The Times Have Changed

[sm4him]

I remember when electronic calculators first came out with (gasp!) a square root key! It was "only" $300!

We bought my dad one of those! We just KNEW we were finally gonna give him something he'd really love (Dad was basically a CPA for a Financial Loan Company and did all the audits of companies asking for loans who were considered risky). Dad reacted to it the same way he reacted to EVERY gift he was ever given...
"How 'bout that? Very good." with a completely flat affect. And yeah, I got my sense of enthusiasm from him. :lmao:

Anyway, Dad had very little use for the thing. The few times I ever did see him use it, he would do his calculations with it, then he'd do the exact same calculations with pencil and paper, to make sure it was right.


I *did* do the punchcard thing, for a bit, in the late 70s, when I got to take the very first classes offfered at our high school in Computer Science. I don't remember much about the computer though. I was serious enough about it to apply to, and get accepted by, Georgia Tech but then realized that I probably was NOT quite serious enough about it to actually get through Tech, so I changed course and ending up with a Business degree and a long career in editorial work.

Christmas 1984: I got my first ever personal computer. A Commodore 64. As in 64K. And I remember thinking that I would NEVER in my entire lifetime need ALL THAT MEMORY. :lmao: :lmao: :lmao:

 

[table1349]

This is like what I started with in 1974 when I took my first programing class. God I loved Fortran and Cobol.

 

[SCraig]

I have a Texas Instruments TI-99 in my moms garage and hopefully the cassette player I needed for backing who knows what up.

I also have a superdisk reader and disks out in the garage. They held 120 megs. They were going to compete with the Zip drives because they were so thin. Wow.

TI-994A was my first sort-of "Real" computer. I never did splurge for the external floppy drive but I did have a cassette drive.

I remember the "Black Watch" -- gunk up a tape head like crazy. I got into the habit of wiping the heads down after every tape.

Anyone remember the "Pet" computers? They were made by CBM, before the Commodore 64.

I remember them but I never used one. I really just remember the name more than anything else. I never even used a C64 though. After the TI-994A I went with a Radio Shack Color Computer. Sixteen colors was where it was at!

Another one that never made it was the Franklin Orange that was supposed to compete with the Apple. It flopped to.

Anyway, Dad had very little use for the thing. The few times I ever did see him use it, he would do his calculations with it, then he'd do the exact same calculations with pencil and paper, to make sure it was right.

My boss did the same thing for a while, but not with pencil and paper. He'd run a calculation on the electronic calculator and then run the same one on the old Monroe rotary that he had. It would divide (as opposed to the crappy Friden I got) but it wouldn't put the decimal place in. We still had to figure out where the decimal point went.

This is like what I started with in 1974 when I took my first programing class. God I loved Fortran and Cobol.

I miss FORTRAN. Never used COBOL but I wrote a lot of FORTRAN. I went from FORTRAN to Pascal and then to C and finally to C++. Once I got used to C++ I really liked it but still missed FORTRAN in many ways.

 

[manaheim]

I'm sooooooooooooo geeking out here. That vid was great, runnah.

I go back to VAXes with big spinning tapes spindles. I didn't know what they were (still don't) because it was literally my first exposure to computers. The were amaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaazing though. I was hooked. I was done. Spent the rest of my life from that moment on absolutely obsessed.

It's sort of tragic how commonplace most of the stuff has become now. Back then it took real hudspa to make computers work... and I can't even IMAGINE what it was like in the vacuum tube days. Today it's just sorta "meh... t works". Boring!

 

[Derrel]

Back in my day | everydaylifewithmo

 

[snowbear]

I wrote an Assembly program in the BASIC class I took, and ended up tutoring BASIC for a couple of semesters. I color coded my Assembly punch cards - white for code, green for data, and yellow for JCL. I loved COBOL, and have learned Python basics when I got my Geography degree.

 

[sm4him]

Anyway, Dad had very little use for the thing. The few times I ever did see him use it, he would do his calculations with it, then he'd do the exact same calculations with pencil and paper, to make sure it was right.

My boss did the same thing for a while, but not with pencil and paper. He'd run a calculation on the electronic calculator and then run the same one on the old Monroe rotary that he had. It would divide (as opposed to the crappy Friden I got) but it wouldn't put the decimal place in. We still had to figure out where the decimal point went.

