On Thu, Jul 07, 2005 at 09:12:06AM +0100, Peter Hunter wrote:
Yep, you're quite right Keith, we should stop living in the past. But it is nice to talk about these things at times.
Well, just to show how ancient I am, I started my computing career in about 1970 on a big (for then) GE timesharing system as a support engineer. The main machine most definitely used punched cards, that was still the predominant means for entering programs and data. At the (teletype, 10cps) terminals punched paper tape was it. Before I left the terminals had been upgraded to super whizzy Olivetti 30cps ones and we even had a few (also 30cps) VDUs.
Later on I worked on many of the early DEC machines, PDP-8, PDP-12 (my speciality) and PDP-11. At that time all except the PDP-12 (which was a bit of an oddity) had to be booted by manually entering a simple paper tape loader in binary using the front panel switches and then loading the rest of the startup programs from paper tape.
Next I programmed 8080s and other early microprocessors.
I'll go back to sleep now.