> Harvey Newstrom, <mail@HarveyNewstrom.com>, writes:
> > Many of us old-timers were espousing that very thing on this very
> > list back in 1989!
>
> Is this one of those stories like how we had to compose our list messages
> on punch cards and deliver them to each other by carrier pigeon sent
> through driving snow? Hal
Carrier pigeon? Luxury! Why I remember when we had to chisel
ASCII code into granite punch cards. The floppies each had a capacity of
one bit. And they crashed half the time. The error message was:
"Data unreadable. Was it a 0 or a 1?" Since the clock rate on the
computers was one cycle per minute, each floppy took about an hour to
read, and of course it took 8 of em per character. The hard disks
were the size of tabletop and they didnt actually have a motor, you
had to wind em up. Then you had to move the read head by hand to
the place on the disk where you thought the data was. The keyboards
in those days had only two keys, a 1 and a 0. Programming was
tedious. We got better. spike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:50:34 MDT