I'm sure my dad did the same thing at work, but of course, I didn't usually see him there. At home, he didn't have anything else. Honestly, I think he ALWAYS preferred paper and pencil to just about anything. And that man could add numbers in his head like nobody I've EVER seen. It was incredible. He could look at a string of 20-30 numbers and just like that, tell you the total.

This is like what I started with in 1974 when I took my first programing class. God I loved Fortran and Cobol.

I miss FORTRAN. Never used COBOL but I wrote a lot of FORTRAN. I went from FORTRAN to Pascal and then to C and finally to C++. Once I got used to C++ I really liked it but still missed FORTRAN in many ways.

Yeah, FORTRAN and COBOL was FUN. I did go on to learn a little Pascal but I moved away from the world of computer programming before C and C++. Nowadays, it would probably ALL just turn my little pea-brain to mush trying to figure it all out.
Honestly, I'm pretty happy leaving the technical side to others these days and just wanting the durn thing to WORK.

But I have to admit--the geek in me was THRILLED when my eldest son decided to major in Computer Science.

 

[KmH]

I got my first personal computer in 1982 - a Sinclair ZX80. IIRC it had 2k of memory.

Who remembers using a paper hole punch to make single sided floppy discs double sided?

 

[480sparky]

..........Sparky, the first calculator I used would NOT do square roots........

My first one didn't either. It was a whopping FOUR function calculator. But it could nest three pairs of parentheses.

Then I got a TI-30, and was the envy of everyone in school. Used it till the batteries crapped out and couldn't find replacements. So I got an HP 48G+ for 1/3 the price. Then had to learn RPN.

 

[table1349]

Anyway, Dad had very little use for the thing. The few times I ever did see him use it, he would do his calculations with it, then he'd do the exact same calculations with pencil and paper, to make sure it was right.

My boss did the same thing for a while, but not with pencil and paper. He'd run a calculation on the electronic calculator and then run the same one on the old Monroe rotary that he had. It would divide (as opposed to the crappy Friden I got) but it wouldn't put the decimal place in. We still had to figure out where the decimal point went.

I'm sure my dad did the same thing at work, but of course, I didn't usually see him there. At home, he didn't have anything else. Honestly, I think he ALWAYS preferred paper and pencil to just about anything. And that man could add numbers in his head like nobody I've EVER seen. It was incredible. He could look at a string of 20-30 numbers and just like that, tell you the total.

This is like what I started with in 1974 when I took my first programing class. God I loved Fortran and Cobol.

I miss FORTRAN. Never used COBOL but I wrote a lot of FORTRAN. I went from FORTRAN to Pascal and then to C and finally to C++. Once I got used to C++ I really liked it but still missed FORTRAN in many ways.

Yeah, FORTRAN and COBOL was FUN. I did go on to learn a little Pascal but I moved away from the world of computer programming before C and C++. Nowadays, it would probably ALL just turn my little pea-brain to mush trying to figure it all out.
Honestly, I'm pretty happy leaving the technical side to others these days and just wanting the durn thing to WORK.

But I have to admit--the geek in me was THRILLED when my eldest son decided to major in Computer Science.

My dad was a CPA. We still have at home his old Royal adding machine. No batteries, no electricity, good old fashioned lever pull. We also have his later electric adding machine. He was a whiz with a slide rule as well. Yes I still have that since I also had to use it in high school.

Fortran, Cobol, Pascal, and Algol68. I still have a shoe box that has all of the punch cards from my final. Still all in order. Those were the good ole days. Playing Space Wars on the Boeing Mainframe in our spare time.

 

[480sparky]

Ease up, people.... we're gonna give the kiddies here an inferiority complex.

 

[table1349]

Ease up, people.... we're gonna give the kiddies here an inferiority complex.

Good, bout time they knew their place in the world. Most of them couldn't survive if cell towers died and cable quit. They would all be in the fetal position sucking a thumb and holding their iPhone, HTC, Galaxy, iPad or wireless keyboard to their cheek like Linus' blanket rocking back and forth.

