December 19, 2011 at 4:19 pm
WayneS (12/19/2011)
bitbucket-25253 (12/19/2011)
Another quirk - those old machines when shut down were restarted by reading a series of commands from a roll of punched paper tape. Doubt if many or even anyone remembers that medium.5-hole or 8-hole?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_tape
You might be interested in this history of data storage media: http://www.pcworld.com/article/188661/from_paper_tape_to_data_sticks_the_evolution_of_removable_storage.html (In my old college programming classes, I used punched card and cassette tapes. In my first job, they used "disk packs"; a later job used mag tape reels. I've also used tape cartridges, ROM cartridges (games), floppys, opticals, MO, Zip (remember the "click-of-death"?), flopticals, SparQ, various flash formats, and now USB.)
... now that I've suitably aged myself...
I fondly remember our TRS-80 and loading programs from cassette. When we got our first HD it was a HUGE 10 meg. Back in 95 I worked for a company that was using an optical jukebox to store data, it was the size of a phonebooth and had a mechanical arm that would load and move optical disks. I believe its capacity was a terrabyte.
--------------------------------------
When you encounter a problem, if the solution isn't readily evident go back to the start and check your assumptions.
--------------------------------------
It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.
What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?
You ask a glass of water. -- Douglas Adams
December 19, 2011 at 5:02 pm
Ron (AKA Bitbucket),
You were spoiled having as much as 32K (I assume bytes) to work with, let alone be able to chain to multiple segments. I'm certainly not old enough to have dealt with mid-1950's equipment, but I did have the honor a few years ago to meet one of the original developers of MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Recognition) and the ERMA (see http://www.sri.com/about/timeline/erma-micr.html) hardware for Bank of America and Stanford Research Institute. He described the challenge of directly writing machine code that would fit in 1K -- Bits, not Bytes. And if my memory is faulty, it may have been as much as 8K bits, but I doubt that. It was literal core memory -- an array of wires criss-crossing through tiny magnetic doughnuts.
Yes, I knew GE made computers. They manufactured the ERMA equipment, and then full-blown mainframes in a division later sold to Honeywell. I doubt any are still in service, but they were used by San Francisco City College and BART(Bay Area Rapid Transit) among others as recently as the early 1980's.
Mention of the punch-tape boot sequence reminds me of the System 360 with its Selectric typewriter built-in console and LED array flashing the contents of the registers. Seemed so modern and normal thirty-five years ago and so kludgy and primitive now.
December 19, 2011 at 5:33 pm
john.arnott Posted Today @ 7:02 PM
Ron (AKA Bitbucket),
You were spoiled having as much as 32K (I assume bytes) to work with, let alone be able to chain to multiple segments. I'm certainly not old enough to have dealt with mid-1950's equipment, but I did have the honor a few years ago to meet one of the original developers of MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Recognition) and the ERMA (see http://www.sri.com/about/timeline/erma-micr.html) hardware for Bank of America and Stanford Research Institute. He described the challenge of directly writing machine code that would fit in 1K -- Bits, not Bytes. And if my memory is faulty, it may have been as much as 8K bits, but I doubt that. It was literal core memory -- an array of wires criss-crossing through tiny magnetic doughnuts.
How well I remember looking at the memory boards that:
It was literal core memory -- an array of wires criss-crossing through tiny magnetic doughnuts
The edge of the board that was stuck into the system was gold plated, and after time that gold would tarnish -- bingo no access to that memory board -- so every few months or so we would pull the boards and polish that gold plate, had to keep the system running one way or another. Oh and when the IBM service individual came to visit and saw what we had done, we would be reminded that our working (maintaining) the machine was forbidden by contract.
Waynes asked if it was 5 or 8 hole punched tape and for the life of me I can not recall. I do remember we were deadly afraid of the tape breaking, so it fell to me to punch a duplicate using a mylar backing -- I did snip a length off a reel of mag tape and used it.
