[NBLUG/talk] System Message

[Robert Hayes]

Gawd. I don't even have to leave my desk now to feel old.

I started programming on a teletype attached to a PDP-8/1 the size of a 
refrigerator in 1972. It had 2K of memory.

Our programs were saved to paper tape, and a well placed pencil point jammed 
into a hole in a folded stack of tape could ruin your roommates' weekend.

We had real Winchester drives (all 6K of it) and it had to spin 24/7 to stay 
viable. It was the size of one of the large original microwave ovens. The 
kind that they advertised could cook an 18 lb turkey.

There are still some remnants of old teletype programming embedded in fairly 
modern code. I used to <ctrl>-G just a few years ago to make my friends' DOS 
console bell ring (in 1972 it was a real, round metal bell -- like on a 
bicycle handlebar) when we'd be using talk.

And I'm nowhere near AARP yet!


On Wednesday 16 February 2005 11:11 am, Walter Hansen wrote:
> I wonder, what did the PDP-11 and Cyber-40 run? I learned Pascal on the
> Cyber-40 at SSU using writeln if I remember correctly. I was corresponding
> with a nice girl named Sandy there until she found out I was 14. My first
> programming experience was on a Apple ][ and we had to load integer basic
> from cassette for 20 minutes before starting. That was arround 1978 and I
> was in fourth grade (an afterschool class). Heh, I remember I was reading
> books about making calculators using voltage (non-binary) arround the
> time. Guess I'm a geek.
>
> Anyone ever program on a teletype? What an enormus waste of paper. Hmmm. A
> guy named Dick used to run the computer center at SSU and he showed me and
> my frinds the Andy Capp animated ANSI art on his terminal and the huge
> drum printer (9'x9'x5') and the disk drives that looked like washing
> machines. They had a little Apple ][e tucked in a room that was almost
> never used. I used to use it alot for writeing term papers and stuff.
> Hmmmmm. Applewriter was a lot better than wordstar. Chatting with eliza,
> trying to land that lunar lander, ...... wanders off down the old geek
> road.
>
> > On Wed, February 16, 2005 12:01 am, Mitch Patenaude said:
> >> Another interesting footnote... back in the old days when large
> >> machines had multiple users
> >
> > <g>
> > The "old" days?
> >
> > FWIW, "large" machines *STILL* have multiple users.  Note that
> > these "large" machines are often no more than ordinary workstations
> > (but often sans-monitor, but also RAM-max'ed), accessed by telnet/
> > ssh/etc.
> >
> > Unless I'm sadly mistaken, our own sonic.net (who IIRC hosts nblug
> > servers) runs such a machine, known as "shell.sonic.net" and I've
> > been at more than one employer over the past 5 years who had similar
> > boxes.
> >
> > This isn't counting the folks who have thousands of (e.g.) e-mail users
> > on one mbox-server.
> >
> >> setting the ticky-bit on your tty was a
> >> sign you wanted to go in on pizza delivery, which is why it is
> >> occasionally still called the "pizza bit".  Maybe this was only a UC
> >> Berkeley thing, but I thought it was common practice.
> >
> > A brief go-round with Google would suggest not... "pizza bit" gets
> > hundreds of hits, but most ("most" = "all on the first 3 pages of
> > results") seem unrelated to UNIX's "sticky bit".  If I search
> >   UNIX+"pizza bit"
> > I get *TWO* hits, one in Norwegian & one on "pizza bit music".
> >
> > And, speaking as a statistically-invalid and strictly anecdotal datum,
> > I've been using UNIX since '80 (including at Sun Micro), and haven't
> > met the "pizza bit" usage before (tho it's clever!).
> >
> >
> > - Steve S.
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > talk mailing list
> > talk at nblug.org
> > http://nblug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
>
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at nblug.org
> http://nblug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk