Personal Computer Related Memories - I Remember:

[Tully]

I see a picture of "Van The Man".

I had the privilege of spending the afternoon with Van at Tullynally Castle, Catlepollard, County Westmeath, Ireland.
He had a private Concert that evening in the "Great Hall" of the castle. It had 121 rooms! It is the home of the Earl of Longford
My wife & I lived at the castle with the family.

Enclosed is picture of the castle.

Also go to www.tullynallycastle.com



Tully

 

[strollin]

When the IBM PC was first introduced in 1981, it was available with either CP/M or PC-DOS. It didn't take long for PC-DOS to dominate and CP/M got left behind. I used to have a copy of CP/M 1.1 and booted it a few times but there was very little software available for it.

 

[Dragon Drop]

The weirdest and most complicated computer I ever heard of was the IBM 305, introduced in 1956 and designed for accounting systems. It was the first computer with a disk drive, but it still used punch-cards and other old-fashioned devices.

It was programmed only in machine language, and it was the most convoluted machine language ever; you almost have to "think" like electric circuits to understand it. And, on top of that, it required extensive control panel wiring, with the "program logic" actually being shared between the central processor and several control panels, all interacting with each other.

Writing (and wiring) a program for that machine was a major project compared with today's world of ready-made software. But it was also an enjoyable adventure for the old-school "mainframe geeks" like me, and I much regret that by the time I got into computers the 305 was long gone.

The site bitsavers.org is an online library of old computer manuals. Here's an IBM 305 manual in all its original glory:

http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/ibm/305_ramac/A26-3502-0_305_RAMAC_Reference_Manual_1958.pdf

 

[strollin]

In college I had a class that used machine language to program an HP 3000 mini-computer and another programming class that used punched-cards as input. Both of these classes made me ask myself, "Why would anyone ever want to program computers for a living?" It wasn't until years later that I sat at a PC with a keyboard and monitor using the C programming language that I thought programming was interesting.

 

[Tully]

Oh! Do remember the wiring boards on the IBM 305. What a rats nest.

Then I got into programming on a DEC PDP 8E using Basic.

It was fun writing & debugging programs! Of course using a Friden typewriter that had a ASCII tape punch & reader.
First you wrote the program, then you typed it into the Friden, took the punched tape out and put it into tape reader on the PDP 8E 7& tested the program. Take the tape out of the PEP 8E. put it back into the Friden, correct the errors until the program worked!

This was called spaghetti code & was hell if you had to change it later!

With the goto's, the if ,then else's etc. It was almost impossible!

Tully

 

[strollin]

Spaghetti code can be written in any computer language. BASIC, with it's numbered lines, made it difficult at times to avoid using GOTO statements which lead to spaghetti code.

 

[CountMike]

My some time landlord in Toronto was programer for Computer Associates and used to write programs at home on some kind of cards divided into squares. in binary code than next morning take them to work where a keypunch girl would enter in a computer (no idea what it was) for him to debug. He used to work nights only drinking coffee and beer with ice (yuck). His black cat Nush wuld sit on the table and watch him doing it whole night and share beer with him. He never had a PC at home and was just marking Xs on those cards.

 

[strollin]

Those were called coding sheets.

 

[JimJoe]

Those were called coding sheets.

Oh. Yeah, we coded Apple ][+ ( 2 plus) Fortran on those.