On Sat, Oct 9, 2010 at 3:07 AM, Earl Miles <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:merlin@logrus.com">merlin@logrus.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="im">On 10/8/2010 10:25 PM, <a href="mailto:jeff@ayendesigns.com">jeff@ayendesigns.com</a> wrote:<br>
> Whoa! Retirement age??!! I used punch cards, card sorters, wrote device<br>
> drivers to get the keyboard to talk to the cpu, developed functions to<br>
> store and retrieve records from files before databases, and wrote my<br>
> first few dozen apps in mnemonic assembler, used 8" hard-sectored<br>
> floppies, a converted IBM selectric as line printer, CP/M, PC-DOS,<br>
> Windows 1, and remember my jaw dropping when they rolled out the first<br>
> CRT (you can backspace?!)... and I've got at almost 20 years yet until I<br>
> retire, though I can take up a collection if I need to go sooner!<br>
<br>
</div>20 years from retirement makes you only a few years older than I am. I<br>
remember the 8" floppies, </blockquote><div><br>Did you ever see a mainframe that had its firmware on one of those?<br>And when it booted, perhaps once a week, you got a prompt on the console<br>to flip the diskette so it would read the other site. <br>
<br>After that it was the operating system. <br><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">IBM selectrics, CP/M (though I missed Windows<br>
1 since I got my start in the Apple and Commodore sides)...but rarely<br>
did I ever see punch cards even hanging around serious geeks in the 80s.<br></blockquote><div><br>Mainframes is where it mainly was in the 80s. At that time, UNIX systems <br>were available and they used "glass terminals", hence vi (visual editor) rather<br>
than ed. The original "terminals" were teletypes with paper output.<br> <br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
Maybe it's background related. Or maybe the 80s were longer than I<br>
remember them being. But my memory is that by the late 70s, punch cards<br>
were pretty much on their way out, and by the time PCs came to market in<br>
the early 80s, nobody was using them except for places with legacy<br>
systems that couldn't be upgraded -- and that's 40 years ago now.<br></blockquote><div><br>Saw punched cards in production in 1990 and maybe 1991. Again, older<br>mainframes.<br> <br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
I remember visiting a facility that used punch cards in the 80s, but<br>
even they thought they were antiques at that point.<br>
<br>
Just to check my history, I did a quick google and found some terminals<br>
with monochrome displays, I assume CRTs, from 1969. That's 40 years ago<br>
by itself. If you were a working adult in the 60s, that'd make you late<br>
50s at best, and late 50s isn't 20 years from retirement age (whether or<br>
not people retire at retirement age is another story). </blockquote><div><br>No, the timeline is a bit shifted. Cards were used in the 80s, and if
someone was in early to mid 20s then, then they still have 1.5 decades,
give or take, to retire.<br> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">If you were a kid<br>
in the 60s and happened to be near people who used the stuff, that's<br>
pretty lucky. I know as a teenager in the 80s I had to work pretty hard<br>
to get near computers until I managed to wheedle my parents into getting<br>
me one.<br>
</blockquote></div><br>Yes. <br><br>Sinclair ZX Spectrum!<br>-- <br>Khalid M. Baheyeldin<br><a href="http://2bits.com">2bits.com</a>, Inc.<br><a href="http://2bits.com">http://2bits.com</a><br>Drupal optimization, development, customization and consulting.<br>
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