Operating Systems > Linux and UNIX
w00t!!
Master of Reality:
I should really dust off my C64, rewire the disk drive (a loose connection on the switch) and play with it. Then i should find a keyboard for my C128 and play with it too.
Sleeping Dog:
Yo Bob.......the infancy of gaming included the C-128.
She and I used to lie naked in bed with one of those C-128's on a crisp Sunday morning and try to get out of some cyber issue that we had gotten ourselves into.
She got her degree in programming. I got the bills from the credit card commpany.
(By the way.....it was worth it!)
I wrote some BASIC stuff that would run on a C-64. The last programming that I did was a routine that spit everything out to a large spreadsheet plotted on an HP pen plotter. It informed each tenaant in as rather large building about their rent obligastions regarding the space that they both occupied and shared. It was all math and cooked pretty fast.
The funny part was that, at the time, I personally only had a printer that could do 8 1/2 by 11 sheets. We taped them together and had large (E-sized) sepias run. We manually cleaned up the sepias, ran blue line copies and distributed them to the client(s). They paid - we got paid. (See there....problem solved).
But Damn....that E sized spreadsheet sure looked impressive.
Amazing what you can do when you are poor and need to eat.
Sleeping Dog
Calum:
this has turned out to be a really interesting thread!
re: the US 1900 census - I am surprised (although i suppose i shouldn't be) to hear of one such as that so early, were IBM responsible? Did they exisdt then? I have a feeling they may have been starting up around that time, and i saw a book once about IBM being hired by the German nazi party in the thirties to provide not only computers, but also technicians so that the nazis could conduct an accurate census (ie so they could easily check out everybody's personal details and kill everybody they didn't like the sound of).
The book was saying that IBM should take responsibility but i reckon that there's nobody at IBM now that was involved, so why worry?
Sleeping Dog:
I am not really sure when IBM was founded. I do know that they made mechanical calculators in the 30's and 40's. During WWII they even produced 30 cal. M1 carbine rifles. In the early 50's, they produced the first practical electric typewriters. Those machines put them on the big corporate map even before they got into the computer biz.
I worked for IBM in the early 70's. Strange company. On one hand, their R&D was on the bloody edge of technology.....on the other, they released some really stupid (in retrospect)products.
I attended the "roll-out" for the mag-card typewriters. I was seated at the table with three VP's and the Regional Director of Sales. After watching the propaganda movie about these new typewriters, the RDS posed the following question to the VP's.
"How do you expect us to go out there and sell these things. People are going to look at us and laugh. Then they will tell us that they can go down here to Radio Shack and buy five TRS-80 computers with printers for the money that we are asking for just one of these typewriters. A TRS-80 will run circles around this thing."
One of the VP's countered with, "You aren't just selling a product....you are selling the IBM reputation for service and support."
The RDS then said "Yeah right.....business people out there are not that gullible. They are going to tell my salesmen that for the same money we want for a year's service contract on these things, they can afford to throw away three TRS-80's if they break and go buy new ones."
The RDS was prophetically right. Those machines were in the base line of IBM office products for a shorter time than anything else that they ever built. Not long after that came the Commodores, Atari's, Apples and then the XT in the eighties. The rest is history.
I began subscribing to the IBM Journal of Research and Development in 1973. Back then, they were trying to perfect a computing technology called "bubble memory". Last year I saw a story on Discovery Channel about IBM's "new bubble memory technology" and how it may soon revolutionize computing. I had to laugh out loud. Some person or people in the R&D department have made a 30 year career out of bubble memory and it still isn't really "out there" yet.
Cheers and beers...
Sleeping Dog
creedon:
Back in the mists of my memory (LOTTA fog there, I'm 55), I remember hearing that the ancestor of IBM (the name escapes me) was started because of the success of the 1900 census; I really wish I could remember more detail (that happens fairly often), but I believe that the roots of IBM stretch back to the first decade of the 20TH century.
Regarding "magnetic bubble" memory, I first heard of it around 1975; I worked in the map department of a local county government, and the department next door was the computer department. I got friendly with one of the programmers, and we'd talk. Most of the things he talked about were WAY beyond me, but I do remember him talking about this new, revolutionary concept that would change EVERYTHING about computers. I've mentioned it a few times to various computer people since then, and the reaction was usuall "HUH?, never heard of it." This is the first time I've ever heard anyone mention it in YEARS, and I had no idea that it was still a viable idea.
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