Another memory - we loved to drive newbies nuts, would take a reel of mag tape run it until the end. The end of tape/ start of tape markers were a thin strip of silver foil (about an inch in length) folded around and secured to the tape. We would cut the EOT off ... and ask a newbie to rewind the reel of tape .... and watch them go nuts as it shoot off the reel and then they were told they would have to sit and rewind that thousand foot of tape by hand.
I know wickipedia has a definition for the term "Bitbucket". On our 1401 the printer was designated as LU (Logical Unit) 6 and LU 0 was the Bitbucket .. often used after looking at a page or two of output and knowing that the program was not performing as intended, so switching output to LU 0 ... and thus hiding our mistakes.
December 19, 2011 at 8:31 pm
bitbucket-25253 (12/19/2011)
Evil Kraig F (12/19/2011)
Good lord. Some of you are Older than Steam!I'm not even going to get in this old fogie contest, best I can offer is starting out programming Basic on an 8088 in my mom's office when I was 12. Which is probably Iron Age in comparison theory to the Bone Clubs y'all worked with. Wow!
It's wierd to feel young in an online forum these days. Woot woot! I must game too much.
Not quite older than steam after all we could always rub two sticks together over some dried grass and cook a meal, that is if we had anything to cook.
But getting somewhat serious - computers / programming / operating systems have come a LONG ways. I can remember when indirect addressing was not yet thought of, and all your code and data had one of two choices,
1. Fit into 32K of memory or
2. You composed (wrote) segmented code, with a main and the main called segments into memory .. my first payroll program consisted of a main and some 9 segments. At that time the so call standards said a main could call a segment, but a segment could NOT return to main. Well that was NEVER adopted by IBM, General Electric, Dec, HP and others (Yes at one time GE made computers - main frame size). Now you can code for days on end, compile and run it .. indirect addressing takes place behind the scenes. We had to divide the program code such that each segment could fit into 16K of core minus space taken by the main segment. Talk about fun and frustration -- one of the reasons I adopted a crew hair cut -- when frustrated I could not pull it out roots and all.
Somehow or other we (old fogies) proved the worth of computers to our managements and so the market grew and grew until it is what it is today mainly as a result of our friend Microsoft ... I can remember talking with a MS team manager and inquiring about what was then called ACCESS and was informed that it could if properly used function as well as a rolodex, you know those individual address cards on a spindle sitting on the corner of your desk.
Another quirk - those old machines when shut down were restarted by reading a series of commands from a roll of punched paper tape. Doubt if many or even anyone remembers that medium.
I remember paper tape. Those chads from those and punch cards made awesomely hard to get of the hair confetti at football games
UCCS had an HP computer that paper tape was the only way to load programs.
December 19, 2011 at 8:35 pm
john.arnott (12/19/2011)
Ron (AKA Bitbucket),You were spoiled having as much as 32K (I assume bytes) to work with, let alone be able to chain to multiple segments. I'm certainly not old enough to have dealt with mid-1950's equipment, but I did have the honor a few years ago to meet one of the original developers of MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Recognition) and the ERMA (see http://www.sri.com/about/timeline/erma-micr.html) hardware for Bank of America and Stanford Research Institute. He described the challenge of directly writing machine code that would fit in 1K -- Bits, not Bytes. And if my memory is faulty, it may have been as much as 8K bits, but I doubt that. It was literal core memory -- an array of wires criss-crossing through tiny magnetic doughnuts.
Yes, I knew GE made computers. They manufactured the ERMA equipment, and then full-blown mainframes in a division later sold to Honeywell. I doubt any are still in service, but they were used by San Francisco City College and BART(Bay Area Rapid Transit) among others as recently as the early 1980's.
Mention of the punch-tape boot sequence reminds me of the System 360 with its Selectric typewriter built-in console and LED array flashing the contents of the registers. Seemed so modern and normal thirty-five years ago and so kludgy and primitive now.
In the early 80's NORAD used Honeywell 6080's to support Missle Warning and tracking of objects in space. Used a customized version of the GCOS operating system.
