Posted on 11/30/2004 5:10:58 PM PST by Fiddlstix
thanks for making me laugh! there some of the funniest people here .I love it.
& if it's good enough for (Kerry's) "Jenjis", it's good enough for me as well!
I'm going out on a limb with a tech prediction here...
"Computers of the future may have only 1000 vacuum tubes, and perhaps weigh only 1 1/2 tons."
-- Popular Mechanics, March, 1949
Cool...I always wanted a steering wheel on my computer. Where's the horn at?
Darn!
You heartless sleuth you!
...good job.
No sleuthing...previously burned by it...see comment #24...
Thank goodness for solid state electronics.
ping
Double steering wheels. they must have envisioned some cool games for the future
Thanks Meek. It's amazing how technology changes.
It had a riding mouse. One scientist was on the mouse and the other was watching the screen giving hand signals trying to position the cursor.
LOL! Thanks for the post.
Ya think?
Sometimes I yearn for the simplicity and pureness of my old Commodore 64.
That giant, chrome, cargo ship steering wheel is the only thing I wish I had on this computer. OK, a couple dozen of them dials to indicate stuff would be cool too.
For a moment you had me fooled too, until I read Snopes' article.
Not too far off actually. Back in the 60s I cut my teeth on IBM's 360/20 - 3 1/2 feet high, eight feet long, blinking lights (mandatory) and, GASP!, 16K of memory.
We wrote in RPG then and used a card compiler. When you wrote a program that exceeded memory, it just printed "Program too big" and kept on blinking. When a new compiler told us how big our programs were it was considered a breakthrough, as was the fantastic 7 1/2 meg disk drives that were a foot wide and almost as high - looked like giant cakes under glass.
Then we went to eight INCH floppy disks that held 2,000 (count them) characters and we thought we could rule the world with that advancement.
So, while the pic is a hoax, it could well have been, given the thinking of the time.
One interesting watershed for me was how we were hounded to desk check our code for errors as time on the computer was so expensive. Then one day years later when I was hassled about it I pointed out that the compters had speeded up so much it cost more for the human to check for errors than the computer.
Oh yeah, when companies first got their computers they put them in a giant room surrounded by glass so everyone could see their latest marvel. Then the Weathermen started blowing things up and the computers went behind walls with controlled entry doors.
Hey! Where'd you get my picture? :-)
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