Progress

I remember working on a large mainframe and it got to be about 2 in the morning. My wife by now had got fed up and was walking around the computer room floor. Now this main frame took 12 minutes to up sequence it and 14 minutes to down sequence it.
Eventually she said can we go home now! I replied that I just had to down sequence the main frame.

Her reply: For fuc*ks sake! just turn the bloody thing off!!!
Brilliant.
 
I read somewhere (forget now where) that there is more computer power in a basic calculator than was in the first lunar landing module which put the first men on the moon in 1969. 😱
 
I remember taping a lot of screeching noises from the radio, BBC, and the load it into a puter and IF it worked, which was very rarely, you had a simple game to play.
 
Whilst working for ICI PLC Engineering Division in the 80's at Billingham (Teesside) one of my jobs was to have a new £2.2m computer room installed in the Process Offices, this was to run the operating systems for the Ammonia plants. The room had floating air conditioned floor with glass wall, about 10 x 6m in size. It was filled with rows of white boxes.

A few years later I was in the building again and noticed the same room was empty except for one fridge sized white box, which was an updated IBM replacement for all those others that filled the room.
 
Sillious Sodus said:
Remember Y2K? I spent more than 3 months surveying all our equipment that was supposed to stop working on 1st January 2000 and nothing happend. 😁.
Anyone remember DW4?
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Yes, I spent that New Year’s Eve at work with some of my IT colleagues. Went home at around 2am with nothing to report!!

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I’ve been lucky to enjoy my various roles in broadcast media for 37 years.
But the physical appliance hardware products I need to support are now replaced by cloud derivatives ☹️🤬
Worse, my employer has realised my role is finite. Early 2022 the role will be wrapped up.
At the start of my career some of the hardware to manipulate video took several 48RU equipment racks. If you watched TV shows like Top Of The Tops, the studio show’s wipes and reveals on that would’ve needed a couple of racks 😜
 
marchie said:
Elaine was working as a programmer on a mainframe computer around 1974 or 75. The mainframe had 16k of RAM ... And the animals went in two by two ... :LOL:

Steve
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I was a computer operator on an ICL1901A around then. It was upgraded to a 1901T with the addition of another 16k of RAM, which was the size of a small wardrobe.
 
still got our bbc b and tape deck
 
Barryh said:
I was a computer operator on an ICL1901A around then. It was upgraded to a 1901T with the addition of another 16k of RAM, which was the size of a small wardrobe.
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I was working in a Bank at the time and we had Burroughs TC500 terminals installed [with a golfball printhead1] connected to the Wythenshawe Computer Centre. Paper Tape program loaded, and then OCK1/PSK3 to start [IIRC]. OCK = Operator Control Key and PSK = Program Select Key. And I thought there was a spelling error at closedown, because, instead of 'End', the program responded with 'EOD', which a colleague explained patiently stood for 'End Of Day' ... Which possibly explains why I spent most of my work day hand posting the Deposit & Savings Account Ledgers by hand with a dip pen; the worst damage I could manage was to break the nib ... :giggle:

Steve
 
Next to the BT Tower in Birmingham, there's a 16 floor tower block. When it was built, half the building was dedicated to housing floor upon floor of 13 foot high telephone switches. As it was the cold war, the building, like the tower, was designed to survive a 1 megaton nuclear bomb.

The building became vacant in the early 2000s because all the switches had been converted to digital. All the switching gear now fitted into a single 6 foot rack in the basement.

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Ingwe said:
I read somewhere (forget now where) that there is more computer power in a basic calculator than was in the first lunar landing module which put the first men on the moon in 1969. 😱
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Today’s iPhones have 7 million times more memory than the computer on board Apollo 11 and a processing speed 100,000 times faster.

https://www.business-standard.com/a...-the-moon-like-apollo-did-119070200272_1.html

Hmm, it seems you have to subscribe which I didn't have to do a month ago when I used the info as an answer to a quiz I prepared for my motorbike club night.
 
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How many of you bought pc magazines and tried to type program listings into your amstrad / amega etc etc?
It taught me how bad my typing was!