December 19, 2011 at 8:39 pm
bitbucket-25253 (12/19/2011)
john.arnott Posted Today @ 7:02 PM
Ron (AKA Bitbucket),
You were spoiled having as much as 32K (I assume bytes) to work with, let alone be able to chain to multiple segments. I'm certainly not old enough to have dealt with mid-1950's equipment, but I did have the honor a few years ago to meet one of the original developers of MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Recognition) and the ERMA (see http://www.sri.com/about/timeline/erma-micr.html) hardware for Bank of America and Stanford Research Institute. He described the challenge of directly writing machine code that would fit in 1K -- Bits, not Bytes. And if my memory is faulty, it may have been as much as 8K bits, but I doubt that. It was literal core memory -- an array of wires criss-crossing through tiny magnetic doughnuts.
How well I remember looking at the memory boards that:
It was literal core memory -- an array of wires criss-crossing through tiny magnetic doughnuts
The edge of the board that was stuck into the system was gold plated, and after time that gold would tarnish -- bingo no access to that memory board -- so every few months or so we would pull the boards and polish that gold plate, had to keep the system running one way or another. Oh and when the IBM service individual came to visit and saw what we had done, we would be reminded that our working (maintaining) the machine was forbidden by contract.
Waynes asked if it was 5 or 8 hole punched tape and for the life of me I can not recall. I do remember we were deadly afraid of the tape breaking, so it fell to me to punch a duplicate using a mylar backing -- I did snip a length off a reel of mag tape and used it.
Another memory - we loved to drive newbies nuts, would take a reel of mag tape run it until the end. The end of tape/ start of tape markers were a thin strip of silver foil (about an inch in length) folded around and secured to the tape. We would cut the EOT off ... and ask a newbie to rewind the reel of tape .... and watch them go nuts as it shoot off the reel and then they were told they would have to sit and rewind that thousand foot of tape by hand.
I know wickipedia has a definition for the term "Bitbucket". On our 1401 the printer was designated as LU (Logical Unit) 6 and LU 0 was the Bitbucket .. often used after looking at a page or two of output and knowing that the program was not performing as intended, so switching output to LU 0 ... and thus hiding our mistakes.
Had a supervisor think he was saving money purchasing refurbished 9-track mag tapes. Real fun when we had tapes run off the reel because of missing EOT markers or fail to load due to improperly placed or missing BOT markers.
December 19, 2011 at 11:07 pm
I've actually worked on an IBM system that processed 96-column punched cards. Not eighty, 96. They were about the size of a zip drive cartridge and were quickly made just as obsolete by the advent of the 8.5 inch floppy disk. No, the system was not hand-cranked.
__________________________________________________
Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain. -- Friedrich Schiller
Stop, children, what's that sound? Everybody look what's going down. -- Stephen Stills
December 19, 2011 at 11:26 pm
Roy Ernest (12/19/2011)
You all are older than me. I am a young pup compared to some of you. 🙂
Ahem. You all are older than me.
I'm a child of the 80's, but luckily I don't remember much of it 🙂
I used computers only for gaming and the Internet when I was young, and I learned how to program (Java, C, C++) when I studied for engineering at the university (never used a slide rule though. Don't even know what it is). I don't recall much of those programming languages as I almost immediately - after about 1,5 years of career - got into SQL Server. That was 2 years ago, so I have an astounding long career of 4,5 years behind me.
Jup, I'm quite the rookie 😉
Need an answer? No, you need a question
My blog at https://sqlkover.com.
MCSE Business Intelligence - Microsoft Data Platform MVP
December 19, 2011 at 11:28 pm
LutzM (12/19/2011)
Dev (12/19/2011)
L' Eomot Inversé (12/18/2011)
Revenant (12/17/2011)
I have started on 2 September 1970, on an IBM 360/40 installation that was pride of the town: 128k of memory, 8 tape drives, and 8 2311 disk drives for a total capacity of then-incredible 60 MB.That said, when we eventually and finally get together, I am buying. (I hope it will be Talisker.)
I was a little earlier - started for real 1st Oct 1967 with a strange assortment of kit: a Deuce (with a few bytes of memory and a few kilobytes of drum), a Marconi Myriad (can't remember how much memory, but not much), and an English Electric 4-50 with 128kb memory, 4 disc drives providing a total of 28Mb, and of course mag tape drives....
You guys are definitely 5 times of my age & have 4 times of my job experience. <Bow Down>
Hmmm.... interesting....
Based on the (almost public available) age of the two fellows you're somewhat between 14 and 16 years old. Hard to believe that you've been working all those years since Kindergarden (2011-1970 aprrox. 40, / 4 (factor of experience) = 10 years of experience, brings it down to the age of 4 to 6 when you started to gain "real" IT experience.) 😎 😉
Edit: assuming the expierence gained per year is a constant - which seems not to be true though...
Exaggerating :-P:hehe:
December 19, 2011 at 11:35 pm
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (12/19/2011)
GilaMonster (12/19/2011)
I don't think I should say anything about when I started, or there may be overripe pawpaw coming in my general direction.You're just a kid, though since you can probably throw everyone on the forum across the room, I doubt anything will be throw your way.
No Arguments on your statement but I am doubtful, whether it was required here.
December 19, 2011 at 11:40 pm
Dev (12/19/2011)
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (12/19/2011)
GilaMonster (12/19/2011)
I don't think I should say anything about when I started, or there may be overripe pawpaw coming in my general direction.You're just a kid, though since you can probably throw everyone on the forum across the room, I doubt anything will be throw your way.
No Arguments on your statement but I am doubtful, whether it was required here.
She's a blackbelt at throwing people around. So yes it was warranted 😀
December 19, 2011 at 11:43 pm
GilaMonster (12/19/2011)
Stefan Krzywicki (12/19/2011)
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (12/19/2011)
GilaMonster (12/19/2011)
I don't think I should say anything about when I started, or there may be overripe pawpaw coming in my general direction.You're just a kid, though since you can probably throw everyone on the forum across the room, I doubt anything will be throw your way.
I've heard Gail is adept with swords, but I didn't know there's Judo involved too.
It isn't. http://www.simple-talk.com/opinion/geek-of-the-week/gail-shaw-geek-of-the-week/
It’s nice to see you (pic). I wish someday I will see you face to face. 🙂
December 19, 2011 at 11:47 pm
LutzM (12/19/2011)
bitbucket-25253 (12/19/2011)
LutzM Posted Today @ 9:07 AM
Hmmm.... interesting....
Based on the (almost public available) age of the two fellows you're somewhat between 14 and 16 years old. Hard to believe that you've been working all those years since Kindergarden (2011-1970 aprrox. 40, / 4 (factor of experience) = 10 years of experience, brings it down to the age of 4 to 6 when you started to gain "real" IT experience.)
LutzM - now, now you have never heard Jeff Moden calling me 3 days older than dirt... for shame...
Now click and look at my profile - it contains my DOB -- and when you see it execute the DATEDIFF function, then after that come on back ...
Guess where I got the numbers from... But since there's no immediate link to the personal profile, I decided to call it "almost public" 😀
Based on what Dev mentioned and what age is the result from his "hints", a slide rule would have been useful in his hands, too... (I'm just guessing he's older than 14 tho 🙂 )
not much older :blush:
December 20, 2011 at 1:18 am
some help here....what am i missing from his side?
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic1224192-1292-1.aspx
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This thing is addressing problems that dont exist. Its solution-ism at its worst. We are dumbing down machines that are inherently superior. - Gilfoyle
December 20, 2011 at 1:37 am
Henrico Bekker (12/20/2011)
some help here....what am i missing from his side?http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic1224192-1292-1.aspx
Change compatibility level of your database to make your code bulletproof.
Viewing 15 posts - 32,761 through 32,775 (of 66,712 total)
You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply