My first one had a tape-deck :)

Mine as well: Commodore Vic-20
:)

My first one had a tape-deck :)

My first computer was an RCA Elf, with a cmos based computer chip used in the NASA moon missions. My main storage was a tape deck too.

I am not sure if you noticed, but the verb form you want is reminisce. Just to let you know, I'm not really anal just thought I could help you out if grammar is not your strong point.

Thanks. I'm more of a math guy then a English one. Plus English is my
secondary language.

cwarn23 must indeed be very young. I had a TI99/4A with a cassette deck as I/O and an old TV as monitor.:)
But that does not mean I consider myself an old sack.

... when you begin discussing your medical conditions in the most honest of terms with most anyone who will hear... then again that may be a personality issue... still sorting it out...

43 btw... not fully disclosing medical issues... but becoming tempted...

...when you remember bootstrapping the computer by its front panel switches, installing operating system patches with an octal editor, and writing programs on a teletype (thats like a big typewriter with fanfold paper instead of a screen, for you youngsters). Oh, and using telex to supply patches (sometimes even small programs) to clients (beats dictating over the telephone, although the character set was limited, you had to spell out some of the punctuation marks).

Sigh! Those were the days my friends!

...when you can remember having to use an ACTUAL dial to dial a telephone number.

You had a Dial Phone? Trying to put operators out of work?

How about having to use punch cards to do programming? Our CS teacher reminded us that when he was working on the ARPANET, they did not have compilers with syntax check and auto completion which I think creates a lazy programmer.

... when a computer with 64K memory was stored on three floors of a concrete building with millions of huge vacuum tubes.

How about having to use punch cards to do programming? Our CS teacher reminded us that when he was working on the ARPANET, they did not have compilers with syntax check and auto completion which I think creates a lazy programmer.

Yeah, in CS we had to write the programs out by hand, on paper with a little box for each character, then post this into a pigeon hole. Next working day (D+1) (if you were lucky) you'd get back a stack of punched cards, and a printout of their contents, for checking. After correcting the errors (with a red biro) , you'd get the corrected cards back the next day (D+2), hopefully without errors, and hand them back for processing. The next day (D+3/4), you'd get the results, which would normally be syntax errors or typos you'd missed. Red biro, da de dah, D+4 the results of the compiled program. Basically, one working week to enter, compile and run a 200 line program. And another week to fix the logical errors.

But we wuz grateful for it, guv!

I still have 3 paper tapes
ascii art (if you squint a bit) ladies scantily attired
just need somebody with an ibm 360 or 370 to load them on
hours Queing at Uni for punch card reader

incidentally the world's third (or fourth I dont remember) computer CSIRAC is (tourism mostly) still in use very occasionally it is bootstrapped by panel switches
Its a pig to operate, but it does teach you to write small tight code, you cant fit much in

The Last of the First: CSIRAC, Australia’s First Computer, by Doug McCann and Peter Thorne, documents the history of this important artifact. The specifications of CSIRAC are both entertaining and amazing. It had 256 twenty-bit “words” of memory,
each storing four 5-bit letters or digits, implemented using mercury delay lines (later expanded to 512 words, and then, finally, 768 words, in both cases by improving the mercury lines rather than by adding more of them). It had a magnetic drum backing store with another 1,024 words of storage. It had 2,000 valves, and using them could compute around 1,000 operations per second. And it required 30 kW of power and weighed approximately two tonnes. It...

the ibm74 that replaced it, seemed so fast 500K operations /second

my ibm pc in 1981 could perform(at 4.77Mhz) 22K operations /sec had 512KB of fully addressible ram, cost only $5000 and fit on my desk

(all benchmarking at this point was the same paper tape program in fortran)
If I load the same program into this laptop, I wonder how many operations it would record)
Edit Ran a vaxMips test 705.568M operations /sec
35000 speed increase, for a $300 laptop

I remember when..., Thats how you know you are old

... you can remember the days when having someone else to keypunch your program for you was a real luxury, when all testing was done at night and 12k of memory was all we had to work with in a (Univac) machine that filled a room. I'll be really old when I can't remember it anymore.

When you remember this thread just like myself. The good old days.

and the fastest modem available was 300 baud.

or the teletype hardwired to the computer that takes up an entire room runs at a blazing 110 baud!

I still have 3 paper tapes
ascii art (if you squint a bit) ladies scantily attired
just need somebody with an ibm 360 or 370 to load them on

Remember Lenna?

Or a crank telephone

Or remember watching this presidential campaign ad on tv

I have one of those crank phones in my attic the bleeping signal generator still works, we didn't have a tv yet when that ad ran.
59 last sept & can still out party the youngins. BTW can you remember sleds with steel runners &wood decks. Later---

or the teletype hardwired to the computer that takes up an entire room runs at a blazing 110 baud!

.. when you know what a baud is.

... when you remember the Queen of England as a young woman.

... when you remember the Queen of England as a young woman.

When you watched her coronation live on tv.

You watched the Mercury space shots live and were old enough to understand what was happening