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On 05/24/2012 12:14 PM, Joep L. Blom wrote:
On 24-05-12 16:06, Tony Sumner wrote:
On May 24, 2012, Jay Lozier wrote:

This trip down memory lane makes one feeil old. Anyone remember
teletypes with punched tape?

Of course. My favourite paper tape story. At AEE, Winfrith, we did
serious computing on the IBM704 at Risley in Lancashire. We would type
the program onto paper tape and run it though a teletype to send it by
phone to Risley. At their end they would punch it out and to check that
it was ok they would send it back. At the Winfrith end we then had the
original tape and a copy and we would hold these up to the light to
check for errors. If there were none we'd phone Risley and say yes ok
go ahead.  This was a communication protocol, yes? Later we installed a
punched card system so we could put the program on cards and fly them
to Risley by plane.

Tony


I assume you never worked with the folded papertape used with the DEC PDP-8! coded in ASCII. Years before we used an Electrologica X-1 with papertape coded in EBSDIC!You could edit the tapes with a manual punch and nontransparent sellotape. We thought punched cards were old-fashioned!.
Joep


DEC PDP 11 and similar was most of my main-frame and mini-main-frame work back in the 80's and early 90's. I used IBM main-frames in the late 70's bunch cards and dumb terminals in then in late 90's with terminals dumb and smart. In the mid 70's I used a teletype style printer/terminal connected via phone to a computer 50+ miles way, for my first coding experience, then went to punch cards before I ever got to use a dumb terminal CRT display and text editor to type in and edit program code for COBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC, RPG-II/III, Assembly, and a few other languages. Now people use PCs with "smart" color coded editors to help them code, edit, and debug their programs.

I wrote an RPG-III coding editor so it would be easier to line up the cryptic codes in their proper columns. It was well received at that place that used RPG-II/III. It took half the time to type in the programs in the dumb terminals.

I started my computer work experience when most computers I had "terminal" access to, or had to load tapes for, were bigger than all my apartment rooms combined, and then some. I worked a terminal with one that used more floor space than a basketball court. I remember when a college put up a Bulletin Board System [via phone modems] that had a brand new 10 MEG of drive space and the people could not think of why it needed so much space to store files. 10 MEG was too large to imagine using. Those were the days when floppies were floppy.

---

Well we really went off thread topic with this one.

As I stated in the original post, it was interesting that LO was listed under free Math software.

Now it seems we are talking about the "grand old days" of computers before they could fit on a desk.

I still know many people who do not have the money to buy a computer or if they have one be able to get online with broadband. In the '50 it was thought there was no need for more than 50 to 100 computers in the whole USA. Now there are millions of them in the USA, with people like me having several desktops/laptops running side by side when needed. Then add their smart phones, tablet phones, and the wifi reader/tablet non-phones that people [and kids] thing are a requirement it their lives. Well, this generation does not appreciate what their fathers and grandfathers had to deal with when they were working with computers in those early years when the smallest computer was the size of a stove or refrigerator.



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