Like in the Good Old Days! [Distro Fever]

Still have the keys to a 3081 operator’s console, and a couple of boxes of blank punch cards…

As I was 4 years old in 1972, my father, working as programmer for a bank (at that time 64 KB filled a whole room), teached me to read punch cards :wink:

Wow!
I worked a lot on the 370’s and newer, mainly with COBOL and COBOL/CICS, and also Software AG Natural/Adabas.
Good old green dumb terminals! ( I can still hear its unique metal key stroke sound)
At home, I was everything but a geek until I came to know Linux, which is now my only OS. With the knowledge I got from tweaking it at home, I ended up making a shift in my career, from mainframe programming to IT. And with that, I rediscovered Windows, via Windows Server, an excellent tool to put a tight control on workstations and quickly deploy changes to their configuration.

I learned how to program at school, with pen and paper. But we couldn’t actually run programs at school because schools didn’t have computers in those days. To run programs I had to cycle three miles to the local college of further education. They didn’t have a computer either, but they did have Teletypes, mostly to prepare programs on paper-tape but one Teletype had a modem for connection to the local Polytechnic which - wow - actually had a computer.

Is it me or is this topic slowly becoming this?

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Hahaha.

If we’re talking intro to computer science, for me that was in 2nd grade writing in LOGO then BASIC on Apple][+’s at school. We actually learned by crayon and paper first. I remember it well. TO SQUARE…

image
https://archive.org/details/edd_Apple_Logo_1982_Logo_Computer_Systems_v1.5

https://archive.org/details/Apple_DOS_3.3_Master

@Ofnuts My thoughts entirely!

At the time, to work on IBM mainframes writing DOS/JCL procedures and FORTRAN programs did not seem so dreadful :scream:

To put everything in perspective, I recently made a short programming stint in a company, and discovered that someone there was writing Cobol to read XML files. Add a jar of Prozac to the array of programming tools…

I must add that, thanks to my interest in Linux, I slowly adopted it at work since around 2010. At first it was as dual boot along Windows. But now, since 3 years ago, I made Linux my main OS at work. I had to wait this long because 90% of my co-workers work on Windows, 8% on Mac, and the rest on Linux. As a researcher, I have to work on shared documents, in general from Word, Excel or PowerPoint, now I can do it more easily since LibreOffice made great progress with regards to MS Office compatibility.

Holy schmokes Batman, Red Hat Linux going to IBM for $34,000,000,000.00.

Big Blue Hat Linux anyone?

You said it, @HIRAM, that’s a lot of mullah!
I wonder how many Red Hat customers feel about the Big Blue Behemoth swalling the red fedora.

Analog computer <3

Especially given BigBlue’s track record with its acquisitions (Lotus, Rational…).

The one in my engineering school (late 70’s) covered a whole wall. The professor that taught us how to use it was convinced that the future would be hybrid analog/digital computers.

I heard that in the 60s, somewhere at Aerospatiale, there was a big building housing such a computer that was a simulator of the structure of Concorde.

You see way back in my day, we made all our beats on a Buchla system 100 in one of the university laboratories. It’s sequencer was formerly installed in Ken Kesey’s van. :peace_symbol: :dizzy:

I love the unique sound. That is what I go to YouTube, etc., for. :joy:

Nowadays they use computers analogas simulated with GPUs

Never to be outdone… My first computer, a sixties-era Ordinatron600 I got for XMas, with its classy wooden box. I still have it… one of these days I’ll fire it up…

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My first actual computer was a SInclair ZX Spectrum.

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