Guess what I found

That year I had an HP 41C, and was doing a bunch of hacking tricks with it (there was a club called PPC for people like that). I had an undergraduate research assistantship in which I was teaching myself Fortran 77 while trying to debug a published program for doing radiative transfer calculations on interstellar giant molecular clouds. (At the time I knew what the words meant, and had a general idea of the physics, but couldn't have written that program to save my life.)

Michigan Terminal System (MTS) on an Amdahl 470 V8 (UBC Computing Centre). I had the last remaining keypunch girl type the program in for me, because I didn't learn touch typing until 1987ish. Besides, cards were going away, and I thought they were cool.

Cheers

Phil "another old timer" Hobbs

Cards were sort of cool. You could color-code the card edges of subroutines and such, and look at a deck and see the program structure. And copy that section for code reuse.

You had to leave it plugged in because if you turned it off, the program memory would be cleared. That was solved with the HP-25C (continuous memory). I used an HP-25 around that time, until someone stole it.

In 1983 I was at UBC with the same Amdahl running MTS and FORTRAN on punch cards. After learning BASIC and Pascal on a VAX 11/780 at community college (with full screen editors), the UBC setup felt like being teleported back to the Stone Age.

Funny. His post was a reference to YOUR obsession. Why am I not surprised that you are oblivious to this as well?

In high school we used cards as input to the uni's 360/75. The CS students were pissed at us because we used the same punches and unlike them, had unlimited CPU time ($$). A few years later, when I had to take CS201, I had no issue with the HS kids. Their unlimited accounts allowed me to use the CPU as my syntax/spelling checker. When I got the job running under one of their job cards, I just stuck mine on the deck and ran it again (to register the homework).

I used a punch one time in IBM (in ~'82), when I was forced to take a course to program our component testers (was never going to do it but everyone had to feel the pain). Dealing with a punch (from a file edited with a real editor) a mile away was less painful than using their editor. If any edits, beyond a card or two, were needed, I just did it on my tube and punched another deck.

Interesting. I thought the same thing, about that time, when I had to use our VAX 11/780. ;-) We set up a HASP terminal on the VAX so we could edit on the mainframe and submit jobs to the VAX. Much easier.

I once built an interface to let our PDP-11 punch cards on an IBM 029.

I don't miss those days.

cards. After learning BASIC and Pascal on a VAX 11/780 at community college (with full screen editors), the UBC setup felt like being teleported back to the Stone Age.

I had my own private 3270 green-screen terminal and a big Tek graphics terminal that I never figured out how to use. (I was taking 6 upper level classes at the time, besides doing the research.)

I even submitted batch jobs that way.

The thing I still miss about those days is the output room. There was always some guru there waiting for his printout who had nothing better to do than help me.

Cheers

Phil "There were real men in them days" Hobbs

You should know better. Sloman comes from a relatively liberal country. It is patently possible to be both.

Similar logic to the "the blonde moved from X to Y and raised the average IQ in both areas".

Tim

That's what I had from '75ish thru '82. After that we went to PCs. They 3270+Tek display were known as the 3277GA (Graphics Attachment). They were never sold to the outside. We did our logic design, as well as ASTAP and ICD (sorta SPICE things), on them.

For years, I worked off the main site (in the original TJW research building - 701) and had to wait for the twice-a-day delivery of printouts. I ended up multiplexing about six jobs so I wasn't waiting for prints.

TJW is 801. ;)

I had a 3279 of my own as well as a PS2 mod 80 around the time I started.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I passed on the 3279. Didn't like them. I preferred the 43 lines of the 3278 Model-4 (IIRC). Though the GA for the 3278s sucked so we didn't get any of them.

power hungry die to emitter coupled logic, not the display. It's fast but at a power penalty

It would be nice if krw understood the difference between "a fact" and "krw 's opinion".

Krw is always convinced that he's been right all the time. He lacks the ima gination to comprehend any other possibility. Less biased observers rarely share his opinion.

In krw's ever-reliable and totally disinterested opinion.

If krw had half a brain - at least something that worked like a brain - he could exress that kind of opinion and might be taken seriously.

As it is, nobody bothers "picking a fight" with krw. He's not equipped to e ngage in any kind of intellectual combat. Because he doesn't understand abo ut evidence and argument, he misunderstands the people who follow him aroun d with a spade and bucket, tidying up the piles of rubbish he deposits in t hreads that catch his attention. He thinks that they are attacking him, whe n they are merely pointing out that he's posting utter rubbish - again.

PMOS, not ECL. The HP25C was CMOS.

See

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Early LSI digital logic, like the HP35, early computer terminals, early EPROMS and uPs, tended to be depletion-load PMOS, unreliable power hogs with multiple bizarre supply voltages and insane clocking requirements.

Then people advanced to depletion-load NMOS with 5 volt supplies!