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How's your DOS ?
awemawson:
--- Quote from: jcs0001 on October 08, 2015, 01:56:18 PM ---My first computer course involved printing out a series of punched cards, putting them in a reader (after lining up with a bunch of other students for long time) and then finding that there was a glitch and it wouldn't run.
John.
--- End quote ---
Oh yes, stacks of (un-numbered) 80 column punch cards loosely held together with a long rubber band - running down the stairs at college from the punch room to the computer suite and dropping the lot. Been there and cried :bang:
Cobol and Fortran on an ICL 1900
CrazyModder:
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. Unfortunately (or maybe not) I missed the punch cards.
I entered the digital age with a brand new Atari 800 XL, complete with a very nice monochrome green monitor and datasette. If I recall correctly, it included the manual, which was actually pretty complete. It contained the complete hardware wiring, a complete Assembler reference etc.. I soon had a few books with listings which I typed in fervently. I remember as if it was yesterday, having typed in a quite longish (for my taste) BASIC program, and then trying a new command... NEW. Oops.
Eventually I got most everything - 5 1/4" floppy etc., "real" games. I programmed it in assembler and BASIC a lot. I actually almost, but not quite, got a 300 baud coupler running with it near the end of it. I also wired LEDs to most of the hardware lines (like the adress/data lines going from/to the CPU) and got an awfully expensive 320KB RAM expansion (which had to be memory banked for a whopping total of 384KB). I did everything. Like write a very large assembler program from scratch including a GUI and everything; it was used to inspect, copy, format floppies. Please guess how I lost this program.
I could use a 2-floppy Amstrad PC (8068 I believe) at an uncle's. I learned the hard way what the RENUM command of that particular DOS flavour did - it renumbered all files on the floppy starting from 00001 in case the directory information got lost. Guess how I lost my DOS boot disk (hey, only one way to find out!).
Then, 268 (40 MB HDD! Unbelievable!) and from there on the whole shebang. The 286 was actually the one and only PC I ever bought. The computer I am typing on right now (more or less a gaming rig) is a direct, unbroken descendant from that one back then, being updated piecewise. I must have used a dozen or more programming languages over the decades.
Times they are a changing. I pitty the kids today who do not have the chance of a pickle in a supernova of repeating such a journey, i.e. understanding every and any single detail about such a machine, from the very level of transistors upwards, at the time it is current state of the art.
jcs0001:
Yes - Fortran IV as I recall, on a huge university mainframe. I didn't spill the cards but also didn't have much of a clue so it was not my favourite course by any means. I must admit that going from a small town to a huge university in the city was a bit of a shock and didn't help my studies.
Much later I took a couple of college level courses using pascal - bought turbo pascal as it was almost the same and I could fool with it at home. No more punch cards - real terminals for a change. Did so much playing with it that it was intuitive at times.
John.
Jonny:
Still use my Casio FX-7000P from 1984 with basic proggies written, 10 yrs later was beating the whizz kids by 10 mins that took me 12 seconds.
Who remembers the Apple 2E had one in 80 and wont have another Apple in the house.
Atari ST was a bit weird in basic same machine at the time to do the Smarties adverts and still got it converted to 1 meg.
At least you knew where you were with the Spectrum.
Just threw out a 94 SX25
Lew_Merrick_PE:
--- Quote from: jcs0001 on October 08, 2015, 01:56:18 PM ---My first computer course involved printing out a series of punched cards, putting them in a reader (after lining up with a bunch of other students for long time) and then finding that there was a glitch and it wouldn't run.
Next was a desktop with two 720 mb floppies - I figured I had the world by the tail and used dos a lot. Once I got it my wife figured she was a "computer widow".
--- End quote ---
My first computer had a discrete component RTL processor running at a (then) screaming 16 kHz! It was "programmed" through bat switches that lit up grain o' wheat bulbs -- until I finally got a Flexowriter hooked up to it...
I suspect that your floppies were 720 kB rather than 720 mB. [My first floppies were 8 inch 32 kB beasties.]
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