What Does Everyone Do?
Burning Brakes
Joined: Jun 2007
Posts: 945
Likes: 8
From: Miami FL
I remember in the 70's we had a time share with the university. We had to program the compiler with dip switches. If you wrote a program with an infinite loop it would bomb the compiler. You had to shut it down and reload. By hand! We used paper punch tape in the day. You could fix your software with clear tape.
Anyone remember the old Texas Instrument Cassette Units and a 300 baud modem cradle? I remember downloading a 1 meg file which took 5 hours to download and thought that was light speed! I paid $640 in the early 80's for 16 meg of memory and couldn't believe how fast my PS2 ran. ( Not Playstation 2) It is amazing how far we have come. I worked as a Unix / Informix database administrator a while back. Bought a restaurant and now just program Point of Sale / Access and SQL. (For fun)
Anyone remember the old Texas Instrument Cassette Units and a 300 baud modem cradle? I remember downloading a 1 meg file which took 5 hours to download and thought that was light speed! I paid $640 in the early 80's for 16 meg of memory and couldn't believe how fast my PS2 ran. ( Not Playstation 2) It is amazing how far we have come. I worked as a Unix / Informix database administrator a while back. Bought a restaurant and now just program Point of Sale / Access and SQL. (For fun)
I remember acoustic couplers .. When you started to get transmission errors you would need to press down on the phone to make sure it sealed properly.
In the early 80’s I upgraded my IBM PC with a 10 meg (meg not gig) hard drive. Paid $800 and I was getting a deal. It was so cool to remove one of the 5 ¼ drives and replace it with this huge hard drive… I though I would never fill up 10 meg!!
Okay I got one… who remembers 8 inch floppies? Running on a CPM operating system? (I still have one of these machines stashed away in a closet.. should be worth big bucks to the Smithsonian)
…not sure what this has to do with Corvettes but all this history was pretty cool
Advanced
Joined: Nov 2007
Posts: 76
Likes: 0
From: Mason City Iowa
I just retired from 30 years teaching in Europe for the U.S. Dept. of Defense. I had my 1959 vette in England and Germany and eventually sold it to a guy in Austria. I shipped my 60 vette over to Germany in 1995, but kept it and shipped it back to USA last summer when I retired.
Melting Slicks
Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 3,022
Likes: 1,099
From: Aggieland TX
"Okay I got one… who remembers 8 inch floppies? Running on a CPM operating system? (I still have one of these machines stashed away in a closet.. should be worth big bucks to the Smithsonian)"
Have I got deal for you! I have a few 8" floppies stashed in a file cabinet. We used "Trash 80's" way back when.
30 years at Texas A&M University teaching soil microbiology. Anyone want to help me grade exams this weekend?
DZ
Have I got deal for you! I have a few 8" floppies stashed in a file cabinet. We used "Trash 80's" way back when.
30 years at Texas A&M University teaching soil microbiology. Anyone want to help me grade exams this weekend?
DZ
Racer
Joined: May 2003
Posts: 406
Likes: 5
From: Miami FL
"Okay I got one… who remembers 8 inch floppies? Running on a CPM operating system? (I still have one of these machines stashed away in a closet.. should be worth big bucks to the Smithsonian)"
Have I got deal for you! I have a few 8" floppies stashed in a file cabinet. We used "Trash 80's" way back when.
30 years at Texas A&M University teaching soil microbiology. Anyone want to help me grade exams this weekend?
DZ
Have I got deal for you! I have a few 8" floppies stashed in a file cabinet. We used "Trash 80's" way back when.
30 years at Texas A&M University teaching soil microbiology. Anyone want to help me grade exams this weekend?
DZ
Le Mans Master
Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 8,506
Likes: 3
From: Calhoun, GA_______ Let It Rock
We had a IBM 8100 that used those big ol' floppies. One of the external drives went bad one day. The IBM CE removed the disk drive that weighed
80 lbs and held about 10-20 mb
The thing was the size of a desk. I spent many hours terminating twinax connectors for that thing. Doing backups to tape that took 10 hours ! Went on to the S/38 and later AS400.
I had a 1200 baud modem and a Compuserve account in the mid 80's. Bad thing was I had to pay long distance charges for the connection on top of it. It would take a couple of hours to download what little was available. The telephone company would call me to report suspicious activity because I would stay on that line for so many hours
We had some IBM XT's that I would hook up external Bernouli boxes on. The boxes allowed you to store data and remove the cards in/out. When the 286's started coming out I would add Aboveboard I/O cards with extra ram for the nerds in accounting. Also Connectronix emulator cards for the S/38. Then you would have to mod the config.sys file to tell DOS about the extra RAM and what addresses to exclude for things like the emulator card.
Then Lantastic, Novell, NT, Citrix, Linux, etc...
80 lbs and held about 10-20 mb
The thing was the size of a desk. I spent many hours terminating twinax connectors for that thing. Doing backups to tape that took 10 hours ! Went on to the S/38 and later AS400. I had a 1200 baud modem and a Compuserve account in the mid 80's. Bad thing was I had to pay long distance charges for the connection on top of it. It would take a couple of hours to download what little was available. The telephone company would call me to report suspicious activity because I would stay on that line for so many hours
We had some IBM XT's that I would hook up external Bernouli boxes on. The boxes allowed you to store data and remove the cards in/out. When the 286's started coming out I would add Aboveboard I/O cards with extra ram for the nerds in accounting. Also Connectronix emulator cards for the S/38. Then you would have to mod the config.sys file to tell DOS about the extra RAM and what addresses to exclude for things like the emulator card.
Then Lantastic, Novell, NT, Citrix, Linux, etc...