 

[sm4him]

My boss did the same thing for a while, but not with pencil and paper. He'd run a calculation on the electronic calculator and then run the same one on the old Monroe rotary that he had. It would divide (as opposed to the crappy Friden I got) but it wouldn't put the decimal place in. We still had to figure out where the decimal point went.

I'm sure my dad did the same thing at work, but of course, I didn't usually see him there. At home, he didn't have anything else. Honestly, I think he ALWAYS preferred paper and pencil to just about anything. And that man could add numbers in his head like nobody I've EVER seen. It was incredible. He could look at a string of 20-30 numbers and just like that, tell you the total.

I miss FORTRAN. Never used COBOL but I wrote a lot of FORTRAN. I went from FORTRAN to Pascal and then to C and finally to C++. Once I got used to C++ I really liked it but still missed FORTRAN in many ways.

Yeah, FORTRAN and COBOL was FUN. I did go on to learn a little Pascal but I moved away from the world of computer programming before C and C++. Nowadays, it would probably ALL just turn my little pea-brain to mush trying to figure it all out.
Honestly, I'm pretty happy leaving the technical side to others these days and just wanting the durn thing to WORK.

But I have to admit--the geek in me was THRILLED when my eldest son decided to major in Computer Science.

My dad was a CPA. We still have at home his old Royal adding machine. No batteries, no electricity, good old fashioned lever pull. We also have his later electric adding machine. He was a whiz with a slide rule as well. Yes I still have that since I also had to use it in high school.

Fortran, Cobol, Pascal, and Algol68. I still have a shoe box that has all of the punch cards from my final. Still all in order. Those were the good ole days. Playing Space Wars on the Boeing Mainframe in our spare time.

I gave my slide rule to my eldest son, who used it proudly throughout high school--usually having to explain to the rest of the students what it was. I think once or twice he also had to explain to the TEACHERS how it worked, lol.
He still has it and uses it for his college classes sometimes, just for fun.

In college, we had a Star Trek game we played, for hours on end. [A note for all you "kiddos" out there: When I say we played a Star Trek game, do NOT envision images of the Enterprise, taking on avatars of your favorite characters, cool 3-D scenes of starships blasting through space...we're talking little dots on a screen here. Printouts on a dot-matrix printer.
Something like this.

 

[Steve5D]

I was never really into computers, but I remember needing to put a 5-1/4" floppy into a disc drive to play solitaire...

 

[table1349]

I'm sure my dad did the same thing at work, but of course, I didn't usually see him there. At home, he didn't have anything else. Honestly, I think he ALWAYS preferred paper and pencil to just about anything. And that man could add numbers in his head like nobody I've EVER seen. It was incredible. He could look at a string of 20-30 numbers and just like that, tell you the total.



Yeah, FORTRAN and COBOL was FUN. I did go on to learn a little Pascal but I moved away from the world of computer programming before C and C++. Nowadays, it would probably ALL just turn my little pea-brain to mush trying to figure it all out.
Honestly, I'm pretty happy leaving the technical side to others these days and just wanting the durn thing to WORK.

But I have to admit--the geek in me was THRILLED when my eldest son decided to major in Computer Science.

My dad was a CPA. We still have at home his old Royal adding machine. No batteries, no electricity, good old fashioned lever pull. We also have his later electric adding machine. He was a whiz with a slide rule as well. Yes I still have that since I also had to use it in high school.

Fortran, Cobol, Pascal, and Algol68. I still have a shoe box that has all of the punch cards from my final. Still all in order. Those were the good ole days. Playing Space Wars on the Boeing Mainframe in our spare time.

I gave my slide rule to my eldest son, who used it proudly throughout high school--usually having to explain to the rest of the students what it was. I think once or twice he also had to explain to the TEACHERS how it worked, lol.
He still has it and uses it for his college classes sometimes, just for fun.

In college, we had a Star Trek game we played, for hours on end. [A note for all you "kiddos" out there: When I say we played a Star Trek game, do NOT envision images of the Enterprise, taking on avatars of your favorite characters, cool 3-D scenes of starships blasting through space...we're talking little dots on a screen here. Printouts on a dot-matrix printer.
Something like this.

THAT'S SPACE WARS!!!! :smileys: Lots of people used to call it Star Trek. Boeing hated that we played it on their mainframe.