Greybeards (Re: Netbooks & BSD)

[Arthur Chance]

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_