Early Computer Memories

[braumeister]

Started in the Air Force in 1967 with the Univac 1050-II.

Yep, used one of those too.
Records stored on an IAS Fastrand unit (think of three-foot lengths of sewer pipe covered in iron oxide) with 64 floating read/write heads that would routinely crash into them whenever the building got vibrations.

We used to boot them by flipping toggle switches on the operator console to make instruction words in octal.

Actually kind of hard to believe today!

 

[AnIntentionalRoad]

Trying not to geek out too much here but was it intentional to include the Enterprise and Star Wars in the same sentence?

Wow, yea, how did I do that!

 

[pb4uski]

I'm a relative youngster. When I was in HS I recall my dad got a TI calculator and I recall getting one for college. The cost about $70 back then. You can get the same functionality today for $10 or less. In college, I remember taking the obligatory BASIC class and doing some simple programming using punch cards.

As a newly minted accountant, the firm I started with assigned me a calculator that had a carry case the size of a small suitcase. That calculator was about 8" wide, 10" tall and 12" long and weighed a lot. It could add and subtract and multiply by repeating adding but don't even think about division.

My first work computer was a TRS-80 with 9" disks that I shared with the rest of the office in 1980. I recall bringing it home for the weekend to design a database to track costs and using Visicalc on it. Later, we migrated to Wang PCs with RBase and MultiPlan. Lotus 1-2-3 came later and was a big upgrade from MultiPlan.

In 1984 I started grad school and bought an Apple Macintosh 512k for my school papers. The Mac and a printer cost about $2,500 as I recall and Mega helped finance it since they wanted employees to become more fluent with computers. I recall a Lotus product called Symphony that could integrate word processing, spreadsheets and graphs much like MS Office does today (in fact arguably better since it was a single application.

I was also very into the Newton when it was around. I was an early adopter back in those days, but am now the opposite... I'm quite happy with my Samsung Galaxy S2 which is a few generations behind the times.

 

[JoeWras]

This is a loaded question for computer geeks like me.

Started with IBM 1130 in high school in the 70's. This was very unusual and very forward looking for a high school. It sealed my career choice. Yes, it had core memory (see above). The computer was fragile and the core cabinets on our computer were open because "it only worked that way, don't touch it." Great stuff to look at. It was all punched cards.

At the local library, they had a Commodor PET. Cool and unique machine. I brought my cassette tape to save my BASIC programs.

My history since then is huge. I won't go through it. But suffice it to say, today I still w*rk and I "create" hundreds of computers each day using a "Virtual Machine" process. It is nice. I create my computer (with 100s of Gigs of memory) and save it. If I don't like it, I throw it away. If I like it, I may clone it.

It is a different world.

 

[Act2]

I remember BASIC, and dropping a stack of punched cards that I had failed to number. Everyone did the card drop - once. Those punched cards made nice Christmas wreaths, remember?

My favorite professor pointed to the one desktop computer the college owned and predicted that someday nearly everyone would own a personal computer and that it would change the world. I thought that was pretty outlandish. Why would that happen?

I hope he invested accordingly!!


Sent from my iPhone using Early Retirement Forum

 

[samclem]

My favorite professor pointed to the one desktop computer the college owned and predicted that someday nearly everyone would own a personal computer and that it would change the world.

Yep. The USAF sent a team out to our 8 person office to install the first computer there and show us how to use the software. It was a Zenith Z-150 (8086-based machine) with a removable hard drive platter--10 MB. I figured we'd NEVER fill up 10 Megabytes. It came with a big daisywheel printer (for good-looking letters/fitness reports, etc) and a big high-speed dot matrix printer. Anyway, he told us someday we wouldn't have to share a computer, that they'd be on every desk. Crazy--why would we need that? And where would we fit them all in our office? We'd have to get rid of the ashtrays to make room. No way.

 

[scrabbler1]

I have an assortment of early computer memories, some of them similar to those mentioned here already.