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Ingwe said:
I read somewhere (forget now where) that there is more computer power in a basic calculator than was in the first lunar landing module which put the first men on the moon in 1969.
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Before they went to the moon the US and NASA spent about a million dollars developing a pen that would write in zero gravity.
The Russians took a pencil. :xdoh:
 
Northern Boy said:
Before they went to the moon the US and NASA spent about a million dollars developing a pen that would write in zero gravity.
The Russians took a pencil. :xdoh:
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www.scientificamerican.com

Fact or Fiction?: NASA Spent Millions to Develop a Pen that Would Write in Space, whereas the Soviet Cosmonauts Used a Pencil

The problem of weightless writing was not solved by either Soviet central planning or good old American sub-contracting, but by a private investor and a good idea
www.scientificamerican.com www.scientificamerican.com

😱😉😂
 
The Coops said:
Who remembers the Telex machines and the miles of paper tapes that went with them?
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Yep. And the first fax machines when you had to make a negative and then put it back through the machine.
When I started work in 1963 as a 'Junior Clerk' with Brighton Corporation my last job at night was to empty the ink wells of around 20 desks and wash them out. Each morning I had to refill them, change the nibs in the pens and fit fresh paper in all the 20 blotters.
All staff had an inkwell for red and for black and the Chief Clerk had green as well.
After about 3 months I refused to collect the Boro' Surveyors executive lunch and 1/2 bottle of wine on a tray from the Pump House restaurant and carry it back through the streets to his office. I was fired.
 
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Northern Boy said:
Oh you spoiled my funster moment, please don't do that again :cry:
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Sorry…….

Would it make you feel better if you knew you could get one delivered in time for Christmas 😉

6573C61C-6B7F-44D0-8BB9-D4BAAAE319B9.jpeg

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I remember spending hours and hours typing code from a magazine for a PC game into my ZX, then it didn't work.

I got the message 'syntax error'

I spent almost as long trying to find out what the heck Syntax was, no one I asked had any idea.
 
There was a radio program might havr been Radio 2 , late at night thatlet you record programs onto tape then load onto the Spectrum. I never had one work.
 
Vanman said:
When we first got our 'diskless' PC's at work they came with a 720k floppy disk that held the Operating system, Wordperfect, Supercalc and DataEase. There was still room to save your work!

Those were the hard plastic disks that you guys probably remember best. Before then there were truly floppy disks, I think the only ones I used were 360k but that doesn't mean there were not smaller 😉
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WordPerfect - forgot about that, fond memories

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The Coops said:
Who remembers the Telex machines and the miles of paper tapes that went with them?
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The engineering consultancy firm where my dad worked had the telex address CREEPHOLE :xrofl:

I also remember operating a telex machine in the City. There was a kind of transition period when we migrated to fax then email.
 
The other big transition during my early career was from manual to electric typewriters, followed by the IBM Displaywriter, a dedicated word processing station with a shared fast printer. It used those giant floppy disks. At last it had become easy for law firms to churn out long documents on an epic scale. That's how e.g. internet companies have evolved terms and conditions with more words than any of Shakespeare's plays.

In about 1982 I got to try out the first proper laptop, the IBM clamshell running DOS. Before Windows or built-in hard disks. Mostly used it to play a D&D type game called Rogue, very popular in our office.

Not forgetting the yukky old wet photocopying process. A few years after that I was operating a huge Xerox copier in the basement.
 
Spriddler said:
Today’s iPhones have 7 million times more memory than the computer on board Apollo 11 and a processing speed 100,000 times faster.

https://www.business-standard.com/a...-the-moon-like-apollo-did-119070200272_1.html

Hmm, it seems you have to subscribe which I didn't have to do a month ago when I used the info as an answer to a quiz I prepared for my motorbike club night.
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“The power of the gods” at our fingertips & we use it to “phone mum” & make comments on forums, progress?
 
SpeedyDux said:
The other big transition during my early career was from manual to electric typewriters, followed by the IBM Displaywriter, a dedicated word processing station with a shared fast printer. It used those giant floppy disks. At last it had become easy for law firms to churn out long documents on an epic scale. That's how e.g. internet companies have evolved terms and conditions with more words than any of Shakespeare's plays.

In about 1982 I got to try out the first proper laptop, the IBM clamshell running DOS. Before Windows or built-in hard disks. Mostly used it to play a D&D type game called Rogue, very popular in our office.

Not forgetting the yukky old wet photocopying process. A few years after that I was operating a huge Xerox copier in the basement.
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Does anyone have fond memories of duke Nukem?
 

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