Thread: Poll: you and computers

Tweet

I worked on the computer staff at Bradley University in 1962 when I was a sophomore. Our main computer was an IBM 1620 with a whole 16K (that's K, not M) of memory. It was the size of a small car. I learned Fortran - punched cards in and out. No tape, no disk. I also learned and taught Basic as a grad student.

In the 60's and 70's, I did quite a bit of application work on Burroughs B5500 and B6700 mainframes. We had moved up to teletype input and line printer output.

In 1982, the company I worked for equipped most of us with the first IBM PCs - with a mind-boggling 64K on board. Our main applications were Basic and VisiCalc.

The PC sitting on my desk now is more powerful than the Burroughs B6700 mainframe that did all our corporate systems and accounting back in the day.

Commodore Vic-20 was my first.
5 kb of RAM and a cassette drive for sequential data storage - Oooooh Too Cool -

Once I wrote and executed my fist 'Hello World' code, I was hooked.

Commodore VIC-20 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Originally Posted by Henry Rifle

Our main computer was an IBM 1620 with a whole 16K (that's K, not M) of memory. .

Hard to imagine isn't it Jack. My first job after the USAF (1970) was as a production expediter at Teledyne. We were making guidance computers for the Atlas Centaur missles. We hand wired a memory board (thin gauge copper wire through ferrite rings, if I remember correctly, on a board about 1' sq), also a mere 16k! The enclosure was a clamshell affair milled from solid billet aluminum.

Anyway, very interesting and revealing responses. Thanks folks.

Originally Posted by Bob Parmenter

Hard to imagine isn't it Jack. My first job after the USAF (1970) was as a production expediter at Teledyne. We were making guidance computers for the Atlas Centaur missles. We hand wired a memory board (thin gauge copper wire through ferrite rings, if I remember correctly, on a board about 1' sq), also a mere 16k! The enclosure was a clamshell affair milled from solid billet aluminum.

Anyway, very interesting and revealing responses. Thanks folks.

Bob, yeah that's Torodial Core Memory. I made a subtle joke about it in a computing thread on the board a while back. I had begun to think that nobody knew what it was.

Anyway, we had the same thing in our Delco Carousel IVE Inertial Navigation Systems. They were manufactured beginning in the late 70's we had a whopping 32K in them. Technology came a long way though in a short time and shrunk the size necessary as our "board" was (as I recall) a type of fabric that was folded over and over and eventually came out to about the size of two 9 volt batteries stacked together on their sides.

Amazing how much things change in such a short time....

The first computer that I got was in 1985. I have been working on them pretty much since.

Spent 15 years working on IBM Midrange systems (AS/400). Then moved on to software support (PC). Then on to PC repair. Now I do pretty much anything at work that involves a computer. I support approx 5000 computers at work. And 6 at home.

Not many dull moments with 3 teenage kids trying to mess everything up all of the time!

First exposure to these infernal machines was in the Navy in the early sixties; that's all it was, though, exposure - I never touched one, then. The company I spent my working life with started using them in local offices in about 1965, for accounting, meter reading data, and inventory control and planning. Our first home unit was in the mid to late seventies, IIRC, and the names of Atari, Commodore, and Radio Shack keep passing through my memory. Since then, we've had Apples, Macs, and Dells; have one Dell running, at this time, and two others in reserve, plus two Macs on the shelf. I sure wish I could figure out just how to really put these things to work, but when faced with a recalcitrant unit, I tend to revert to caveman, and reach for a hammer - not such a good thing.

Originally Posted by Bob Parmenter

Hard to imagine isn't it Jack. My first job after the USAF (1970) was as a production expediter at Teledyne. We were making guidance computers for the Atlas Centaur missles. We hand wired a memory board (thin gauge copper wire through ferrite rings, if I remember correctly, on a board about 1' sq), also a mere 16k! The enclosure was a clamshell affair milled from solid billet aluminum.

Anyway, very interesting and revealing responses. Thanks folks.

Hey Bob, betcha remember these!
The last one is a close-up of a core plane. The distance between the rings is roughly 1 mm (0.04 in). The green horizontal wires are X; the Y wires are dull brown and vertical, toward the back. The sense wires are diagonal, colored orange, and the inhibit wires are vertical twisted pairs

Yes Larry, I do. And I remember ours were all hand threaded while looking through a magnifier! Those gals had a lot more patience than I could have mustered.