blast from the past

[fozzybear]

hi,

do any members remember the site ATM "Amateur telescope making" before the days of the wonderful websites of today, Mel bartels etc, I was going through an old hdd and found a load of emails of the daily updates from the site, probably in those days is was a bulletin board rather than a website... blast from the past... god hasn't life changed since mid 90's. I started back in IT as an engineer with an ibm pc xt50 10mb  hdd 640kb ram mono display cost new  thousands, mono display green...... and pc dos. before ms dos....  my next was a compact 286 laptop more like a brick on steroids still slow and a black and white screen,  how the tech has changed over the years, I was in IT for 20 years but gave it up for a better life too much change and more exams to pass as the software changes to stay up to date, at 50 brain to slow to update. (to err is human to really mess things up takes a computer)..

any more ex IT people care to add

cheers

andy

 

 

[Peter Drew]

I used to have a load of the ATM magazines, full of good stuff.  

[John]

I can remember when a floppy disk really was floppy ......

 

[niallk]

We covered programming in FORTRAN with punch cards in 1st yr in Elec Eng, and used PCs with colour screens for the first time in 3rd year in '95 (Windows 3.1)!!  It took all night to simulate a simple 1 transistor oscillator in PSpice if you had a 33MHz 386 without a 387 math co-processor.  Nowadays our server farm in work is basically a supercomputer in comparison, and we run simulations of designs with millions of transistors.  Incredible progress over ~20 years!!

[cletrac1922]

 

4 hours ago, John said:

I can remember when a floppy disk really was floppy ......

 

 

Reminds me of my first PC around 1983

Olivetti 286 with a 20MB HDD, 3.5" floppy disc drive, 128bit RAM, which later updated to 1MB RAM

Came with windows 3.1, and had word 3.1 and excel for DOS , which both came set of 3.5 floppy discs, colour monitor

Thought was very upmarket with a citizen dot matrix colour ribbon printer

Internet access was via 14.4 k/bs external modem

3.5" floppy discs were in a hard case, and 5.25" was in a cardboard sleeve

 

[brantuk]

I can remember loading programs via keys on the processor to fill registers and store memory locations and intructions in machine language. Also loading a bootstrap program from punched tape to pull in the o/s (Unix). And then moving on to high level languages using punched cards, before finally getting terminals to work on. Anyone remember the first "asteroids" game? And "moon lander" program? Showing my age eh! lol.

[fozzybear]

On ‎29‎/‎11‎/‎2017 at 00:25, John said:

I can remember when a floppy disk really was floppy ......

 

the 5.25" and 8"

[fozzybear]

On ‎29‎/‎11‎/‎2017 at 07:30, brantuk said:

I can remember loading programs via keys on the processor to fill registers and store memory locations and intructions in machine language. Also loading a bootstrap program from punched tape to pull in the o/s (Unix). And then moving on to high level languages using punched cards, before finally getting terminals to work on. Anyone remember the first "asteroids" game? And "moon lander" program? Showing my age eh! lol.

I can remember the punched tape as this was used at "Joderell Bank". I can also remember learning on the old IBM 1442's if that is right card punch/reader. cobwebs everywhere....... 

[Uplooker]

On 29/11/2017 at 06:30, brantuk said:

Anyone remember the first "asteroids" game? And "moon lander" program? Showing my age eh! lol.

I do! My first "computer" if you can call it that was a ZX81. You can imagine my delight when I got a 16k Ram pack expansion, this was dimmed somewhat when I had to use blutack to hold it in place. This was because if you pressed too hard on the "keys" it caused the plug-in Ram pack ( for those youngster, no it was not plug and play) to lose connection. What a nightmare when you were typing in the last few rows of thousands of 1's and 0's of the programme you really wanted.

Next "upgrade" was a Dragon 32 ?

[fozzybear]

On ‎29‎/‎11‎/‎2017 at 07:30, brantuk said:

I can remember loading programs via keys on the processor to fill registers and store memory locations and intructions in machine language. Also loading a bootstrap program from punched tape to pull in the o/s (Unix). And then moving on to high level languages using punched cards, before finally getting terminals to work on. Anyone remember the first "asteroids" game? And "moon lander" program? Showing my age eh! lol.

the first moon lander or "lunar lander" as I can remember was on a DEC machine going back ages I think.

[Alien 13]

I worked with punched cards and tape in my yoof, I can probably still remember the whole alpha numeric codes on the manual inputs, no floppy disks when I started either..

Alan

[cloudsweeper]

Certainly does show age, this topic.  Elec. Eng. course - computer filled a room - did a Fortran (I think) programme to solve a humble quadratic equation, and inputted on punched tape - took a while to process.

