Rare Apple I computer sells for $216,000 in London

Rod Speed wrote:
T.T. wrote

In the punch-card era you always had something in your shirt pocket to
write on.

I still use the cards to write on even now.

Cut in half, they go in the wallet fine, now that T shirts dont have shirt
pockets.

Apart from that, the whole concept was an abomination.

Specially when you dropped an entire box of cards which didnt have any
numbering.

I used to run an IBM 360/50 in the evenings myself.

The printer automatically opened up when it ran out of paper.

One night, someone had a box of cards on the top of the printer.

You could hear the printer cover automatically opening up when it ran out of
paper.

The poor bugger ran to the printer when he heard the cover opening.

Didnt get there in time. The box of cards had months of data on those cards.


If no one paniced, you could pick up the most of the cards in sequence.
Click to expand...
Static was your friend in this case.

/BAH
 
Charlie Gibbs wrote:
In article <UXxIo.3627$gM3.3198@viwinnwfe01.internal.bigpond.com>,
tonyt92@bigpond.com (T.T.) writes:

In the punch-card era you always had something in your shirt pocket
to write on.

:) Those cards were my nerd badge, which I wore proudly.

Apart from that, the whole concept was an abomination.

On the other hand, it was there and it worked - which put it
miles ahead of anything which sounded nice but which either
didn't exist yet or was prohibitively expensive.

More importantly, it could be fixed. Looking at magtape
Click to expand...
took a bit god who didn't mind going blind. ;-)

/BAH
 
Rod Speed wrote:
jmfbahciv wrote
Roland Hutchinson wrote
jmfbahciv wrote
Rod Speed wrote:
Walter Bushell wrote
Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote
Rod Speed <rod.speed.aaa@gmail.com> wrote

WordPervert was never gunna survive, it always had a completely
fucked user interface.

Surprising then that it was so popular right up until Windows
became ubiquitous. I quite liked WordPerfect's interface.

I have head many laments about WordPerfect's demise.

I heard many laments about the demise of punched cards too.

I had to physically remove the last of the card punches to stop the
dinosaurs continuing to use them.

Why in the world would you want to do that?

Opens us a niche or two for the mammals, innit.

But removes hard-copy data and code backup which is human-readable.

You can always print that crap out if you are that much of a dinosaur.
Click to expand...
You cannot transform the line printer paper into machine-readable format.
This kid confirmed my hypothesis about his attitude with today's posts. PHB
in the making.

I'm older than you, thanks.
Click to expand...
No, you are not. You started in this biz long after I did.

/BAH
 
Rod Speed wrote:
jmfbahciv wrote
Rod Speed wrote
terryc wrote
Rod Speed wrote

But it didnt run better than it did on Win or DOS.

Yes, it did.

Pigs arse it did.

We have a winner.

Just another of your pathetic little drug crazed fantasys.

No surprise that you're completely unemployable.

Child,

I'm older than you, fuckwit.
Click to expand...
Not emotionally; not chronologically, nor experienced.

if you remove the chips on your shoulders, you might
learn something from those who do know better.

Any two year old could leave that for dead.

Get one to help you before posting again, if anyone is actually stupid
enough to let you anywhere near one.
Click to expand...

Not interested in learning, are you?

/BAH
 
Charlie Gibbs wrote:
In article <8lfv6kF2b4U1@mid.individual.net>, rod.speed.aaa@gmail.com
(Rod Speed) writes:

One night, someone had a box of cards on the top of the printer.

You could hear the printer cover automatically opening up when it
ran out of paper.

The poor bugger ran to the printer when he heard the cover opening.

Didnt get there in time. The box of cards had months of data on those
cards.

Look on the bright side. The data was still there. (Heck, it was
now everywhere.) A bit of work with the card sorter and everything
was back together again, with nothing lost but time. (If the cards
didn't contain fields on which you could do whatever sorting was
necessary, it was time for a talk with whoever designed the layout.)

Or mention the merits of the use of a dry marker.
Click to expand...

/BAH
 
Rod Speed wrote:
jmfbahciv wrote
Rod Speed wrote
Bill Leary wrote
Rod Speed <rod.speed.aaa@gmail.com> wrote

There are still quite a few of them around, mostly used for
more obscure stuff like PLCs and hardware controllers etc.

Mostly legacy machine control or financial applications these days.

Nope, quite a few apps used to program hardware.

And that was the problem. Apps should be asking the
monitor to do the hardware tweaks, not doiing it themselves.

Yes, but with that sort of app, if they dont do it that way, there is fuck
all you can do about that.

You dont normally even have a choice of app to do the programming of unusual
hardware.

That's the source of most of the bugs and non-features in MS' software.

Yes, but when you need to run that software, the last thing you need is an
OS that wont let it run.

