Greybeards (Re: Netbooks & BSD)

[krad]

On 20 October 2010 21:10, Arthur Chance <freebsd at qeng-ho.org> wrote:

> On 10/20/10 20:46, Bob Hall wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 12:07:55PM -0500, Tim Daneliuk wrote:
>>
>>> On 10/20/2010 11:55 AM, Gary Kline wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 12:47:38AM -0700, perryh at pluto.rain.com wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Matthias Apitz<guru at unixarea.de>  wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> El d?a Tuesday, October 19, 2010 a las 07:29:46PM -0700, Gary Kline
>>>>>> escribi?:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>        PS:  I really _was_ current on hardware stuff.  Back in the
>>>>>>> VAX
>>>>>>>        780 days :-)
>>>>>>>
>>>>>> I booted my first UNIX V7 tape on a PDP-11 around 1982, I think.
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Gotcha beat :)  UNIX V6, PDP-11/34, RK05 disk cartridge, 1975.
>>>>> The whole runtime fit on one RK05.  The sources took a second one.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>        I remember the 11/34 fondly.  The whole EE department at Cory
>>>>        Hall was running one one; then when I interned at Livermore my
>>>>        job of porting the "Portable F77 Compiler" was done with vi and
>>>>        the source code that Stu Feldman wrote.  I love[d] those bloody
>>>>        old computers, :-)  Dunno why.   Maybe because they really
>>>>        *were* about computing.  Not streaming [[whatever]] or having
>>>>        php running.  (Blah^9^9^9)
>>>>
>>>>        :)
>>>>
>>>
>>> Heck, when I started out, they didn't even have zeros and ones yet.
>>> We had to settle for "o"s and "l"s ...
>>>
>>
>> When I started out, we didn't have read/write heads for the hard disks.
>> We had to copy the data from the screen to the disk by hand using
>> magnetized sewing needles. In order to read the damn things we had to
>> pass a compass over the disk and see where the needle deflected.
>>
>
> Enough Monty Python Yorkshiremen claims, already. :-)
>
> Getting back to reality, although I never did it (fortunately), a friend of
> mine who was about a decade older than me (I'm mid/late 50s) had the
> experience of programming microcode on a machine by inserting brass slugs
> for 0s and ferrite slugs for 1s on a pin board. Anyone got any idea what
> that was? He was (UK) military so maybe it wasn't a generally known box.
>
>
> --
> "Although the wombat is real and the dragon is not, few know what a
> wombat looks like, but everyone knows what a dragon looks like."
>
>        -- Avram Davidson, _Adventures in Unhistory_
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My dad used to smooth the stones for his *abaci* 8))