First, as a high school student in the late 1970s, we dialed into BOCES' central computer system using actual rotary phones and models we would stick the handset into after we heard the "handshake" tone at the other eand. If someone accidentally touched the phone after it was plugged in, the transmission would get messed up. Our 2 terminals were continuous-feed paper coming from boxes beneath the terminal. We learned BASIC and I wrote a bunch of programs. This is when I began to enjoy programming and it would become a key part of my (former) career.

The school also bought a Commodore PET PC which was not connected to the BOCES system. It was small but still pretty cool to an impressionable HS student like myself.

In college, we had a computer center I went to so I could write my programs and print them out and run them. At least we were passed the punch-card era which wasn't that long before I got there in 1981.

A friend of mine, Bob, had a PC, an old ATARI system. He had to use a cassette player to load some programs. My favorite was a Star Trek game written in BASIC. It was slow to load and run but fun to play. Bob figured out how to make the game a little tougher by changing a few lines of BASIC code.

In 1983, I became a "computer counselor" at a day camp I worked at that summer. This consisted of hauling out from a nearby storage closet 4 large color TV monitors along with 4 keyboards and 4 cassette tape players to load some software. For the younger kids, we stuck some game cartridges in the back so they could play, sitting 3 kids at each workstation. For the older kids, I taught them some BASIC so they cold write a few simple programs. Not only did this look good on my resume, I used that experience when I taught SAS to coworkers in the later 1980s and into the 1990s.

Early in my working days starting in the mid-1980s, we had mainframe-only terminals and a few scattered PC-only terminals with one person having a terminal which could do both, useful if we needed to download or upload something from one to the other. The diskettes were those 5 1/4 floppies but it wasn't long until the smaller 3 1/2 diskettes came into being. Some of the PCs had both types of disk drives which was crucial for those of us who needed to copy files from the older, soon-to-be-obsolete floppies to the smaller, newer ones. Eventually, the newer PCs which came in had disk drives only for the 3 1/2 diskettes. I remember when the company bought some laser printers and how wonderful that was. But the old Lotus 1-2-3 (Version 2.1) software could not print landscape easily so we had to use something called "Allways" to print landscape. A later version of Lotus (for DOS) had something called WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) which enabled us to more easily print Landscape.

My parents got an old Commodore 64 some time in the 1980s, one you had to attach to a TV. It had a disk drive for a 5 1/4 floppy. I could program BASIC on it but do little else. They also bought a dot-matrix printer, an OKIDATA 180. I still have these items.

And those are my earliest computer memories.

 

[pb4uski]

I always thought it would be a hoot to take my laptop, tablet and smartphone back in time to myself as a 21 year old graduate and show what we would have in 35+ years.

I seem to recall a saying that there is more computing power in my wristwatch (ok, I'm old-fashioned) that existed on the case of the earth on the day I was born in the mid 50s.

 

[meierlde]

To continue my first computer experience was a fortran class in the fall of 1968 where we used teletypes to a Ge computer at Ford, as well as a CDC 3600 (punched tape for the teletype, you punched your program in during the day and ran it at night, cards for the 3600). Then after working with computers in grad school, went to work where a CDC 7600 was located eventually to a Vax, then to administering a Convex and a number of Sun/IBM/SGI workstations. Eventually got my own PC, in 1993. One of the things that amazes me is this machine had 8 mb of memory, while the pc I have today has 1000 times more. On disk it had 500 mb and todays machine came with 1 tb and has now 7 tb of disk. (A good bit of that is backup space). So over the 46 years there has been a lot of change.

 

[brett]

I remember that my first sale was a 4K memory upgrade on an NCR system. Also sold core memory systems.

 

[Lucantes]

TI-99/4A for me, so not that far back in reference to some here!

 

[davemartin88]

AN/FSQ-7, also known as the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) computer, used at about half a dozen locations around North America to control air defense.

My first office was INSIDE one of them.

My first real experience with computers was the AN/GSA-51 BUIC, the back up for the SAGE system. Saw it at Keesler AFB in Biloxi, MS in 1975 where I became a computer repairman. Ended up staying there an extra year as my first assignment to keep the computers at the school running. The BUIC was relatively small compared to SAGE, only took up one room and I think it had 6 1K memory modules, each the size of a refrigerator.

