What Were the Early Days of PF Like for Members in the Twenty-Year+ Club?

[Hornbein]

My mother programmed in machine language. The assembler had yet to be invented.

 

[gleem]

Terminals were not available yet. You had to type carefully one mistake and start over. If you did not catch it you could lose up to 24 hours before you found out. Then there was the walk to the computer center hoping a card punch was available. The good old days with the beloved Univac 1107.

IBM 029 Card Punch. Not me,

 

[DaveC426913]

My mother programmed in machine language. The assembler had yet to be invented.

Pfft. How hard can it be?

 

[jedishrfu]

Not so fast. 3-bits for more complicated stuff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digi-Comp_I#/media/File:Digicomp_I.JPG

http://www.retrocmp.com/articles/digi-comp-1/302-digi-comp-1-introduction

 

[anorlunda]

Not so fast. 3-bits for more complicated stuff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digi-Comp_I#/media/File:Digicomp_I.JPG

http://www.retrocmp.com/articles/digi-comp-1/302-digi-comp-1-introduction

Wait! Those things exist as commercial products.

The Twiddler is a one-hand chording keyboarding that has been around since at least 2004. It’s now on its third design iteration, which has been available since 2015. This is a handheld keyboard with four rows of 3 keys each. Each row of keys is operated by one of the typist’s four fingers. 12 of the 30 character codes can be typed using one key. For example, you type ‘A’ by pressing the left button on the top row, typically using your index finger. The remaining characters are typed using two keys simultaneously — e.g., ‘I’ requires pressing the right button on the top row and the left button on the 2nd row. Twiddler provides some tutorial software to help you learn and practice the codes. ... The website claims that the average person can type up to 30 wpm.

 

[pinball1970]

It's 1980 in this clip. Is this a teleprinter or just an electric typewriter?

Columbo had an electric typewriter in now you see me.1976. this looks similar.

If you don't want to watch the whole video the clips are at, 11,32,39,53 and 101 seconds.

Edit. The clip is

 

[Nugatory]

Not so fast. 3-bits for more complicated stuff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digi-Comp_I#/media/File:Digicomp_I.JPG

http://www.retrocmp.com/articles/digi-comp-1/302-digi-comp-1-introduction

I had one of those when I was a kid... Also the gravity-and-marbles Digi-Comp-2

 

[gleem]

It's 1980 in this clip. Is this a teleprinter or just an electric typewriter?

Looks like an IBM Selectric typewriter which in the late '70 or early '80s (?) was used as a printer IIR. faster than TTY.

 

[anorlunda]

Is this a teleprinter or just an electric typewriter?

It was both. Several brands of electric typewriters were adapted to be driven by computers. Often, they retained the ability to use via the keyboard as well as via the computer port.

 

[scottdave]

Late 80s or early 90s for me... I can remember that I had an account on Compuserve about 1990 back in the days when modems made a lot of beeps and peeps.

For PhysicsForums - I'm since 2017.

In the late '80s & early '90s I remember having Compuserve. I was also active on some BBS systems - enough to get a second phone line just for the modem. Around then, a friend of mine started his own BBS.

 

[anorlunda]

Who remembers downloading pictures of pretty girls in ASCII HEX dump format, then using a local utility (???) to turn it into a picture?

 

[DaveC426913]

Who remembers downloading pictures of pretty girls in ASCII HEX dump format, then using a local utility (???) to turn it into a picture?

Man, the internet was the Wild West of FREE girlie pics!

Yep, We were livin' in the future!

 

[Ivan Seeking]

The clip is

I loved that show! LOL!

 

[mathwonk]

i recall writing my first (maybe last) program in machine language for a univac mark I, and joined PF about 40 years later.

 

[Nugatory]

The last serious piece of assembler code I wrote was in 1989 or thereabouts... My employer had a successful port of our Unix variant to the Motorola 88100, but to bring it up quickly we wrote strcpy and related functions in C as

while(*s1++ = *s2++);

and let the compiler take it from there.

Once the system was running I went back, looked at the pipeline structure of the microprocessor, and rewrote the byte copy routines in assembler with unrolled loops and picking up 32-bit words whenever possible (the 64-bit load/store instructions occupied two pipeline stages, so no benefit to using them). Several hundred lines of assembler to replace the single line of C code.... and one of only two times in my life that I coded a performance improvement that everyone could feel as the system booted.