Commodore 64 is now 25 years old

The only thing I remember from Compuserve was back when I was 13 or 14, using my 300 baud modem to wander around some new-fangled "chat room" thingie (which, as I recall, they gave the super-hip name "CB", associating it with the "we got a great big convoy" radio social phenomenon), being singled out by some guy for a "solo" chat, who sort of electronically rolled his eyes when it became clear that I was the only person who didn't realize that this "room" was somehow known to be only for gays. The guy was probably a Senator.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme...
-harry
 
mantakos said:
The only thing I remember from Compuserve was back when I was 13 or 14, using my 300 baud modem to wander around some new-fangled "chat room" thingie (which, as I recall, they gave the super-hip name "CB", associating it with the "we got a great big convoy" radio social phenomenon), being singled out by some guy for a "solo" chat, who sort of electronically rolled his eyes when it became clear that I was the only person who didn't realize that this "room" was somehow known to be only for gays. The guy was probably a Senator.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme...
-harry
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Representative actually, the Senator was off in the bathroom at the time. ;)
 
Ghery said:
It is a keypunch machine. Used for punching cards. A standard way of inputting a program into computers back in the dark ages. I used these in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
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I did data entry for my college flying club on a keypunch machine. It was my way of getting them to waive the monthly dues. This was in the 1978/79 timespan.
 
smigaldi said:
That is far too modern. One has not lived until they did their programming on one of these babies!
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smigaldi said:
We were movin' on up when we got to use the machine. A lot of times you went home with your cards and a number two pencil and colored in the dots. The 'big kids' had priority access to the punch card machine. Heaven help you if you got a card wrong or even worse the got out of order.
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Wow! LOL! At our cutting edge Chicago public high school we had to take turns to use one of the three(?) keypunches. The teacher's pet got to use the online printing terminal with a live datalink to downtown. The revenge was when his science fair project program got erased and all he had was a printout. The teacher told him to have mere mortal students rekey the program in on cards.

The sad thing was when I went back 15 years later and told the students how we had use the keypunch and now they had CRTs. I was told they were STILL using the keypunches! The Board of Ed gave all the money to the lousy schools that weren't getting the good test scores and sending grads to college.
 
mantakos said:
The only thing I remember from Compuserve was back when I was 13 or 14, using my 300 baud modem to wander around some new-fangled "chat room" thingie (which, as I recall, they gave the super-hip name "CB", associating it with the "we got a great big convoy" radio social phenomenon), being singled out by some guy for a "solo" chat, who sort of electronically rolled his eyes when it became clear that I was the only person who didn't realize that this "room" was somehow known to be only for gays. The guy was probably a Senator.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme...
-harry
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Yep. I knew the guy, Chris, who was the moderator of the CB area.

The gay area was open to anyone who had a recognized alias until they made it private (by password only) later when some troublemakers started doing impersonations to get in and cause havoc. They eventually even put code in place so even the password alone wouldn't work.

Everything online has negative entropy. Those were the days before spam and flames, etc.

When Chris from New York met up with Pam in Chicago and they eventually announced their marriage. I tipped off a newspaper columnist because it was litterally the first online date marriage. They ended up with TV crews coming to visit and went on game shows. They did eventually forgive me. :rolleyes:
 
I'm surprised nobody mentioned the Adam...

028_25.jpg


It had a (deservedly) short tenure.

Rich
 
Some of the most wasted hours I spent in school was writing a program using some 300 punch cards. I wish I still had them to cut up for the next parade.
 
Bill Jennings said:
(Or, God forbid, you drop you deck on the floor....Oh, Lordy)
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The weekend before finals week around 1am I ran across a guy sitting in the long hallway next to the mainframe windows slowly cleaning up a big mess of punch cards. He crying with tears running down his face. He dumped three boxes of cards on the floor - they were NOT numbered.
It took five or six of us and a handful of others that came and went until sunrise to get it all sorted out.

Today's visual basic is for computer science slacker weenies. We had no visual nothing back then. We were into hard core stuff. I had put my Assembly project aside to help with Mr Punchcard's Fortran 77 program.

IIRC the big sign in the printer room said something along the lines of "Notice to all Assembly programmers: PLEASE DO NOT EVER forget to restore the registers before ending your program...thy Sysop will love you for doing so. EOJ"

Anyone who has written a program in machine code raise your hands. :yinyang:

$60 RTS

EOJ
 
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fgcason said:
Anyone who has written a program in machine code raise your hands. :yinyang:

$60 RTS

EOJ
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My favorite compsci class was 360/370 assembly language. That was several lifetimes ago, it seems.
 
Bill Jennings said:
My favorite compsci class was 360/370 assembly language. That was several lifetimes ago, it seems.
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Ditto! loading registers and shifting bits ... real programming ... like "Visual Assembler"! :) Visualize the registers in your head, now load them, now shift right no carry!
 
gkainz said:
Ditto! loading registers and shifting bits ... real programming ... like "Visual Assembler"! :) Visualize the registers in your head, now load them, now shift right no carry!
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I loved when we got to move up to that. I had been doing assembler on the front panel of an HP 100 by moving a switch for each of the 16-bits and then hitting enter.

hp1000.jpg
 
Navy test labs had some simulators (Sperry/Rand and Goodyear were 2 I recall) that had to have the bootstrap program loaded via switches on the front panel ... pages and pages of entries ... one mistake and you wiped it out and started over ... now we complain when Win2K or XP takes nearly a minute to boot!
 
