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. -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info