Most impressive, there was a speaker connected to one of the flip flops which gave a very distinctive sound depending on what the system was doing at the time. You could listen to maintenance routines and immediately know if something failed.

My family thought it was neat that I learned to work on computers but they were really impressed when I brought home a cassette tape recorded from the BUIC after someone had written a program to play Christmas Music on the speakers.

From there, I went on to work on computers that had 16K of memory and were "only" the size of a microwave! This was a great experience as we learned not only how a computer worked but all the basic electronic skills that were needed to fix them down to the component level. Our basic electronic portion of training was nearly 3 months long I remember and it took a full year to finish school as a computer repairman. As I was leaving the Air Force, they were transitioning to a more task based training process where you didn't have as much of the basic background and had to rely more on maintenance routines.

 

[donheff]

My first experience was coding Fortran in college circa 1972. Waiting overnight for the error list was a PITA. My next foray was a Timex Sinclair sometime around 1980. 2M of RAM IIRC, with programs stored on a cassette tape recorder, and display on a TV. It was fun. After that I ignored the damn things at home and used them strictly at work until late 1993 when I get interested in the Internet. Then I bought a PC and bought an online Unix shell account. Then pseudo SLIP, then installing a TCP/IP stack and the Cello Browser. By mid 94 I had built a family website on the Unix site and was hooked.

 

[Fermion]

I may have had my first computer experience on an Apple I but likely it was an Apple II. I was seven, it was 1977 and we were at a college professor's house (friend of my parents).

I guess the odds it was an Apple I are pretty slim.

 

[Which Roger]

My earliest is the DEC PDP-8 with a whopping 2 K of memory. Later upgraded to a huge 4 K. Was in an 8' tall rack. with winky blinky lights showing tha computing process. On a research ship. Punch tape for data and program input. Teletype for data output in addition to punch tape.

One of my first programming assignments in college was to write a program using PDP-8 assembly language, convert by hand to machine language, then input the program using the switches on the front of the machine. If I recall correctly, there was a set of switches for the memory address, and another set for the data. Set both of these then hit yet another switch to store the data at that address. One of my best learning experiences ever.

 

[donheff]

My first experience was coding Fortran in college circa 1972. Waiting overnight for the error list was a PITA. My next foray was a Timex Sinclair sometime around 1980. 2M of RAM IIRC, with programs stored on a cassette tape recorder, and display on a TV. It was fun. After that I ignored the damn things at home and used them strictly at work until late 1993 when I get interested in the Internet. Then I bought a PC and bought an online Unix shell account. Then pseudo SLIP, then installing a TCP/IP stack and the Cello Browser. By mid 94 I had built a family website on the Unix site and was hooked.

How quickly we forget what computers were really like. I said my Sinclair had 2M of RAM. That was actually 2K. Not enough for a page of text.

 

[easysurfer]

How quickly we forget what computers were really like. I said my Sinclair had 2M of RAM. That was actually 2K. Not enough for a page of text.

I used to check out each issue of Popular Electronics magazine to see if the price of the Timex Sinclair computer dropped down.

 

[athena53]

The Science hall was adjacent to the library and both buildings had both men's and women's rest rooms. The chemistry and physics professors decided to gut the women's rest room in the science building and put the computer in there.

Wow. Thanks for the reminder of the Bad Old Days. Another thing to tell younger women when they claim they're "not feminists". I think a lot of them don't know how it really was back then.

 

[Midpack]

My first exposure was in college in 74-75. My first language was Fortran utilizing the universities mainframe(s). We typed out punchcards and submitted them, results came hours later. So if you made even the slightest mistake, you had to replace the erroneous code/card(s) and resubmit.

[I've shared this on similar threads here before] My first computer of my own was an Osborne 1 in 81-82, I only knew a handful of other people who had their own computers back then. We also had the original IBM PC's at work, though they were shared among an office of 16 people - fortunately most people weren't interested in learning, so I had good access, mostly competing for time with only those about my age.

