Old farts and new Linux

Phil Schaffner Philip.R.Schaffner at NASA.gov
Mon May 3 20:31:07 UTC 2004


On Mon, 2004-05-03 at 16:02, Terry Polzin wrote:
> On Mon May 3 2004 03:58 pm, Charles Curley wrote:
> 
> > A bunch of tadpoles on this thread. IBM 360s, PDP-11s, all new
> > stuff. _I_ worked on the world's first silicon based computers, in a
> > project on what is now called Salisbury Plain, England, about 5,000
> > years ago.
> >
> > So there.
> 
> So you were the one responsible for counting the criters on Noah's Ark?

Perhaps working with the Druids at Stonehenge?

Not quite as old as some of these other farts - only started using Linux
at 0.98 (ran Coherent for a while before that) but my first computer
language was Algol on the Burrows B5500 in 1966. Tied up the whole
room-full-of-computer to do a single plot on a pen plotter from punch
cards.  Then moved on to BASIC on a paper TTY in 1969 - talk about ahead
of its time for interactive computing!  On through booting a Data
General Nova (billed as a mini-computer - only one rack) with
front-panel octal codes entered through front-panel switches, reading
the OS, FORTRAN compiler, and programs from paper tape, until we got
really advanced by adding the 8" hard sectored floppy.

After years of FORTRAN code submitted on punch cards to mainframes, and
getting line-printer hardcopy output several hours later, finally (1977)
got to work on a monochrome Tektronics graphics terminal - if you got on
the sign-up sheet in time you might get it for an hour a day to plot the
output from your batch job you put in on cards the day before (unless it
had failed to run with a syntax error or core dumped - yes real magnetic
core - then punch a few new cards and resubmit.)  Output was a screen
copy to a thermal printer.

CP/M on a Z80 provided the first "desktop" experience.  The IBM 8088 PC
with a 10MB HD and a $10k price tag was living in the lap of computer
luxury in those days, but the Commodore VIC-20 - with a 32KB home-brew
memory expansion box the size of an (old-style) telephone - was
something one could actually afford personally.  Could display about 20
character lines on your TV screen.  Ran BASIC and had a cassette tape
drive that could load neat things like a Forth interpreter, and of
course the occasional primitive game.  Only later came 5-1/4" SSSD
floppies.  (DD and learning about the hole-punches to save a buck came
later still.)  Then on to the Commodore 64 which could speak advanced
things like Pascal and Lisp, and could fit a few more characters across
your TV screen.  (Others were experimenting with early Apples - remember
the Lisa? - or TI and Atari home machines.) Then came the Amiga followed
by Commodore oblivion.

Meanwhile back at work, moved from CDC-6600 batch-mode computing to a
Vax 750 with VT100 terminals (a cool $0.5M in 1983) and a $30k+
Tektronics graphics terminal all it's own, color no less!  Still doing
pen-plots for color hardcopy output, but at least the computer could do
other things at the same time!.  Supported 12+ users on RS-232 serial
ports - ran our own wires all over the building.  Ran Fortran and this
new C stuff nobody had much experience with, except the guys down the
street that had something called UNIX on a PDP-11 in a back room.  Moved
on to MicroVAXen for the heavy computing and many people got IBM ATs or
"IBM clones", many still at 5-digit prices and with DOS.  Then Sun
Microsystems popped up - some left-coast (and probably leftist)
radicals, but they made killer scientific workstations with a graphical
OS (eventually even X-windows) at competitive prices.  The days of the
VAXen were numbered!  (Linux vs Windows comes to mind. ;-)

Ah well, enough lost productivity.  Those were the [good|bad] old days!

Phil






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