Thats why OS/2 never did get used much by those that need to do that sort of
thing.

Quite a bit of it would only run on DOS.


You really don't seem to know what you're talking about.
Click to expand...

/BAH
 
Rod Speed wrote:
jmfbahciv wrote:
Rod Speed wrote:
Joe Pfeiffer wrote
Rod Speed <rod.speed.aaa@gmail.com> wrote
William Hamblen wrote
Rod Speed wrote
jmfbahciv wrote
Rod Speed wrote
Walter Bushell wrote
Ahem A Rivet's Shot<steveo@eircom.net> wrote
Rod Speed<rod.speed.aaa@gmail.com> wrote

WordPervert was never gunna survive, it always
had a completely fucked user interface.

Surprising then that it was so popular right up until Windows
became ubiquitous. I quite liked WordPerfect's interface.

I have head many laments about WordPerfect's demise.

I heard many laments about the demise of punched cards too.

I had to physically remove the last of the card punches to stop
the dinosaurs continuing to use them.

Why in the world would you want to do that?

Because the support for the hardware ended up being a complete
pain in the arse.

You didn't need to get rid of the keypunches, just the card
readers.

The card readers werent the problem.

And the key punches are useless without card readers anyway.

There is some remote possility that that was the point.

Nope, the punches are useless without the readers.

I was right;

Nope, you never ever are.

he didn't understand.

Nothing to understand with that mindless silly shit.
Click to expand...
There were lots of sites who had card punches, including
keypunchers and no readers in those days.

/BAH

>
 
Roland Hutchinson wrote:
On Sun, 28 Nov 2010 13:13:11 +0000, jmfbahciv wrote:

Roland Hutchinson wrote:
On Sat, 27 Nov 2010 14:10:19 +0000, jmfbahciv wrote:

Rod Speed wrote:
Walter Bushell wrote
Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote
Rod Speed <rod.speed.aaa@gmail.com> wrote

WordPervert was never gunna survive, it always had a completely
fucked user interface.

Surprising then that it was so popular right up until Windows
became ubiquitous. I quite liked WordPerfect's interface.

I have head many laments about WordPerfect's demise.

I heard many laments about the demise of punched cards too.

I had to physically remove the last of the card punches to stop the
dinosaurs continuing to use them.

Why in the world would you want to do that?

Opens us a niche or two for the mammals, innit.

But removes hard-copy data and code backup which is human-readable.

That's what the line printer is for!

Line printer output wasn't that great and couldn't be used as input.
Click to expand...

/BAH
 
Bill Leary wrote:
"terryc" <newsninespam-spam@woa.com.au> wrote in message
news:icsr3d$q6b$3@news.eternal-september.org...
Rod Speed wrote:

But it didnt run better than it did on Win or DOS.

Yes, it did.

Pigs arse it did.

We have a winner.
Congratulations Bill.

Sure. And thank you. But it's a victory not unlike winning a quick draw
duel with a comatose garden slug. Looks like Barb's come in for round two.
This should be entertaining. And perhaps even informative, if you just read
her replies and ignore his.
Click to expand...
<GRIN> I got to talk about DECtapes again.

/BAH
 
In article <8lghpjF64cU1@mid.individual.net>, rod.speed.aaa@gmail.com
(Rod Speed) writes:

Charlie Gibbs wrote

(If the cards didn't contain fields on which you could do whatever
sorting was necessary, it was time for a talk with whoever designed
the layout.)

You quite sure you aint one of those rocket scientist fellas ?
Click to expand...
Nah, that was too simple. I worked with the really hard stuff:
payroll systems.

--
/~\ cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid (Charlie Gibbs)
\ / I'm really at ac.dekanfrus if you read it the right way.
X Top-posted messages will probably be ignored. See RFC1855.
/ \ HTML will DEFINITELY be ignored. Join the ASCII ribbon campaign!
 
In article <PM000496315112334F@aca3836f.ipt.aol.com>, See.above@aol.com
(jmfbahciv) writes:

Charlie Gibbs wrote:

Look on the bright side. The data was still there. (Heck, it was
now everywhere.) A bit of work with the card sorter and everything
was back together again, with nothing lost but time. (If the cards
didn't contain fields on which you could do whatever sorting was
necessary, it was time for a talk with whoever designed the layout.)

Or mention the merits of the use of a dry marker.
Click to expand...
Hear, hear!

--
/~\ cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid (Charlie Gibbs)
\ / I'm really at ac.dekanfrus if you read it the right way.
X Top-posted messages will probably be ignored. See RFC1855.
/ \ HTML will DEFINITELY be ignored. Join the ASCII ribbon campaign!
 
jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> writes:
I liked handling cards. I hated handling papertape. I would rather
have my data in cards than on magtape.