Commodore Pet - 32k memory - Basic language - left it to perform indexing of a list of names - took hours.  Loved playing Space Invaders on that one!

Doug.

 

 

 

[fozzybear]

1 minute ago, Uplooker said:

I do! My first "computer" if you can call it that was a ZX81. You can imagine my delight when I got a 16k Ram pack expansion, this was dimmed somewhat when I had to use blutack to hold it in place. This was because if you pressed too hard on the "keys" it caused the plug-in Ram pack ( for those youngster, no it was not plug and play) to lose connection. What a nightmare when you were typing in the last few rows of thousands of 1's and 0's of the programme you really wanted.

Next "upgrade" was a Dragon 32 ?

good old Sinclair. and you had perform strange things with your fingers with that stupid keypad not bad for a 50 quid computer...

 

[fozzybear]

2 minutes ago, cloudsweeper said:

Certainly does show age, this topic.  Elec. Eng. course - computer filled a room - did a Fortran (I think) programme to solve a humble quadratic equation, and inputted on punched tape - took a while to process.

Commodore Pet - 32k memory - Basic language - left it to perform indexing of a list of names - took hours.  Loved playing Space Invaders on that one!

Doug.

 

 

 

ibm system 38 or 380 then as/400

[Uplooker]

I don't know what's more embarrassing - having had a ZX81 or talking about youngsters, I am obviously getting old ?

Oh well, it all relative

[fozzybear]

I worked for a bank on commissioning a data centre and the data centre was the size of 2 five a side football pitches and is now full of equipment.

[tomato]

A chess game programmed into 1 k RAM on the ZX81, now you need a gig or two just to switch it on......

[John]

I've still got a ZX81 somewhere. For some daft reason I thought they might end up collectable

I seem to recall that the 1k of RAM was not even enough to type a screen full of characters - the machine ran out of memory about half way down the screen !

[Gina]

I had a ZX81 and wobbly 16K memory pack plus printer that burnt foil backed paper to make characters - stank the place out :D.  I've programmed in Fortran at work as well as machine code and assembler.  I even hand punched holes in paper tape as a bootstrap loader for a DEC 8 bit mini computer.  I also wrote operating systems for bespoke computer systems such as automatic testing equipment.  My credit card sized RPi is a thousand times more powerful than that mini computer which occupied a whole 18" rack.

[brantuk]

2 hours ago, fozzybear said:

the first moon lander or "lunar lander" as I can remember was on a DEC machine going back ages I think

PDP8 and PDP11 iirc.

[Paul M]

I was a school boy in the 70s when my father got into it after his friend loaned a Commodore Pet from his work.

The early ones we had at home were a Video Genie which was actually a clone(ish) of the Tandy TRS80, A Sharp MZ80k (junk), some other flashes in the pan then BBC Micros and then Amigas. All that before his (our!) first "IBM compatible", as they were called then, PC.

I only ever learned Microsoft Basic (which I learned from debugging the thousands of hand typed lines of code copied from listing books that were sold back in the day). And BBC Basic which was a natural progression. Them were the days.

I used various homebrew and manufactured interfaces to receive and decode Shortwave RTTY and FAX (among other SW radio data formats) aeronautical and weather products and VHF weather satellite images from Polar Orbiting weather satellites with both the Beebs and the Amigas.

Klingenfuss Guides, were my bible in the 80's and 90's

[Mognet]

Another former ZX81 owner here. And I remember the RAM pack wobble well! Caught me out a few times before going for the BlueTak solution

I started out programming on that, before moving on to a Texas Instruments TI99/4a, a Commodore 64, then an Atari ST520. Some gaming, mostly text adventures as I liked the problem solving, but usually for programming in Basic, Z80 and 6502 assembler, and C. Fast forward a few years and I became a professional programmer in IBM zSeries assembler (OS/360) and Cobol (both with CICS and DB2 for those who know what they are!). These days I'm an automated software tester doing mostly manual testing I still get to dabble in Java sometimes though

I'm too young at 50 to have dealt with paper tape and punched cards, but I've worked with people who did. I've dealt with 3.5", 5.25" and 8" floppies, and dot matrix and daisy wheel printers. USB sticks and laser printers are just not the same, nor is having to consider the speed vs size tradeoffs when coding on limited systems.

[JeremyS]

My first computer was a Compukit UK101 with a 6502 CPU, programmes loaded from a cassette player and a TV monitor. I didn't build it myself, but bought it in early 1981 from a friend who had.

Jeremy