I would like to clear something up.

[k6ccc]

5 minutes ago, Mr. P said:

Dang, you all are some old farts in here.  😁

Yea...

 

[tlogan]

Hi. My name is Tom and I'm an old fart.

Coleco Adam, anyone? Yeah, with the CMS OS? And cassette tapes? I added the 5 1/4 disk drive. Loudest printer EVER.

In 1979 the private school I was teaching at had a PDP 11. No monitor; keyboard and printer only. That's what got me started programming.  Sorry @hasslerk, I got rid of all my punch cards. Still have my blue Brown book, bit ruler, flow chart stencil and both IBM pocket guides. And a couple of old binders of IBM CoBol manuals lying around (although with Book Manager you don't need the paper anymore). As W.C. Fields said to Groucho Marx after showing him his attic full of liquor and Groucho having said, "But, Bill, Prohibition's been over for 20 years" W.C. said, "You never know when it might come back!

[k6ccc]

3 minutes ago, weigh2fast4u@yahoo.com said:

Throughout my journey with this hobby. I have yet to meet anyone younger than me. Lol everyone has been 40+. 
of course, all of our friends call us the old couple. Because we don’t fit in the this millennial junk 😆

I've run into a few.  Last year I had a 16 year old "kid" who lives couple blocks away ask if he could help me set up so he could learn.  He already does stage lighting.  So there are some younger lighting people around.

 

[hasslerk]

25 minutes ago, tlogan said:

5 1/4 disk drive, PDP 11

25 minutes ago, tlogan said:

 

So I guess you can say we have a museum in our basement.  We have my wife's old IBM clone, with amber monitor, with all the 5 1/4 floppies.  Also old Zip drives from the 90's and boxes of 3.5" diskettes.  I programmed on PDP 11s where you had to worry about caching your program in and out of memory, where adding one line of code caused hours of headaches.  Also programmed on VAX 11/780s for many years in Fortran.  In my office I have a Radio Shack catalog from 1981 (Trash 80's anyone?) and a Stereo Discounters catalog (reel-to-reel anyone?).  :)  Of course we had to get through all of this to get to where we are at today so that we can enjoy this hobby so much.

Edited September 2, 2021 by hasslerk
Corrected where my comment was

[dibblejr]

2 hours ago, weigh2fast4u@yahoo.com said:

hahahahaha…

Throughout my journey with this hobby. I have yet to meet anyone younger than me. Lol everyone has been 40+. 
of course, all of our friends call us the old couple. Because we don’t fit in the this millennial junk 😆

I help a guy since 2017. He is now 21

At one time I thought I was the baby here. LOL

I help 2 that are in their 70’s and 80’s one has multiple cancers.

JR

[Godney]

Yes we all are a bunch of OLD Farts here because my first computer was a Radio Shack TRS 80 using DOS operating system with 4K memory and was released in 1977 when i was 13 years old.

[dgrant]

Oh come on...you are all newbies! My first computer wasn't mine rather the USAF's but it was analog and was embedded into an F4. I was working on Mainframes when the first TRS80 came out, then Commodore64's. I still didn't own one till I built my first 386. I had more mainframe power at my fingertips at work than most people ever saw in the lifetimes. First mainframe though was a SEL 840A along with a mag tape drive but used an ASR33 Teletype with a paper tape reader to load the bootstrap so the mag tape would run. My first code was machine code directly to the CPU which we use to be able to repair!. Tons of ECL logic cards and (4) 8K core memory modules, 24 bit machine. CPU was huge with four major double-sided backplanes that swung outward and this was just the actual processor(CPU). Nowadays the internal parts of a CPU are so small that you require a very high-powered microscope or more. Yeah, technology has changed a lot over a very amount of time. My watch has more computing power than the main CPU in the Apollo capsules. This laptop I'm on this second has more power than the original Univac computer that helped develop the atomic bomb.

[dibblejr]

2 minutes ago, dgrant said:

Oh come on...you are all newbies! My first computer wasn't mine rather the USAF's but it was analog and was embedded into an F4. I was working on Mainframes when the first TRS80 came out, then Commodore64's. I still didn't own one till I built my first 386. I had more mainframe power at my fingertips at work than most people ever saw in the lifetimes. First mainframe though was a SEL 840A along with a mag tape drive but used an ASR33 Teletype with a paper tape reader to load the bootstrap so the mag tape would run. My first code was machine code directly to the CPU which we use to be able to repair!. Tons of ECL logic cards and (4) 8K core memory modules, 24 bit machine. CPU was huge with four major double-sided backplanes that swung outward and this was just the actual processor(CPU). Nowadays the internal parts of a CPU are so small that you require a very high-powered microscope or more. Yeah, technology has changed a lot over a very amount of time. My watch has more computing power than the main CPU in the Apollo capsules. This laptop I'm on this second has more power than the original Univac computer that helped develop the atomic bomb.