Cards were great; DECtapes were the best.
Click to expand...
I got summer job at the univ. doing port of 1401 MPIO to 360
assembler. The univ. had 709 with 1401 front-end for doing unit-record;
cards were read to tape on 1401 and the tape moved to 709 tape
drive. the 709 did tape-to-tape processing and the resulting output tape
was moved to 1401 tape drive for output to printer/punch (MPIO was 1401
program that handle card-to-tape and tape-to-printer/punch).

As part of eventually replacing the 709/1401 with 360/67, a 360/30 was
brought in to replace the 1401. While 360/30 had 1401 hardware emulation
mode and could run MPIO directly, I got hired to rewrite it in 360
assembler; except for requirement to duplicate MPIO function, i got to
design and implement my own program; dispatcher, interrupt handlers,
device drivers, error recover, storage management, etc.

The datacenter shutdown at 8am sat. and didn't re-open until 8am mon
.... so I had the machine room for 48hr period. I also got other
programming jobs ... and in the fall it was little difficult going to
monday morning class after not having slept for 48hrs.

The source assembler program eventaully grew to approx. 2000 cards
(could still fit in card box). The 360 assembler took a minimum 30
minutes to assemble the source and produce "TXT" deck (i.e. deck of hex
cards for execution loading). Since it took so long to assemble ... i
got pretty good at duplicating cards & punching patches. The "TXT" deck
just had hex "holes" ... no printing across the top and the 026 keypunch
was alphanumeric ... to get the correct combination of hex" holes, had
to used "multi-punch" feature ... use keyboard to force combination of
holes to be punched. Put the original card in the duplication slot and
then duplicate out to the columns for the patch ... multi-punch the new
hole combinations and then duplication the remaining columns.

Got fairly good at being able to interpret the hex holes in "TXT" deck
.... having to fan the deck to find the card that had the correct
displacement in the program (for applying the patch). Was typically able
to do patches in much less time than it took to re-assemble.

past post containing format of TXT card (as well as table for hex punch
hole combinations):
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007q.html#69 IBM System/3 & 3277-1

much, much later I was at SJR in san jose and my brother was regional
apple marketing rep (supposedly had largest physical region in CONUS).
He would come to town periodically and I could go to business dinners
with him. Got to argue with some of the mac developers about design
.... before the mac was even announced.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970
 
Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> writes:
much, much later I was at SJR in san jose and my brother was regional
apple marketing rep (supposedly had largest physical region in CONUS).
He would come to town periodically and I could go to business dinners
with him. Got to argue with some of the mac developers about design
... before the mac was even announced.
Click to expand...
other random apple trivia ... my brother figured out how to dial into
the apple hdqtrs business computer (which was a s/38 at the time) from
his apple-II to track manufacturing schedules and deliveries.

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970
 
Some gutless fuckwit desperately cowering behind Ahem A Rivet's Shot
wrote just the peurile silly shit any 2 year old could leave for dead.
 
Some gutless fuckwit desperately cowering behind jmfbahciv
wrote just the puerile silly shit any 2 year old could leave for dead.
 
Some gutless fuckwit desperately cowering behind jmfbahciv
wrote just the puerile silly shit any 2 year old could leave for dead.
 
Some gutless fuckwit desperately cowering behind jmfbahciv
wrote just the puerile silly shit any 2 year old could leave for dead.
 
Some gutless fuckwit desperately cowering behind jmfbahciv
wrote just the puerile silly shit any 2 year old could leave for dead.
 
jmfbahciv wrote
T.T. wrote

In the punch-card era you always had something in your shirt pocket
to write on. Apart from that, the whole concept was an abomination.

I liked handling cards. I hated handling papertape.
I would rather have my data in cards than on magtape.
Click to expand...
Wota terminal fuckwit.
 
jmfbahciv wrote
Rod Speed wrote
T.T. wrote

In the punch-card era you always had something in your shirt pocket to write on.

I still use the cards to write on even now.

Cut in half, they go in the wallet fine, now that T shirts dont have shirt pockets.

Apart from that, the whole concept was an abomination.

Specially when you dropped an entire box of cards which didnt have any numbering.

I used to run an IBM 360/50 in the evenings myself.

The printer automatically opened up when it ran out of paper.

One night, someone had a box of cards on the top of the printer.

You could hear the printer cover automatically opening up when it ran out of paper.

The poor bugger ran to the printer when he heard the cover opening.

Didnt get there in time. The box of cards had months of data on those cards.

If no one paniced, you could pick up the most of the cards in sequence.
Click to expand...
Not in that situation you couldnt.

Static was your friend in this case.
Click to expand...
Fantasy.

And most isnt anything like good enough in that situation anyway.
 
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