for writing essays. /1
Until I'd patched a copy of WordStar with the Centronics control codes, we all had to use the library's IBM printball hybrid typewriters. Dot Matrix was not an acceptable format for final drafts. /fin
Booted and loaded apps on mainframes before that with 16mm paper punch tape readers. Hung the run tapes on an overhead line with clothes pins in the computer room. Damn we old. Lol
I was told in a JCL class that the cards were first read by brushes and they separated the zone and digit of "S" for machine readability. Later the cards were read by light which was more accurate. I took a PASCAL course at UMCP and carried a box and a 1/2 of my final project on these.
Yea I know. Saw that after text. I used to use an IBM Card Interpreter, our keypunch machine just punched the zones and digits then the interpreter would print the text.
Been around for a good long while, but managed to miss that era. I did cut my fair share of write-protect notches into 5.25" floppies to make them double sided, tho
I grew up with these as the endless supply of scratch paper on which to crayon, while hanging around the college computer lab lounge waiting for my mother to finish.
Also we had an endless supply of round clear plastic boxes, from 1/4” tape? Anyone know what that format was called?
That comment brought a tear to my eye. I think it was from muscle memory from regularly crying - after trying to boot it up, it promptly crashed.
When it booted up successfully, it was like winning the lottery.
And change the disc for every 10 pages you write. And remember to number the disc so you know what is on each one. I was the only person in my dorm with a computer in 1984. Discs were awful.
In a weird way, we had it easier. You had to learn how to use a computer, and indirectly you got the ability to do self-directed learning and appreciation for math (programming is easier if you already understand the concept of a variable)
Shout out to Amstrad CPC 464 users. Those were the days.
yeah wrote that just now too lol. one tiny bit to far, and it would still find it, load it, and after 20 minutes of loading, it gives a load error, and we start it all over again. :)
Toggle switches? Phttt, the only switches we had was grandma threatening us to push more copper wire through magnetic cores to go to the moon. /jk love u gamgam
Floppy disk was Next Gen.! Try the cassettes omg. with floppy you could DIR and you saw what was on it. Cassettes you needed your own papers with numbers on it that corresponded with a place the program code was. OMG the flashback i have of it omg :)
I bought a second hand c64. but the dude messed with the crew that is used to sync to the cassettes. I messed with it for 2 weeks, turning it very slowly every time for hours on end. Untill i finaly saw, FOUND GIANA SISTERS, omg I was 13, I think. I went out of my mind, it ran after that smoothly.
Luxury. I had to toggle-in the bootstrap loader before even getting anywhere near the OS on a 8” floppy. PDP-11/05 with RT-11. Lab data acquisition system with CAMAC racks for PhD experiments 1982-84
the first computer I had to boot (a PDP-8 I think) one had to flip the front panel switches to manually key in a very short program, which then loaded a more powerful loader program from a paper tape reader, which in turn was able to load the program you wanted from the paper tape reader
My first computer had to be booted by setting patterns of switches, pressing buttons, and then it read a cassette tape. Burroughs 1700. You had it easy!
Yes, very similar. Each switch (there were eight) setting was an instruction, then you pressed a button to execute it. Repeat (I think) four times with different settings and it started booting from the tape. Or didn't, depending on the phase of the moon and which way the wind was blowing.
Back in the day (early 1900s): To be honest if you have never had to crank your car to get it started with a crank handle then you have had it wasy and I think you're a pussy.
All these people in the replies trying to outdo you. I respect that you lived through the floppy disk era. I will say that when I started, we only had zeroes and we had to wait a few years until they invented ones.
Took me three days to type in balloon bust game in my Vic20 and then saved it to tape drive because before that nothing was saved. I got the game out of a PC Magazine .
First home computer I was allowed to use was a Wang 240 tower with DOS 1.0 and Basic 2.0. If I wanted a new game, I had to grab a PC magazine and enter the code myself.
The forums were NOT on this thing called "the Internet" but instead were hosted via BBS systems run by unwashed geeks in their spare time (I was one of them).