Team Owner
Joined: Aug 2007
Posts: 58,061
Likes: 7,146
Army
Well I cut my teeth on KayPro, the Osborne 'Brain', the TI-99 and Radio Shack's TRS-80 before moving into software...before that we had a Sierra-Digital system that RAN off floppies (they weren't just secondary storage). My first programs were written on a Honeywell mini with 540K RAM (yes that is a 'K'). I could go on and on.
It seemed that the higher up the ranks I moved the less satisfying the jobs became. I retired early at 50 and have been consulting for the last 7 years making double my 'working' salary keeping gov't folks from making silly IT security mistakes.
It seemed that the higher up the ranks I moved the less satisfying the jobs became. I retired early at 50 and have been consulting for the last 7 years making double my 'working' salary keeping gov't folks from making silly IT security mistakes.
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Le Mans Master
Joined: Mar 2005
Posts: 7,631
Likes: 11
From: Rocklin California
Ok, here goes: Did get drafted in 1969, played Army for 2 years during the Viet Nam war, went to college on the GI bill and received my masters. Did a few odd jobs and was recruited by a headhunter to go to work for an Insurance Company to become an Executive. Did the fast-track and became upper management. Had some health issues on the way and was told to lay back. Have been with the same company for 32 years now and will retire in 3 more years at age 62. Make way too much money for what I do but only because I didn't have a pay cut when I stepped down from my position. Now, a senior analyst and technician in collision repair. Do a lot of training with the up and comers in the industry. Held the position of ICAR Chairman for a couple of years. Built a few cars and love to do body work. Lots of body fabrication work. Mostly hot rod stuff. Unfortunately a few years ago my back has gotten the better of me with degenerative disks so I have almost stopped with all the car stuff. Can't bend over for more than a minute or two. Doctors say non-operable. Look forward to retiring so I can go fishing, play with my toys, and do whatever I want!
Advanced
Joined: Jun 2006
Posts: 90
Likes: 0
From: SF Peninsula CA
Well I cut my teeth on KayPro, the Osborne 'Brain', the TI-99 and Radio Shack's TRS-80 before moving into software...before that we had a Sierra-Digital system that RAN off floppies (they weren't just secondary storage). My first programs were written on a Honeywell mini with 540K RAM (yes that is a 'K'). I could go on and on.
I bought a Radio Shack TRS-80 with 48K Ram back around ’79. It ran my payroll for 5 different stores, twice a month, for all the years I owned the business. I tried in vain to find a program (and a great deal of money) that would run on windows, but none did what, or was as easy to use (albeit slowly) as the TSR-80.
Team Owner
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 38,897
Likes: 1,926
From: Washington Michigan
I was one of the dummies who jumped on the IBM PC when they first came out - two 160K floppies, 64K memory upgraded to a monstrous 256K (
), DOS 2.1, and a cassette player to load programs, and it was ONLY $4,000 in 1981 (plus a Seiko daisy-wheel printer and monochrome monitor). My first hard disk was a 5MB "Hard-Card", figured I could never fill it (in those days, my word processor, WordStar, only occupied 30K when fully loaded - talk about "tight code" ).
Photo below is IBM's first 5MB hard disk, in 1956 - weighed 2800 pounds.
), DOS 2.1, and a cassette player to load programs, and it was ONLY $4,000 in 1981 (plus a Seiko daisy-wheel printer and monochrome monitor). My first hard disk was a 5MB "Hard-Card", figured I could never fill it (in those days, my word processor, WordStar, only occupied 30K when fully loaded - talk about "tight code" ).Photo below is IBM's first 5MB hard disk, in 1956 - weighed 2800 pounds.
Melting Slicks
Joined: Feb 2006
Posts: 3,125
Likes: 2
From: Park City to SoCal - according to the map it's all down hill. No bad days in Indian Wells, California
That's a 305 RAMAC. In September 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the first computer with a hard disk drive (HDD). The HDD weighed over a ton and stored 5MB of data. IBM could have made a HDD with more than 5MB, but the Marketing Department wasn't sure they knew how to sell it.
I think there's one on display at Amercian University in Washington DC area.
Melting Slicks
Joined: Feb 2006
Posts: 3,125
Likes: 2
From: Park City to SoCal - according to the map it's all down hill. No bad days in Indian Wells, California
Drifting
Joined: Oct 2004
Posts: 1,255
Likes: 7
From: Coralville Iowa
I was one of the dummies who jumped on the IBM PC when they first came out - two 160K floppies, 64K memory upgraded to a monstrous 256K ( ), DOS 2.1, and a cassette player to load programs, and it was ONLY $4,000 in 1981 (plus a Seiko daisy-wheel printer and monochrome monitor). My first hard disk was a 5MB "Hard-Card", figured I could never fill it (in those days, my word processor, WordStar, only occupied 30K when fully loaded - talk about "tight code" ).
Photo below is IBM's first 5MB hard disk, in 1956 - weighed 2800 pounds.
), DOS 2.1, and a cassette player to load programs, and it was ONLY $4,000 in 1981 (plus a Seiko daisy-wheel printer and monochrome monitor). My first hard disk was a 5MB "Hard-Card", figured I could never fill it (in those days, my word processor, WordStar, only occupied 30K when fully loaded - talk about "tight code" ).Photo below is IBM's first 5MB hard disk, in 1956 - weighed 2800 pounds.
Melting Slicks
Joined: Feb 2006
Posts: 3,125
Likes: 2
From: Park City to SoCal - according to the map it's all down hill. No bad days in Indian Wells, California
Instructor
Joined: Mar 2006
Posts: 207
Likes: 0
From: ooltewah tennessee
I Have for 36 years been in the recruiting profession. I own Management Recruiters of Chattanooga North, Tenn. Before that I was in the pictorial directory business and before that I sold mid year corvettes and chevys in the 1960's.