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Well, let's ask him. He's probably still alive. :D
My Dad worked for GEIS and he often brought one of these home to fool around with. The first ones you actually typed up your batch file on ticker tape and then dailed into the compiler and uploaded the batch file. This was pretty much the same as any data center except that instead of punch cards you had a ticker tape.
The laptop (mine), circa 1986.
First CALCULATOR I ever used was in 1967, in the physics department of the college I attended; size of a big typewriter — it took a whole minute for it to give the answer to a square root. It’s hard to imagine those times, even though I lived them.
This reminds me of the ancient modem they tried out a few weeks back, it had a wooden case! It was 300 baud or something
I read recently that the typical cellphone of today has about the same amount of computing power as the Apollo 11 lunar module had.Amazing!
My first experience with a minicomputer was with a DEC PDP 11/45 that you booted via paper tape.
God forbid anything happened to that tape :) We stored two fresh duplicates in a bank vault.
The first “desktop computer” I used was a Wang in the mid to late 1970’s. It had about an 8” green screen with tiny dots that made up the letters and numbers showing on it. They were easiest to see in dim light, so we had to remove half the lights in the room that it was kept in. It did not have a hard drive or floppy discs. It has an ordinary cassette tape for storing programs. It had 8K of memory (which was a costly upgrade from the 4K standard). With a pinwheel printer, it cost nearly $20,000. Of course, we had to write our own programs in Fortran.
I asked what else was available. I was told the IBM PC was just out at a mere $6000. I declined.
Then, he said, we have something they're calling the Volkswagen of computers, the Osborne I. It had a software bundle including word processing (WordStar), spreadsheet (SuperCalc) and, this month only, a certificate for a free copy of dBASEII. In addition it had two disk drives, a display that would scroll to 80 characters and was portable -- the first of its kind! And, best of all, just $1795 drive out.
To this very day I thank the late Adam Osborne that I was able to get started computing with that machine. In time I bought a second one to use at the office, then I bought out a CPA firm, three more machines. Today I still have two of them and my son has another.
I think I'll try to fire one of them up one day before long. With a Cape Cod or two in my glass, it ought to be a sweet journey down memory lane.
Think any of 'em still work?
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Send treats to the troops...
Great because you did it!
www.AnySoldier.com
Bit significance depends on if you system used Little or Big Endian alignment. Started with and old Honeywell 2020 in college, all programming done on Hollerith 80 column cards. Hated it when you dropped your program of 1-2 thousand cards and they weren’t numbered like you could do with the later IBM punch card machines, of which at that time were in short supply. First remote terminal was an old Texas Instruments hardcopy thermal printer. I think it was a model 300, don’t remember anymore, had a 300 baud acousta coupler that was about circa 1982-3 time frame I would log into customers field test systems for DEC’s testing of 11780’s in a cluster environment. Pretty heady days in the computer industry at that point.
Now days most of our code is written in foreign countries and who knows what type of phone home code they are slipping in and even our DOD uses that crap. I’m coming to the close of my career in the industry. But those 70’s and 80’s were great days in the business.
Seeing those old machines brought back a lot of memories.
Under my reloading bench, in a box, wrapped in canvas, are two (2) Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 laptop computers. They still work.
Radio Shack had a somewhat tarnished reputation when it came to computers but the Model 100 was the first laptop on the market. I remember when President Reagan met with Gorbachev in Iceland. I saw two reporters sitting in a hallway, busily typing their stories on their M-100 laptops. The computer had a ‘fair’ word processor and a built-in modem that transmitted data at a whopping 300 baud. All that and it would run almost all day on four AA-batteries!
1968 was also the year of what is simply known as “The Demo”:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8734787622017763097
We had these at one place I worked. It’s just an ASR-33 that doesn’t have a pedestal and comes with a carrying case. We were still using the ASR-33s into the early 90’s.
Much nicer is the TI Silent 700 terminal. It came out in ‘71.
http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/X1612.99
I still have mine. It has the lower case option, local memory, and the parallel interface. Woo-hoo! About 12 lbs. Much better than an ASR-33 in a tuba case. ;)
I don’t have my original Kaypro II any more (traded it for a bench power supply, bench VOM and a handheld DVM), but I still have a souped-up Kaypro IV and Kaypro 10. The IV is really sweet: amber screen with manual adjustments, upgraded ROM, 256K RAM, 40MB hard drive, three internal half-height floppies—each one reads a different format—and an external 8” floppy connector.
That add pre-dates me a bit but it reminds me of my days at the dawn of the PC revolution. I was selling PCs out of a store front in West Hartford CT in the early 80’s. When I started, we sold California Computer Systems and Zeniths and then added Kaypros and Osbornes all running CPM...basically they were Wordstar machines (remember CTRL K?). We also sold Apple PC’s and Corvus hard drives.
Other random things I remember from then:
Videx Video cards (extend the screen from 40 to 80 colums)
Intro of the IBM PC, AT, XT, PCjr,
SSDD, DSDD floppies
They ‘grey” market
Intro of the Apple II, The Apple III, Lisa and the Mac
Visi Calc, Visi Dex, Visi File etc...
Multiplan
Drinking beer, eating pizza and stuffing memory chips into quadram memory cards till 3 am
40% - 50% margin on hardware