Deep inside a Delaware strip mall closet, an old, forgotten Pentium computer's NPC.EXE is running wild, compiling deranged and out-dated modmails that read... well, retarded like THIS! Any local frogs up for a mission? Please find & unplug this poor museum relic of a PC! It is suffering! 🐸
(media.greatawakening.win)
YOU'VE GOT BETA MALE!
We had no modems or internet.....
We had a keyboard and a punch card machine with no monitor in my first computer class. We would write and run a program and then comeback in 1 to 10 hours and look at the results on paper. Their was only one computer on the whole campus shared by everyone.
Yep, I had that also. Fortran 77 on punch cards which we'd drop off at some counter for someone to run at some point and then you'd come back to find the output. Sometimes, the output would indicate one of the cards had an error so all that time was wasted as your program didn't run and produce any output. You had to fix the card and resubmit your deck.
Wait 12 hours to find out you missed a comma and it's due in two hours.
Math is hard....
Fortran 77? Luxury! We used Fortran IV at UNIVERSITY in 1970. We waited till next day to get the print-out that said:
SYNTAX ERROR AT LINE 0001
We had pencil and paper
You were rich then.
Some at the time didn't even have that.
Yeah, I knew Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm when they were scratching in the dirt with a stick.
My mother did not have electricity or indoor plumbing until she was about 10, and my mom was from a relatively well to do family. And my dad no indoor plumbing when a kid, but always had electricity even when there was no electricity in the town. His dad ran a chicken hatchery so they had a couple Kohler generators running all the time.
I even remember people in the neighborhood that still had old outhouses still in yard even though by then they had indoor plumbing.
Luxury! We lived in t' brown paper bag in t' middle o' t' road.
(Monty Python, anyone?)
I used an outhouse for a year when I was 5 and we pumped drinking water out of the lake. And we still used it off and on for years. We were not poor but dad had everything tied up in his buisness......
Yeah at my first base I was on a mainframe that still used both punch cards and paper tape. It had the disk platters that looked like a big cake with a handle on top.
One time I had to hit the emergency power off button when a new guy dumped a mop bucket full of water by the CPU. The noise of all of the disk platters crashing sounded like someone was torturing a cat. When I left that base they made a plaque for me made out of one of those disk platters. Oh - I got a medal for saving the mainframe from either burning up or shorting out when I killed the power. They saved a platter for me.
I remember those.
I use to work on systems with racks of drives that when you powered them up it sounded like a cross between a jet and choo choo train talking off. Whistling, humming and click-a-tee click.
I was fortunate to be in a trade school in the early 1970's where the Board of Ed had an IT satellite office, with their computer! When their 2 programmers weren't using the computer, we got to run our stacks of cards (programs) through, and had them as our mentors. Was set up to function as their office, so we learned it all, keypunch, sorter, interpreter, printer. Also, since they didn't want us banging the keys, we got to learn typing on the IBM selectrics instead of the manual typewriters. Yes, I'm old....
My dad only had radio but he did work with the first computers in his anti- aircraft unit.
He had to de- bug, actuality clean the bugs off the tubes
I miss that old sound of a 557 interpreter ca chunk ca chunk ca chunk, and the sorter I think was the 082. They had to wiring boards. And I worked on keypunches 024, 026, 029, 129 and 059 verifier.
Still got a tube of silver wires that go into wire contact relays. Sometimes when I would go to a call, the girls would bring me their jewelry chains that had broken, and I would fix them with my contact wires.
Good memories!
Who had to wire boards?
Control Panel\Plugboard. 557 Interpreters you could control certain machine functions through the control panel which I called wiring board.
I was never trained on 557, but I remember things like zero print, and significant digits, controlling the stackers and other operations.
The operators set up the control panel depending on what they needed to do. Or the maintenance person could use to test the machine function.
You can see one here on this 557.
80 places baby