I began studying engineering in college in 1972 with an inexpensive plastic slide rule, (mechanical) pencil and paper. Calculators didn't become readily available until my Sophomore year when some (rich) students started showing up in class with the Bowmar Brain - a 4 function calculator that then cost $150 IIRC. Needing more than 4-functions in engineering, I stayed with my plastic sliderule until the far more capable TI SR-50 came out in 1974, $180 IIRC.

Memories indeed...

 

[Nodak]

Yep. The USAF sent a team out to our 8 person office to install the first computer there and show us how to use the software. It was a Zenith Z-150 (8086-based machine) with a removable hard drive platter--10 MB. I figured we'd NEVER fill up 10 Megabytes. It came with a big daisywheel printer (for good-looking letters/fitness reports, etc) and a big high-speed dot matrix printer. Anyway, he told us someday we wouldn't have to share a computer, that they'd be on every desk. Crazy--why would we need that? And where would we fit them all in our office? We'd have to get rid of the ashtrays to make room. No way.

The USAF station I worked at received the message that Zenith computers would be supplied and wanted to know how many we needed. My boss replied that we didn't know what we would do with a PC. USAF responded that we had to take at least 1. We got a Z-150 with enough manuals to fill an 8 foot book shelf and a Diablo daisy wheel printer that must have weighed close to 50 pounds.

 

[Nodak]

When Cavalier Air Force Station was built it was part of the first ABM system that President Nixon announced. The main computer was amazing. It was called Central Logic and Control (CLC) and was the world's first multiprocessor computer. It consisted of about 50 cabinets that were 4 feet square and 10 feet tall. Each of the 7 processors were a separate box and the Program Store and Variable Store were also separate. The whole system, including languages, was designed specifically for the Safeguard ABM system. It was a system built by IBM, CDC, and Unisys.

Safeguard was operational for about 2 days then cancelled. The only remaining part is the Perimeter Acquisition Radar (PAR) at Cavalier AFS. Here is a link to more info on Safeguard.
http://srmsc.org/pdf/M115.pdf

 

[jimbee]

One of my first programming assignments in college was to write a program using PDP-8 assembly language, convert by hand to machine language, then input the program using the switches on the front of the machine. If I recall correctly, there was a set of switches for the memory address, and another set for the data. Set both of these then hit yet another switch to store the data at that address. One of my best learning experiences ever.

I had to do the same thing in one of my CS classes in college. We did have an advantage in that the computer had an autoincrement switch, so once I tabbed in the initial address, the computer calculated the address for the next statements. The professor told us after doing it manually, we would appreciate using the assembler in the other assignments.

 

[NW-Bound]

People were able to do amazing things with primitive computers back then. The Apollos, ICBMs, and even the Space Shuttle flew with these. The limited memory capacity and speed mandated some clever programming.

Young programmers tend to turn out bloatware. They should be able to practice LBYM in programming as they have so much at their disposal, but instead they squander all these bits and bytes and CPU cycles.

 

[Ronstar]

Midpack's post reminds me that my slide rule is on display in the antique equipment exhibit at my former workplace. I need to go snag that. I still use my HP48gx (ca1990), but I have to remember that it's rpn. Used to use it at work with the land survey chip.

 

[donheff]

[I've shared this on similar threads here before] My first computer of my own was an Osborne 1 in 81-82, I only knew a handful of other people who had their own computers back then.

That prompted a work memory. My agency opened the Microcomputer User Support Center (MUSC) back in the 80s dark ages to try out some of these new fangled things. Interested employees submitted proposals for projects they would implement with them and 20 were accepted. I proposed to build a database of disciplinary actions taken across the agency and then do some analyses of status, trends etc. I was selected to particpate and given a dual drive Osborne similar to the one in your picture. I can't remember much about it other than CPM was the operating system and DBase was the program I used to construct my database. The whole project was fun but not particularly valuable.