USAF always had the good stiff while we Marines had the hand me downs

 

 

[weigh2fast4u@yahoo.com]

Lol this thread went WAY far away from what I said in the beginning. Lol 

[dibblejr]

4 hours ago, weigh2fast4u@yahoo.com said:

Lol this thread went WAY far away from what I said in the beginning. Lol 

Is that me…. Is that you

criss cross applesauce 

Edited September 3, 2021 by dibblejr

[Mr. P]

9 hours ago, weigh2fast4u@yahoo.com said:

Lol this thread went WAY far away from what I said in the beginning. Lol 

They usually do dibble, I mean Chance.

[dgrant]

15 hours ago, weigh2fast4u@yahoo.com said:

Lol this thread went WAY far away from what I said in the beginning. Lol 

Yeah, just having fun 

[Old Sarge]

Heyyy Rocky.... Wanna watch me pull a wabbit out of my......

[ItsMeBobO]

On 9/1/2021 at 11:43 PM, Don said:

Loved my TI 99/4a. Was my first PC.
2400 baud was my first modem.

I'm not as old as some of you. :) I feel better now.

Im coming to this thread late!   Im old too.   TI 99/4a was my first owned computer.  It used the tv for a monitor and had NO hard drive.  I had to use a cassette tape player to save my basic programs.  Watching the tape counter was the only way to find and not overwrite your programs.  But three years before that in 1977 I took my first college programming class in Fortran.  No monitors at all and no disk storage.  I had to type my programs and the input data onto punched cards and kept a rubber band around the deck to keep them in order.   It was unforgiving of typos.  Each time I wanted to run the program I had to wait in line at the card reader machine then wait for the printout.  It told me if the compile was a success and then ran the program which had to output its results to paper.   Having a screen to see my typing and correct it and switching to a cassette tape to save my work was a big upgrade back then. 

Edited October 12, 2021 by ItsMeBobO

[weigh2fast4u@yahoo.com]

WOW. All of this is crazy. 
 

[tlogan]

1 hour ago, weigh2fast4u@yahoo.com said:

WOW. All of this is crazy. 
 

and yet, here we are.

[Durty]

On 9/2/2021 at 10:26 AM, dibblejr said:

You meant to say Morris Code and or telegraph. When I joined the USMC and went to Japan the only way to comm back home was via the USO and the telegraph i think.  Always could hear the person repeating what I was saying. Because of miss communication the old technology made me miss the fact that my Grandfather was very sick and dying. 

JR

I joined 1997 and was a Morse Code operator but they ended up phasing it out after about 10 years or less.  It's almost like when my Father-in-Law came in as a Flame Thrower and they phased that out after a few years...of course, not as cool...

haha.

Semper Fi.

[ItsMeBobO]

On 9/2/2021 at 9:58 AM, hasslerk said:

I still have mine in a box in the basement, along with the 12" black and white TV I used with it and the cassette tape player used for backups.

I also still have all my punch cards from college (CoBOL and Fortran decks) which were executed via the College's NCR mainframe (circa 1981).

Yes I am old.

Hey ! Another cassette player guy! I missed it earlier.    My HS class was 1976 but no computer classes were offered till college. I learned CoBOL in 1983 and got paid to do it until about 1996.  A lot of VSAM DB2 JCL CICS and even some assembly language in there.  I did a few years around '86 on some portable hand held computers with radios inside and tiny screens which were used in huge warehouses for pick bins.   Then we started upgrading our entire software inventory to com/DLLs for YK2.  I did a lot of years on the huge footprint  IBM monochrome terminals which were 80x24 characters (no color or pictures) and the keyboard was like a brick.  

 

 

[TheDucks]

1 hour ago, ItsMeBobO said:

Hey ! Another cassette player guy! I missed it earlier.    My HS class was 1976 but no computer classes were offered till college. I learned CoBOL in 1983 and got paid to do it until about 1996.  A lot of VSAM DB2 JCL CICS and even some assembly language in there.  I did a few years around '86 on some portable hand held computers with radios inside and tiny screens which were used in huge warehouses for pick bins.   Then we started upgrading our entire software inventory to com/DLLs for YK2.  I did a lot of years on the huge footprint  IBM monochrome terminals which were 80x24 characters (no color or pictures) and the keyboard was like a brick.  

 

 

IBM 3270 (green screen) 1/2 duplex EBCDiC. those things were heavy  only topped by the 5080 Color CAD terminal

[tlogan]

16 hours ago, ItsMeBobO said:

My HS class was 1976 but no computer classes were offered till college. I learned CoBOL in 1983 and got paid to do it until about 1996.  A lot of VSAM DB2 JCL CICS and even some assembly language in there. 

Sounds familiar! HS, 74, Learned CoBOL early 80s (whatever year it was under Reagan that the Air Traffic Controllers went on strike and got fired...there were three of them in my class!). Lots of CoBOL, JCL, Utilities (SYNCSORT!), CICS, Fortran, VSAM, DB2, IDMS. Programmed into the mid 2000s. I did some pretty amazing things in the early 2000s with IDMS for the government but they kept saying it couldn't be done (no matter how times we demo'd it)  and then never implemented it.  Got into management  and came back to it for a while in 2014 for a year. And it all came back to me in no time...like a bad dream! Back to management now.  Close to retiring but think I could code CoBOL forever if I could something 100% remote.