Greybeards (Re: Netbooks & BSD)

[Robert Bonomi]

> From owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org  Thu Oct 21 02:18:28 2010
> Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2010 08:20:07 +0100
> From: Arthur Chance <freebsd at qeng-ho.org>
> To: FreeBSD-Questions <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>
> Subject: Re: Greybeards (Re: Netbooks & BSD)
>
> On 10/20/10 23:07, Gary Kline wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 09:10:28PM +0100, Arthur Chance 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.
> >>
> >
> > 	This microcode programming sounds just vagely familiar; seems like
> > 	mid/late-80's or early-90's. Am i right?  --Most uses for
> > 	supercomputers are mil/spooks/<<>>; that's the only reason the
> > 	idea might have floated past me.
>
> No, this was circa 1970. I met him in 1975 and and it was past history 
> for him then. He was Royal Air Force, if that gives a clue, and 
> certainly wasn't a super - he talked about it as if it were a fairly 
> dumb mini.

That =had= to have been some kind of fairly specialized, and -very- limited
capability, hardware.  Probably a crypto translator.