Silly?!!
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Ah yes, a 'floor sort' :-D. When I took Data Structures in college, it was in FORTRAN on the university IBM mainframe, using punched cards. We had a guy in the class who was blind. I helped him with a floor sort one time. The funny thing was, he'd originally punched his deck on a punch where the ribbon was dry, so you couldn't read the text. Fortunately, he'd run the deck through a verifier that punched line numbers in columns 73-80 for you, and those were readable. The guy himself had learned to read Hollerith directly off the card. He said it was like Braille, just a heck of a lot slower since each character was spread out over so much space.
Software Zen:
delete this;Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
The guy himself had learned to read Hollerith directly off the card.
:omg: It just shows that humans are amazingly adaptable. On a related note, have you ever noticed that there is braille on the keys at a drive-up ATM.
Gary Kirkham Forever Forgiven and Alive in the Spirit He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. - Jim Elliot Me blog, You read
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if((a != b) & (a == c) & (c == b)) //a, b, and c are integers { //Do something } else { //throw nasty exception that when caught results in email being sent to multiple individuals and blaming dumb users. Also, //keep trying, as maybe it will be different next time. Yeah, that's the ticket... }
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Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
The guy himself had learned to read Hollerith directly off the card.
:omg: It just shows that humans are amazingly adaptable. On a related note, have you ever noticed that there is braille on the keys at a drive-up ATM.
Gary Kirkham Forever Forgiven and Alive in the Spirit He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. - Jim Elliot Me blog, You read
Gary Kirkham wrote:
braille on the keys at a drive-up ATM
Actually, that's not as silly as it sounds. A blind person could have someone drive them to an ATM, etc. and they get out of the car to use it. The other thing you'll notice is that the kiosk for drive-up ATM's and indoor wall-mounted ATM's from a given manufacturer will often be identical. The real :wtf: with ATM's is that a lot of them used to run under OS/2...
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Graham Shanks wrote:
After that
You skipped a few machines that used compact cassettes (and no I am not talking about the Vic-20's!) such as the Wang 700 series.
Texas Instruments had the "Silent 700". ASCII keyboard, a thermal printer, RS-232 interface, and a mag tape. The tape was really slow. I remember one project where we had device firmware on the tape, then the patches for the device firmware, then the patches for the patches, and so on for five or six levels. This firmware got loaded into a device which we then debugged :shudder:.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
:-D You could tell the tech guy on the phone (it ended up with that before I knew what I did) was having a WTF moment.
Jeremy Falcon
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Nader Elshehabi wrote:
Also if anybody has nice memories from the old times -when the OS was loaded each time from a 5.25" disk
OK, if these are old times, what about when you loaded the OS from paper tape (actually using the keys on the front of the computer to load a paper tape containing the loader program, which was then used to load the OS). The times when patching a program meant covering up holes in the paper tape by little bits of paper (come on, fess up - how many people have done this?). The times when you could tell what program the computer was running by the noises they made. The times when a programming competition meant writing a program that did something as well as playing a recognisable tune on the computer After that came 8" floppy disks: 5.25" disks - luxury
Graham My signature is not black, just a very, very dark blue
We had an old Xerox mainframe in our Engineering School and each of the student operators (there were about a half dozen of us) had our own customized OS (with development tools) on mag tape reels (loaded from tape drive 2)...and a small piece of mag tape that we spliced together to form an endless loop that just fit around the empty reels of tape drive 1 (with a mag tape bootstrap program recorded on it)...we never had to rewind the boot loader because it was always positioned at the start after each boot up (no start of tape / end of tape markers). :-D ah, those were the days when 32K bytes of main memory was way more than we needed... Steve