Scott Silva wrote: > on 10-24-2008 3:21 PM Phil Schaffner spake the following: >> On Fri, 2008-10-24 at 14:19 -0400, Ed Westphal wrote: >>> Forgive my senility, but I'm continually amazed how many of us ole >>> fossils are still around, and running Linux! Not to use up too much >>> bandwidth, but the switch from Fortran 2 to 2D, for disk, was a big >>> event way back when. Then Fortran 4 came around! Be still my old >>> heart! >> WAY OT, but since the thread has already been hijacked, can't resist a >> trip down memory lane... >> >> Ah yes, how fondly I remember running FORTRAN from punched tape on the >> Data General Nova "minicomputer". At least it was not prone to dropping >> the 80-column card deck and having to re-sort it. Then we got the 8" >> hard-sector floppy drive. Luxury! Still had to boot it up with the >> correct sequence of flips of the front panel switches, but actually had >> somewhere to save output data as well as load programs - up to 256KB. >> Did real-time data acquisition using an 8-bit A/D and ran fast Fourier >> transforms to get frequency domain responses using ASCII graphics on a >> printer. >> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_General_Nova >> >> Seem to remember an "old farts" thread on this list a while back, so I >> guess "ole fossils" sounds a bit better. :-) >> >> Phil > I remember numbering on the back of cards with a pencil as a backup when you > dropped the deck. And of course you numbered by tens just in case you had to > insert something. That's why you punch sequence numbers in the last 8 columns. :-)