Well, maybe not the dawn but at least the early morning.

As I approach retirement (I'm so short I can sit on a dime.) I look back at a long career in computer technology and wonder at the changes. So I thought I would start a series of posts over the next couple of pre-retirement months and write about the early days of computing when it was called "Data Processing". I would love to hear the memories of other vintage folks on the subject.

Here's a little ditty from back in the day. Who can tell me what this is all about?

To please the she's
Who punch the keys
Distinguish these:
I's from ones
and twos from Z's,
S's from fives
and U's from V's.
If these rules
You will apply
Your deck will come through
With an i for an i
and a 2 for a 2.

 

Kinda’ reminds me of the IBM 024 Card Punch and IBM 026 operators who had fits reading the assembler programmers handwriting on their coding forms. Hollerith rules!

Edit: Oops. Forgot about the 029 card punch, which was the all time best.

gary

 

Back in 1983 our CPA firm purchased a mini-computer system from Digital Equipment for around $60,000. I remember loading the removable drives which were the size of a dinner plate and about 3 inches high. Can't be sure of the capacity, but they were less than one megabyte.

 

As a programmer, I remember having six large Hollerith card cabinets filled with hundreds of thousands of cards. During this time-frame IBM had promoted Time Sharing Option (TSO) which allowed programmers to enter their source statements from a workstation. From there they had the ability to save their information onto Direct Access Storage Devices (DASD) and the ability to submit the source for compilation and execution on a mainframe; their submitted tasks were prioritized, queued and the results delivered to the workstation for the programmer’s perusal. TSO was a major breakthrough in interactive programming and communications. It was so revolutionary at the time, but it seems so prehistoric by today’s standards.


gary

 

My IBM PC had two 3 inch floppy drives. I'd load my Microsoft Multiplan (I graduated from VisiCalc to Supercalc to Multiplan) on one disk and my data files from another. Early on my brother in law, working for a tech company, brought me a 10 mb hard drive. I was amazed by how much data it could hold. A few weeks later he brought me a 20 mb drive. I told him not to upgrade me any more as I now had enough storage space to run the city of Cincinnati on my computer.

I started out running CP/m but quickly graduated to Dos. I don't recall which version, it might've been 2.0.

I guess everyone streams their audio today. I oftentimes think back to my collection of 78 rpm Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith records. Remarkably, the format for music has change about 8 or 9 times in our lifetimes.

 

The days at the Univ of Cincy..... Fortran programming on punch cards..... Severe warnings about putting the system into a do loop....

Was the first one at work to get a desktop PC.... Just showed up on my desk.... No instructions, no training. Thank goodness had one at home that I had been playing with.

I remember when 1 gig hard drives were $1k..... Running Stacker on my two 256 meg hard drives....

Using Lotus123 and Wordperfect....

 

I remember all this stuff. I ran production from home back in the 70s. Had a "portable" computer the size of a suitcase that I plugged my phone into.

 

My first computer was a Atari 800. Our division manager bought 2 and gave me one to learn and teach him. It came with a cassette drive/storage unit.

The second computer he got me was a Allen Bradley ladder logic translator that also ran CPM. It had three 8" floppy drives that held 160KB each.

The third computer he got me was a IBM PC-XT. It came with a gold monochrome monitor and a 5MB hard drive. I told that I would never run out of storage space! It was only about 2 months before I upgraded it to 10MB. WOW!

All of the above happened within a year.

BTW, he never did learn to use the damn things no mater how had I tried to teach him. I even took a college course in his name to "help" him. It helped me but he was always lost

 

remember this?


I can remember moving up to a 3 inch DEC mag tape.
Formatted it had almost 64K of storage.

of course then i went and pulled abrain muscle when i saw this.



yup 256 Gig in a little card about the size of your pinky nail.

 

I started with a Commodore 64, and a 5 inch drive. My friend wasn't so lucky- he had the cassette player.

HS, punchcards that got sent out nightly, and then a TSO and a telex/tape machine. Woo Hoo- results in 5 minutes, not overnight. Worked for a local IT guy (hardware reseller and some custom coding). I remember the first hard card he got - a 10 MB drive that fit into the motherboard.

In college, I worked in the computing center, doing 'networking'. In reality, I made cables, matching colors to the chart, putting on the pins and then building the connectors. On a fun day, I'd get to trace twisted pair lines between buildings trying to find the loose connection. Could take days sometimes to get through all the punchdown blocks. It also wasn't uncommon then for a PC to have 3 network cards in it, each plugged into a different jack on the wall, and the user had to boot and select the right one. Am I on the IBM network today, the Sperry system we had or something else.

I also remember when I first started at my current employer 21 years ago. Our VP of IT basically said something like "No one will ever need more than an IBM PS2 model 70 with 2 MB of RAM" Oh have times changed.