Greybeards (Re: Netbooks & BSD)

[Robert Bonomi]

> From owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org  Wed Oct 20 15:04:17 2010
> From: Mike Jeays <mike.jeays at rogers.com>
> To: Bob Hall <rjhjr0 at gmail.com>,
>         FreeBSD Mailing List <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>
> Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2010 16:05:34 -0400
> Cc: 
> Subject: Re: Greybeards (Re: Netbooks & BSD)
>
> On October 20, 2010 03:46:06 pm 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.
>
> OK, I guess you win! End-of-thread time?

Well, if one is going to get into that kind of bragging, the first *mainframe*
I worked on didn't have any disks at all. purely mag-tape based.   An early-
generation IBM system/360 with a whopping 64k words of _core_ memory.  The 
operating system was "TOS" (the <T>ape <O>perating <S>ystem), predecessor of
DOS, which the machine was upgraded to when they got a couple of hard-disks
for it.  Single user, bare-bones batch processing,  punch-card input.  late 1960s.