Distrowatch

[Lindsay]

What I'd like to know is, are any of these old computers kept alive in
museums or are there just no valves etc.. alive to work them anymore?  I
lost my memory back in 1968 and dont recall the monsters of before that
time.

On Mon, 2005-04-04 at 15:48 +0100, Tony Arnold wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-04-04 at 23:54 +1000, Peter Garrett wrote:
> > On Mon, 2005-04-04 at 06:41 +0100, david wrote:
> > > On Mon, 2005-04-04 at 13:04 +1000, Peter Garrett wrote:
> > > > On Sun, 2005-04-03 at 22:19 -0400, mario8723 wrote:
> > > > > Emphasis on 99%. How did I know somebody was going to respond like that?
> > > > > =D>
> > > > > 
> > > > > 
> > > > > -- 
> > > > > mario8723
> > > > > 
> > > > 
> > > > <cue: Monty_Python_4_Yorkshiremen>
> > > > 
> > > > Aye, well....
> > > > 
> > > > When *I* were lad, used to punch out Fortran IV, on mechanical punch
> > > > keyboard.... carry deck 'o cards to front counter of Computer Centre,
> > > > *queue* for privilege of using IBM mainframe, and come back *a day
> > > > later* to find printout of bugs!
> > > > 
> > > > XP? OS/2? Win3.1 ? HA! *YOU* were *lucky* !!
> > > > 
> > > > </ Monty_Python>
> > > > 
> > > > 
> > > 
> > > 
> > > luxury!
> > > 
> > > We had a bag of ones and zeros which we had to lay out on t'ground and
> > > if we got it wrong father would whip us wi' cat5 cables.
> > 
> > 
> > Ones and zeros? You were lucky! Our Mum and Dad would throw letters from
> > alphabet soup on t'floor and make us write COBOL with 'em before we
> > could eat 'em!
> > 
> > Had to lick ground clean wit' tongue to debug program !...
> 
> 
> Right ...
> 
> 
> Back in 1975, every morning and evening, I used to have to key in 30
> words of octal number using a row of 16 switches on a PDP-11/20 just to
> load a bootstrap program. The system used to boot up from a 256 kilobyte
> fixed disk, run 16 terminals (Olivetti teletype) and used 2 exchangeable
> hard disks each holding 2.4 megabytes. The system had 16 kilobytes of
> memory in total.
> 
> (This is absolutely true, but you trying telling it to the kids of
> today, and they won't believe you!).
> 
> Regards,
> Tony.
> -- 
> Tony Arnold, IT Security Coordinator, University of Manchester,
> Manchester Computing, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL.
> T: +44 (0)161 275 6093, F: +44 (0)870 136 1004, M: +44 (0)773 330 0039
> E: tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk, H: http://www.man.ac.uk/Tony.Arnold
> 
> 
>