The Times Have Changed

[sm4him]

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.

Ah, okay. I thought it might be--sounded familiar, but yeah, we ALWAYS called it Star Trek, because most of us were big Trekkies.

 

[table1349]

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.

Ah, okay. I thought it might be--sounded familiar, but yeah, we ALWAYS called it Star Trek, because most of us were big Trekkies.

OMG.....Would people today vapor lock if they had to play games by command line??? :shock:

 

[SCraig]

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

I must have wasted a thousand hours playing that silly game. I'd forgotten all about it.

There was another game I used to play but all I remember was that it was the "Original" command-line "Adventure" game. Walk forward, look left, pick up something, everything done by command line. I can't remember the scenario any longer though, only that I found the source code for it on a tape from the DEC User's Society and cheated on it from then on

 

[limr]

Oh goodness, Pet computers! I never had a Commodore 64 - they were way too fancy for us I do remember learning to program BASIC on a "Trash-80". Our computer class also had two - TWO - Apple II computers and we got to do some graphic programming on that. I still remember that I coded out a Nike swish. I also remember that I had a HUGE crush on a guy named Lance who was in that class. He was very shy and barely talked at all. One day we were both in front of the one massive dot matrix printer, waiting for our programs to print. His came out first and he pulled it out too quickly and it ripped. He looked at me, and then looked away and said, "Crap! I ripped my program!" My friends and I dissected that for weeks, trying to decide if it meant he liked me or not God, I'm so glad I'm not 14 anymore!

My older sister majored in Computer Science, so I got some exposure at home, and she gave me her IBM PC to me when I went to college. Didn't even have a hard drive at all. Had to boot it from a 5 1/4" floppy. At least it had two disk drives so I didn't have to keep switching from the system boot disk, the program boot disk, and the storage disk. And green monochrome was WAY better than orange monochrome! That computer gave up the ghost LITERALLY an hour after I finished and printed my college senior thesis.

I can't even remember the point at which I realized that I would NOT have to learn to program anything other than go-to loops. I also know that for the first few years after Windows came out, I kept defaulting to the DOS prompt whenever I wanted to do something "for real."

Ah, good times

 

[table1349]

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

I must have wasted a thousand hours playing that silly game. I'd forgotten all about it.

There was another game I used to play but all I remember was that it was the "Original" command-line "Adventure" game. Walk forward, look left, pick up something, everything done by command line. I can't remember the scenario any longer though, only that I found the source code for it on a tape from the DEC User's Society and cheated on it from then on

Colossal Cave Adventure or Adventure for short? I remember it but didn't play it much.

 

[SCraig]

Colossal Cave Adventure or Adventure for short? I remember it but didn't play it much.

Yep, just "Adventure". I remember the name of the executable was ADVENT.EXE (I played it on a VAX so it wasn't a .COM).

 

[manaheim]

XYZZY!

 

[table1349]

Right, well someone get out the The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch. The rabbits gone crazy.

A Reading from the Book of Armaments, Chapter 4, Verses 16 to 20:


Then did he raise on high the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, saying, "Bless this, O Lord, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy." And the people did rejoice and did feast upon the lambs and toads and tree-sloths and fruit-bats and orangutans and breakfast cereals ... Now did the Lord say, "First thou pullest the Holy Pin. Then thou must count to three. Three shall be the number of the counting and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither shalt thou count two, excepting that thou then proceedeth to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the number of the counting, be reached, then lobbest thou the Holy Hand Grenade in the direction of thine foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it."

 

[bratkinson]

In my first computer sciences class in 1966, the professor held up a grid about 24" on each side and perhaps 1-2" thick and said: "THIS is 1000 characters of computer memory!". Of course the entire lecture hall gasped. But he lied... it was REALLY 1024 characters, not 1000! I'm guessing that was perhaps $300,000-400,000 1960 dollars when it was new. The 16 GIGABYTE thumb drive on my key ring cost $15 2-3 years ago.

In subsequent college computer classes, I did everything from write binary bootstrap cards to Fortran compilers and used several TUBE computers in the process! Little did I know that 20 years later, at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, the former "Electric Theater" was converted to an IBM 'hall of history' or whatever. Except for the 704 there, I could program/operate/and WIRE -everything- there! Maybe when I die, I should ask to be stuffed and mounted as 'old fashioned computer geek'...

 

[IronMaskDuval]

Well, at least we've identified the aarp members of this forum. :mrgreen:

 

[snowbear]

“You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.”

 

[table1349]

Well, at least we've identified the aarp members of this forum. :mrgreen:

May be, but we have also identified someone who should have read this post http://www.thephotoforum.com/forum/off-topic-chat/356463-times-have-changed-2.html#post3202371 And paid some attention to it.

 

[IronMaskDuval]

May be, but we have also identified someone who should have read this post http://www.thephotoforum.com/forum/off-topic-chat/356463-times-have-changed-2.html#post3202371 And paid some attention to it.

Who reads?

 

[unpopular]

Token Ring 4 Life!