On Wed, August 27, 2008 14:19, William L. Maltby wrote:
On Wed, 2008-08-27 at 20:13 +0200, Chris Geldenhuis wrote:
From reading your many and interesting posts to this list I realize that we must be contemporaries (possibly I started programming before you - circa 1963 on a ICL1500 aka RCA 301 in assembler or directly punching machine code into punch cards).
Yep. I had my 1st professional job in 1969. I was in the "modern" age, S360 stuff was the equipment then. The punch cards were still there, made on 026 and 029 card punches and read by MFCMs to load programs into IBM's DOS.
I guess we're both old enough to fill in for JP when the resident curmudgeon is not on-list. ;-)
You can list me as a backup curmudgeon as well :-).
Started being paid to write software in 1969, for an IBM 1401. 026 and 029 card punches for me, too; I preferred the keyboard touch on the 026 by quite a lot. 14" five platter removable pack disk drives that stored...around 1.5MB if I'm remembering right (can't seem to find the info online quickly, either; might be as high as 2MB).
I don't think I still remember much about how to make drum cards, though. I *do* have some cards from back then out near my computer at home; found them cleaning out some stuff, and could quite bear to just dump them, so they're kicking around.