And to think I once entertained the idea of buying an ancient Sperry mainframe from Herbach and Rademann. Aside from keeping the house warm (at great expense), what was I thinking? :redface:

The spontenaity of youth.
 
As a field tech for DEC,for 4 years at Lockheed Georgia, (1984-88) I had the distince pleasure of maintaining over a hundred of these wonderful junkheaps. (Along with over a thousand other DEC terminals and printers.)
Lockheed GA didn't get touch tone service till after I left. Sometime in the early 90's.
Spareparts had at least a 60% DOA rate. The circuit cards weren't printed, they were wires poked thru holes, and wave soldered on the underside. Our time was mostly spent chasing cold solder joints. Ahhh, the memories. The truly modern ones had 2 count 'em 2! 8 inch 256K floppie drives. The parts/POH/service libraries for the C-141/141B and the C5-B were all created on these. I just threw out all my old 8 inch diagnostic disks about 3 years ago. My kids don't even know what a diskette, of any size, is.
 

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wsuffa said:
And to think I once entertained the idea of buying an ancient Sperry mainframe from Herbach and Rademann. Aside from keeping the house warm (at great expense), what was I thinking? :redface:

The spontenaity of youth.
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Somewhere in between times I met up with a group of guys who were buying PDP-11s and such at auction for mere hundreds of dollars. I got to visit the warehouse they had on the west side. They had dozens of complete DEC systems, but not of course, a facilty with enough power and A/C to allow them to be powered up.

I go by that building on the train now. I think is destined to be loft condos.
I should have learned then that "This once cost nnn,000 dollars!" doesn't mean it's not junk now. I'm still not dumping my Osbornes and Kaypros and my GRiD not-quite-PC-compatible laptop, although I am junking some of the peripherals. I had torn the hard drive for the GRiD apart 24 or so years ago and never reassembled it. I just now moved the parts. They're going to the metal recycler.

I more recently had a co-worker who said he wanted to buy an Intel server for use at home. I asked him what advantage he thought a hot, power hungry, redundant PC would bring him.
 
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...anybody recall what RT-11 would return if you typed, "Help Me" at the dot prompt?
 
Who needs a Wii or PS3? I'm still rollin' with the Comm64 and Pong. :D
 
Jeff S KDTW said:
Who needs a Wii or PS3? I'm still rollin' with the Comm64 and Pong. :D
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We had Super Pong. It was a game console with two dials and a four-game selector: basic pong, reverse pong (instead of paddles there was a hole in the wall), double pong (two paddles, one in front of the other), and...and...ah gimme a break it was over 30 years ago...
 
Sam Doolittle said:
We had Super Pong. It was a game console with two dials and a four-game selector: basic pong, reverse pong (instead of paddles there was a hole in the wall), double pong (two paddles, one in front of the other), and...and...ah gimme a break it was over 30 years ago...
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You must have been rich! :rofl:
 
SCCutler said:
...anybody recall what RT-11 would return if you typed, "Help Me" at the dot prompt?
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Never used RT-11, but I remember what CRBE (Conversational Remote Batch Entry system on an IBM 360/67) would reply if you typed in "F^&* you".
















Verb Invalid :D
 
jesse said:
NO HELP IS AVAILABLE FOR YOU
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Close, Jesse, close.

What'[s funny is, in RT-11, if you typed "Help _____" with something it knew, like a valid command such as "copy," it would respond with a screen of valid commands and switches.

If you typed "Help ____" with a word it did not know, it would respond "THere is no help for ____," simply repeating the unknown argument.

BUT, if you typed "Help me," it replied, "There is no help for you."

Subtle, but funny.
 
Ever see a 2000 ppm printer run with the doors off?

It would shoot paper across the room flat against the far wall. Of course a box a paper while testing did not last very long.
 
I remember using that one. It seemed so "advanced" back then. :)
smigaldi said:
I know we are talking PCs but IMHO the greatest handheld comuter ever made is shown below!

HP-41CV-S.JPG


I still have an HP15C at my desk.
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I did have a TI-95 but have no clue whatever happen to it. It mysteriously disappeared.
 
smigaldi said:
I know we are talking PCs but IMHO the greatest handheld comuter ever made is shown below!

HP-41CV-S.JPG


I still have an HP15C at my desk.
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That picture is an HP-41, not a 15C...

I still have an HP-41CV on my desk. It works, I use it. I think it's still even got the Smith Chart and Transmission Line programs in it that I used, oh, 15 years ago.

I also have an HP-55 at home. It, too, still works, but the on-off switch is flaky. Short battery life (LEDs for the display), and it lost programs when you turned it off.
 
wsuffa said:
That picture is an HP-41, not a 15C...

I still have an HP-41CV on my desk. It works, I use it. I think it's still even got the Smith Chart and Transmission Line programs in it that I used, oh, 15 years ago.

I also have an HP-55 at home. It, too, still works, but the on-off switch is flaky. Short battery life (LEDs for the display), and it lost programs when you turned it off.
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My HP-41CV has many many years on it, and it works just great. The primary program I keep on it is one that computes monthly payments on loans. Feed in the principle, annual interest rate and number of months and it spits out the answer. Much faster than waiting for loan officer to look it up in a table. :D

I have a number of other programs that I wrote for it, as well, but they all date back to my time in aerospace. Never did get any of the peripherals for it, so no mag cards for program storage. Oh well...

Also have an HP-34C which predates the 41 by a couple years. A unique feature of that calculator is that it can perform a numerical integration of a formula that you've programmed in at the push of a button.
 
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