Trade Wars - take your turn, make your moves, and hang up, dude, there's a line.
Frequency Shift Keying (FSK) encoding was similar to the sequence that allowed digital devices to piggyback on an analog telephone network. A phone line carries only the small range of frequencies in which most human conversation takes place: about three hundred to three thousand hertz.
All I know is I had to plan well ahead if I wanted to play Bruce Lee on my Commodore 64. (that’s really cool that it uses this same tech as a modem, I never knew that.)
That's why the first PC I bought was a Tandy TL/2. Dos in ROM completed boot up in less tfat 20 secs. Came with a 3.5 in floppy that held 720k. Even though the bus was was only 8-bit I was able to get an adapter that allowed me to install a 120mb 16bit GD.
How does that saying go? My father studied war and politics so I could be free to study architecture and trade, and I studied architecture and trade so my children could be free to study art and poetry?
My late father-in-law was a programmer at IBM. He was still writing in "machine language".His son is learning so he can finish his father's last program.
I got boxes of Hollerith cards to use in a Scout project. Who can go technology older? There has to be one.
These pups who think that because I'm over 60 I can't handle the tech - fuck you, junior, I pioneered this shit. I'm sure you can do cool nonsense on Snapchat; I wrote DOS batch files.
They are also surprised when I know the lyrics to punk songs. Who do they think the punks of the late 70s are now?
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I could never fully grasp either, however I worked more with BASIC and only touched Fortran... lol
... Big upgrade from the original paper tape...
Wuss.
Those drives sounded like they were doing violent things to the disks.
That's a bit like the handle you had to turn at the front of an old motor to get the engine going.
The kids of today don't know they're born.
PIP anyone?
...and raise you MANUALLY toggling in the paper tape reader from the front panel. (DG Nova, 1980)
All solid state now.
One of the last pieces of immediately perceivable operation of computers... eclipsed by opaque magic.
We lose the tractable aspect though.
Can't believe that was (only) 36 years ago
Not like having to look up the specific sequences to set or deset 'underline' and then run a setup program to embed them into the word processor EXE.
If you’ve never had to boot up a computer from the front panel…
Shoebox full of these
My computer time was 2:30.
A.M.
I do remember you could change a digit with a hole
Pain in the ass prank for friends
Not all of them did that though
Also we had an endless supply of round clear plastic boxes, from 1/4” tape? Anyone know what that format was called?
I had to literally put my phone handset onto the Modem.
It was a separate component
And then, I had to dial the phone number of the computer I wanted to communicate with
What's internet? 🤣
Another phone number I still remember to this day, but I can't remember Mom's number today, and I call her five times a week
When it booted up successfully, it was like winning the lottery.
:)
(And I have the "reading cpu minicode via punchcards" - card, too...)
I have also used an 8" floppy to boot a Wang.
That sentence, taken out of context, can either get you arrested, beaten up, or a date.
Shout out to Amstrad CPC 464 users. Those were the days.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Amstrad_CPC464.jpg
My first PC didn’t have any hard disk, but I was lucky enough to have two 5.25” floppy disks, “a” and “b”!
That sound of Ms Dos loading!
Now it's the norm and disk storage is literally as cheap as chips.
Trade Wars - take your turn, make your moves, and hang up, dude, there's a line.
He didn't want to spend the money.
I get a call at home in Chicago telling me to fly to Kansas City, the computer blew up.
I get there, he says "I have backups" - holding up 8-in floppies.
I got boxes of Hollerith cards to use in a Scout project. Who can go technology older? There has to be one.
when I were a lad we had to boot 8 bit CP/M machines off an 8" floppy
They are also surprised when I know the lyrics to punk songs. Who do they think the punks of the late 70s are now?
My first laptop weighed 7 lbs and had a 100 MB hard drive…
By the time our family had our computer, it was the amazing Commodore Amiga.
All I want for Christmas is an edit button
I had a drive and converted files for people
Magnetic media? No toggle switches?
Lightweight.