Re: New Members - please post your introductions here
hello Forum Members, registered here a while ago just to read some posts & now today i downloaded something so i thinks that as a member i should have to give back as i take something from here...but i can't make a new thread coz i realize that i can't make a new thread then read the forum rules & Finds.. it just needs a Post a Single Post to activate my account so i m here
member on lots of technical CHINA forums, so will be happy if i can serve here as a good member,,just changed my net name to register here 1st time,, normally i use "naughty" as my ID but now i thinks this name does not suit to my age so changed here
anyways HELLO to all members , mods & ADMINS with due respect
hello Forum Members, registered here a while ago just to read some posts & now today i downloaded something so i thinks that as a member i should have to give back as i take something from here...but i can't make a new thread coz i realize that i can't make a new thread then read the forum rules & Finds.. it just needs a Post a Single Post to activate my account so i m here
member on lots of technical CHINA forums, so will be happy if i can serve here as a good member,,just changed my net name to register here 1st time,, normally i use "naughty" as my ID but now i thinks this name does not suit to my age so changed here
anyways HELLO to all members , mods & ADMINS with due respect
!
I'm Gary from New York and first programmed on the IBM 360/40 then the 360/65 worked on the Univac when with the Air Force in various places around the globe. It had over 5500 tubes 
and weighed close to 30,000 pounds 
. Ran at 2.2 MHz and used serial memory tape drives. Won't go into the way it was programmed because that's a story in itself. 
After graduation from the military, in 1974 I worked on wire wrap boards for one of the worlds first OCR's. It had some associated computer components, one of which was a 5 MB hard drive which was as big as a washing machine. That was just the container the disks sat in, the controller was the size of a small closet.
After all the wonderful education I finally moved into the era of "modern" computers with the S-100 bus. Started out with the 8080 at 2 MHz and memory boards that were 2K (extended memory).
Ran on CPM 
and had 8" floppies, soft sectored you could turn them over and get 32K on one side and 64K on the other, if you knew the tricks. Even worse was our I/O for output devices like printers and modems. Harmon (line at a time) were tricky to make work as they were shooting for a 9600 baud rate. So most people were satisfied with a diablo pin writer, which in theory you could get to go at 1200 Baud but most of the time would only sync at 300 or 150 Baud 
(yes even a crappy typist can do better then 150 so it was a toss up time wise). My modem was so slow it had a transmit and receive switch. 
My first laptop? around the same time the Osborne 1. Had to work out to call it a "portable" computer. Had modern 5" floppies and a Amber monochrome 5" monitor. Of course myself and many others laughed at the first IBM PC's we saw because they were so small and used something called "DOS". Why we though it was easier to solder components and make a jump start board just to make a computer "boot" then learn some new fangled language. 
Well 40 years later I still think we don't know what we are doing as we lost a lot of older users when WINDOWS 8 hit town. For all the advancements in hardware the software really sucks. At this point in my life I enjoy fixing anything that broken, except bad spooler calls in windows... 
Comment