We would have DREAMED to have 8” floppies! Etc.
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Only so far you can go with that…
I think it’s pretty safe to underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of cave paintings
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Well, my first exposure to computers was back in the days of mainframes, punched tape, line printers and magnetic tape reels, but that Corona was, for all its limitations, liberating. Heck, even the VIC-20 before it was a gas.
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Back in my day, we entered programs one instruction at a time, with switches, and wrote down what lights blinked! And we liked it!
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I’ve got an awful baroheadache and an awful migraine and that painthought does not help.
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Mine too! Programmed in Pascal…how about you?
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A magnet? Do you think the people who built the Antekythera Mechanism needed magnets? Or Napiers’ Bones? Or other newfangled technology for modern computers?
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My grandad remembers the days of string, beads, and a frame! He didn’t even have a spoon.
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Ours had a word length of ten – twenty, if you used toes.
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Not really science, but in line with the “we did computing by hand” crowd.
a retrocomputing series that does not focus on BASIC. Instead, it’s 8502 assembly.
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My first hard drive was 5Mb. I could store one whole Sierra game on it at a time and not have to swap floppies constantly! Though since I was running them on a DOS emulator on a CP/M system, it’d still crash every few screen changes…
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Since we’re on a computer science sidetrack…
ABEND JINGLES
Lets see, an 804
means you need more core.And a D37, for your information,
means you need more secondary allocation.While a B37, in the same vein and tradition,
means you need more primary allocation.For an 806 the program is contrary;
You just need a steplib to the right library.Also, a U0004 on LF356
just means the table needs to be fixed.And then there’s always BB454
where a bad order causes an OC4.Well an OC1 is really quite dumb;
It means a DD’s missing for someone.And a 137, 237, 337, or 437
means your trailers aren’t going to heaven.To ignore an 813 abend is insane
since header and DSN are not the same.When a program with an OC7 goes kaputt
it means your really have bad input.On TTRAN an abend of a U0031
means you must scratch data sets from MN0001.When the job with a 213 has gone wrong,
it could mean a data set’s gone, gone, gone.When the job with an 013 meets its demise,
you might check closely with the LRECL and BLKSIZE.
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Sorry, I can’t help myself…
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My first programming experience was with Dartmouth Basic on a teletype-interface minicomputer around 1970. Dunno the make, but they brought it into my high school one weekend, and we made programs for it. My first programs were function tables, and by Chr*st, they worked!. I had to work pretty tightly with the IT boys when I worked at CE Canada, which was mainframe work, but I wasn’t directly involved with the programming. (Fine by me. I missed COBOL altogether. 
) I moved to C when I got the Corona, and then to Delphi when I finally bought a 32-bit box, so yeah, I’ve worked in Pascal, and liked it quite a bit.
Honestly, I still think Delphi was the best framework/IDE I’ve ever worked with. C# was Hejlsborg’s next project when he left Borland for Microsoft, and it is nowhere near as clean or simple or easy to use.
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Sounds very much like my first experience in HS, 1971 or 72, Basic on a teletype connected to a mystery mainframe or minicomputer somewhere else in the universe. I calculated x for y = x^x (which I called the “twerd” of y, for some teenage reason) iteratively. It took a while. I sometimes wonder if I tied up air traffic somewhere.
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In our case, they brought the minicomputer into the classroom. It was a 2’ x 2’ x 1-1/2’H box on a table top with a whumping 32k of memory and a ROM Basic monitor built in. Did the job pretty well, iirc. My tables were for super- and sub-ellipses, and hyperboloids using fractional exponents. (These were the days of Piet Hein, eh?) I used the tables to form a picture from the graph.
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Do you remember what kind it was?
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Not at all, unfortunately. The box was rather generic-looking, iirc, but the distinguishing feature had to be that it was running interpretive Basic from a ROM monitor rather than an O/S. I don’t believe the PDPs did that.
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I used a Tektronix graphics computer like that in the '80’s. Booted up to basic, so you could run a single command (e.g., x=10) at the prompt, or write multiple lines with line numbers and then type “Run.” Pretty cool graphics too - vector based. It had two slots in the back for add-on components. The ones I used were a Fourier analysis box and a A/D-D/S converter.
It did use magnetic tape cartridges rather than paper tape for storage though, so that was an advance.
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