Computer Basics - Old School

[Mike Mitchell]

This is CSIRAC, the fourth computer built world wide.
The rack modules at the back are (left to right), PSU, BIOS, CPU, Arithmetic Co-Processor and RAM - I kid you not!

All the stuff in front is the input/output devices. I started programming at school in 1972 using punch cards, three years after this box was decommissioned. The box I used would fit on top of a dining room table. It used 8 bit words and 8 inch floppy's, probably for secondary system memory. Latter I used a Micro VAX II, which was about the size of a washing machine. It had a 16 bit CPU, 16K of RAM, 2 X 60Meg (I think) system discs and a HUGE array for working memory, 360Meg.

Today's PC's may have more stuff, but they are no where near as reliable as that old VAX.  biggrin



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[Dataman]

Mine was the IBM 360:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360

I was out of the Army and back in college and working part time. They were converting the Bank from ledger cards to "The Computer". The project was run by IBM. Since there were no formal training classes anywhere at the time, IBM gave everyone in the Bank (~3500 employees) a "Computer Apptitude Test". This was the dumbest test I ever took. It was so easy to figure out it was silly. It had questions like, "Would you rather play baseball or solve mathmatical problems?" As I figured the Bank was not looking to hire baseball players, I checked all the right boxes and scored #3 ou of the whole Bank. Thus began my career in "Data Processing" as it was called at the time. I never looked back ...  :coolgleam:

[Mike Mitchell]

Thus began my career in "Data Processing" as it was called at the time.

My tertiary qualification is in commercial data processing.  biggrin ie commercial programming.

I studied a cut down version of Fortran called mini-tran and latter a bit of middy-tran. Thought they were both toys for tools, so swatted up on Fortran 77, then did proper studies on Cobol. Rather liked VAX Cobol. Then some pr1ck invented/released or made popular Unix. I refused to learn C, it looked to much like Pascal and still does. Grrrr!!! So I moved on to 4GL's and some were okay.

Then some really big pr1ck invented/vomited up Windows and I suddenly hated IT.  :hbang: :hbang: :hbang: :hbang: :hbang: