Technological Nostalgia

[AB Editor]

I spotted this in the wilds of the internet, and it made me chuckle:



I wondered if anyone would be interested sharing their experiences with ancient electronic machinery?

Pictures encouraged, stories of your first computer welcome and moaning about how kids don't know they're born will be tolerated :)

(Note: I full understand a 33/56k modem is merely Victorian compared to some of the things which will get mentioned here!)

[TTG]

BBC B! Had many happy days (and nights) playing games such as Planetoid, Snapper, the Acornsoft text adventures and above all Elite. The Basic language was super fast for it's day and the best version for learning how to program.

[Mosaic]

My thang is not just the technology...but the immediate way it affects people.
If you accept that technology = power....

when I first started work, you had to apply in writing to the secretary for a photocopy (she'd say no).

In 1995 my boss said 'if you think I'm watching all day to see if emails arrive you've got another think etc'

In 2002 one of my senior team leaders had all emails printed, presented in intray and dictated a reply....

in 2008 a secondary school strategy planner would not consider flexible timetable changes 'because the bus companies won't stand for it'....

[tenrec]

I remember when where I worked got a Fax machine. We all stood round it waiting for the paper to come through. A fax from Australia. We were amazed. Talked about it for a week!

[Mosaic]

Do you remember the 'spam faxes' that used to use up the roll of paper over weekend?

[sunny-dave]

I remember writing a college enrolment program for the BBC B - loading from the rather iffy floppy disc drive was a real fun game - as was saving the 'spreadsheet' type data files before the inevitable crash ...

[Nibble]

This was mine....... hangs head in shame!!!!!

http://www.old-comput...eum/computer.asp?c=84

Really, interesting juggling amsDos & DoS (NOT!!!)

[tenrec]

Nibble, is your real name Alan Sugar?

[bert_h]

I go back to about the same era as sunny-dave (see above). My first computer (in 1962) was a Ferranti Pegasus with valves and crystal diodes for logic, nickel delay wires for fast memory, and a drum for bulk memory.

A group of vintage enthusiasts restored one of these to working order for the computing history gallery at the South Kensington Science Museum. I didn't know about it, and could scarcely believe my eyes when we visited there in 2001. My 15-year-old daughter was even more incredulous; "but Dad", she said, "it was a such a rare machine! It says here they only made 40 of them." Then I had to explain that, comparatively, that made it quite a successful product for the time.

[ChuckFickens]

One of the things that gets me these days is how "sloppy" programmers have become.

In the 90's the Amiga could load a full workbench3 (which was actually a pretty good OS for the time) from 2 floppy disks (about 1.4MB) and happily run it from 2MB of RAM.

These days the amount of memory and processing power needed to run even simple tasks is huge!

I realise that modern OS's and programs are far more advanced than the early ones, but I still think there is a large degree of programmers becoming lazy and assuming hardware will deal with what they write rather than writing really tight and efficient code.

The only place I think this isn't the case in current times is console games, where they can get ever increasing performance from 8+ year old hardware on consoles when the PC version of the same game expects you to have hugely higher specs.

[sunny-dave]

Anyone else have one of these

http://en.wikipedia.o...ki/Sinclair_Cambridge

£30 was a lot of dosh back then - about £300 in todays money - I remember programming it to do some sort of 'moon lander' application ... easily pleased :+)

[bert_h]

Yes, ChuckF, you're quite right about bloated code nowadays. I've watched it all happen over four decades. But there is so much code on the market now, that most of it has had to be written by mediocre programmers; and it has such a long life cycle, that any really cleverly-written code would just be a maintenance nightmare waiting to happen.

[ChuckFickens]

I was Just about born in 73.. So nope :)

An example of what I was just saying above is some of the Amiga demos... try getting modern day programmers to fit this sort of stuff on one low density floppy (720KB) and I'd bet they would struggle.

[sunny-dave]

'Clever' code was always a problem - I remember returning to an employer after a three year gap - to be greeted with joy by the poor bugger who'd been attempting to maintain one of my efforts - which had used every trick in the book (and a few more of mine that weren't) to save space and increase processing speed. Trouble was I couldn't remember how half of the fiddles worked either ...

[EDDIE51]

I found a Spectrum computer in the loft. I put it on ebay and was surprised to get £35 for it, sold to Australia.

[ChuckFickens]

And if anyone thought the Chemical Brother track "It Began in Afrika" (2002) was written by them...

The amiga budbrain demo from 1990

[seadogg]

Good old "basic" made programming a reality for the user of the BBC models which were coming into schools in the 80's. Most of us today are just button pushers I guess.

[Huderon]

The first one I got to use seriously was a PDP-11/70, that was before switching to an IBM370 and assembly programming.

The stupidest mistake I ever made programming was forgetting to sort the data which was used to create an indexed file. Hours later, when I realised what I'd done, the program ran in under 10 minutes.

The most profitable program I wrote (from the company's point of view) was one to list all the obsolete tools so they could be sold for scrap - that one brought in £250,000 in the early 80's.

The shortest program I wrote was about 6 lines of code to read a tape created on another system and write it to one which could be read by our system.

I started to lose faith in systems programmers when one told me that, no, it was absolutely NOT possible for a COBOL program to start printing on one type of stationery and then call for another type to be mounted. It didn't matter that it was a program I'd been asked to amend it to use a third type of stationery, so it was already doing what was wanted - all I needed to know was how ! In the end I found two ways of doing it.

The first "portable" computer I used was a Kaypro - to say it was weighty is putting it mildly - solid steel casing and built to take knocks. That ran CP/M, had no hard disk, just a couple of 5.5" floppies, and ran programs to help farmers with crop plans and milk records.

[TTG]

Elite in 32k on the BBC B (most of that was screen memory). An amazing piece of programming.

[EDDIE51]

I started work in a chemistry lab in 1968 , we had an electric adding machine no computer of any sort. The adding machine could do addition subtraction division and multiplication. It was just mechanical but powered by an electric motor . Th first computer I can remember was an Olivette , it was HUGE ! as big as a large bookcase with a desk for the operator. It probably had less capacity a basic mobile phone.

[HowardKennitby]

I started with a Spectrum, which I still have somewhere, then moved onto something like this.

http://www.old-comput...UM/computer.asp?c=183

I remember that it had a 40MB hard disc, DOS 3.? and that strangely shaped mouse. Came with a very good keyboard, in fact I think it is the only computer I ever bought that did have a decent keyboard as standard.