You know you are old when... - Page 2

[GrimJack]

I use to carry a couple of rolls of paper tape (much more advanced then punch cards) with all my D&D data on it.

To be honest I started this thread thinking someone will ask, but no one did, sigh!

[almostbob]

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

[chrishea]

... 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.

[cwarn23]

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

[WaltP]

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?

[Biker920]

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---

[Simon Tite]

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.

[vegaseat]

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

[Ancient Dragon]

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

When you watched her coronation live on tv.

[Biker920]

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

[WaltP]

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

Ouch....

[woooee]

Giving my niece and nephews the old "we had it tough back in my day" routine, I told them that it was so tough that if we wanted to change the TV channel we had to get up off the couch, walk across the room, and turn the knob. They gave me that look that said they weren't sure if they believed it not, and one of them said "TV's don't have knobs".

[MosaicFuneral]

"TV's don't have knobs".

I barely had to get rid of mine that I use to play games on(got a 55" HD for that now), under the stairwell. You should find one of them and an antenna; then hide your newer televisions away, so when they come over they're forced to deal with it. Also hide any computers.

[Ancient Dragon]

The first TV I bought that had a remote control I could change channels by jingling my car keys.

I also remember TVs that had round screens, and pictures were only in black & white. Then when color was becoming popular each program shown in color would be advertised as "Brought to you in living color!" and a peacock tail feathers.

[woooee]

When driving around, take a look at how many motels still advertise "color TV" (about half?). It was a big deal back when but today you would just advertise "TV".

[Salem]

.... you remember the number in Pink Floyd's refrain seemed like quite a large number of TV channels.

The number is a lot larger, but the adjective still fits ;)

[Ancient Dragon]

Pink Who???

[vegaseat]

Pink Who???

You must have been well past your teenage years and too old to remember Pink Floyd and their rock opera The Wall.

[Ancient Dragon]

Yes -- I was into Elvis, The Beatles, and others like them during my teenage years. We actually touched bodies when we danced.

[almostbob]

so did we, 10 years later, but not the body of the one dancing with

[ddanbe]

Pink Who???

You where into Elvis and the Beatles you say. Pink Floyd started out in 1965 or so. They are a famous band and one of my favorites.
Look here for info and if you want to hear how they sound here is the life track "Time" out of their classic album (1972 I think) "Dark side of the moon" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntm1YfehK7U

[Ancient Dragon]

You where into Elvis and the Beatles you say. Pink Floyd started out in 1965 or so. They are a famous band and one of my favorites.

By 1965 I was well on my wan in US military and no longer a teenager. I hated the sound of the new hard rock and acid rock that was coming out -- and still hate it to this day. Give me back the era of the big bands of the 1940's and I'll be happy.

You know you're old when...

your nipples start to point down again (down during my pumped period; up! during my eating era; going down again in my sagging stage).

Trying to unbuckle my belt is a battle - like playing hide-and-seek, or like early-onset senility - "I know it's there somewhere..."

[GrimJack]

You must have been well past your teenage years and too old to remember Pink Floyd and their rock opera The Wall.

I saw pink floyd live - Dark Side of the Moon, and UMMA GUMMA and another one I was too stoned to remember what album tour it was.

[almostbob]

IF you remember Pink Floyd, you werent really there man ..

[MosaicFuneral]

More likely, if you actually willingly listened to Ummagumma, you probably don't remember the whole year or decade.

[ddanbe]

Give me back the era of the big bands of the 1940's and I'll be happy.

Yeah! The Glenn Miller Orchestra played great music.

[Ancient Dragon]

I miss the big bands on New Year's Eve -- TV used to visit all the major night clubs so that we could watch them all. Young people don't know how to party any more.

[HiHe]

... when you remember the 3.5 inch floppy disk.

[almostbob]

When you remember 5 inch SS SD floppy disks