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

[Huge]

On 2010-11-30, keithr <keith@nowhere.com.au> wrote:

I haven't seen a punch card in decades though.

I saw one yesterday. I'm using it as a bookmark.


--
Today is Setting Orange, the 43rd day of The Aftermath in the YOLD 3176
"Always mount a scratch monkey."

 

[jmfbahciv]

Frank Slootweg wrote:

jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> wrote:
Frank Slootweg wrote:
Roland Hutchinson <my.spamtrap@verizon.net> wrote:
On Mon, 29 Nov 2010 13:54:01 +0000, jmfbahciv wrote:

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.

Sure it can. It's compatible with the ten-finger interface.

Scanning it with OCR sofware is much easier and has remarkably
good/reliable results.

Sometimes. Think about the listings generated by ribbon ink.

I have had some remarkable results with my lowly EPSON (Perfection
V30) scanner. Also on very old policies which were printed by a (ribbon
ink) line-printer,

Do you know which one? How did you eliminate the lines?

on photocopies of photocopies of (typewriter) typed
documents, etc.. It was really and eye opener (or closer? ).

Or blinding.... Fly specs could cause bugs. At least with
a line printer page, I could tell the ones from the ls. But control
characters were a problem. it took 3 editing passes for the monitor
guys to get Magee to enter <CTRL>G correctly in one monitor load edit.

/BAH

 

[jmfbahciv]

Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:

On Wed, 1 Dec 2010 06:25:51 +1100
"Rod Speed" <rod.speed.aaa@gmail.com> wrote:

Some gutless fuckwit desperately cowering behind
jmfbahciv wrote just the puerile shit that any 2 year old could leave for
dead.

Hey Barb, I think you've broken it.

grin> Looks that way. He still hasn't really answered my question. So

I'll guess he wasn't the one to make the decisions and doesn't know
all the details of that particular site.

Trying to get back to an on-topic....

I remember the 33s causing field service to create new swear words.
However, I don't remember keypunches doing that. I do remember one
33 which took about a month to fix (one of the ones I busted by
typing too fast). If a keypunch broke badly enough to get IBM
in to fix it, it didn't take long to have it working again.

So, another question is: Speedybongzalas implied that keypunches
were difficult to fix. Were they really?

/BAH

 

[jmfbahciv]

keithr wrote:

On 29/11/2010 8:17 AM, 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.


At the CSIRO Dept of Computing Research back in the mid 70s the hairy
legged "Computer scientists" used to output all their jobs to the card
punch as well as the printer. Some offices were stacked from floor to
ceiling with boxes of cards. The cardpunch itself was a bastard to
maintain, it was always jamming or punching askew. I got the job of
finding the problem which turned out to be that the baseplate had been
completely worn out under the springs that braked the cards as they were
fed into the punching station. The baseplate was the thing that the
whole punch was built on and was a non replaceable part. So I got the
job of telling them that either they could buy a new punch (secondhand
as the punch was obsolete) or do without. There was much sobbing and
gnashing of teeth, we took the punch out and they never punched another
card again which made it obvious that the millions of cards that they
had punched were a total waste of time and money.

ABS were using cards as input right up to the early 80s.

Do you know how that practice began? Was it a course all of them
took which required both media to be used for the course's problems?

/BAH

 

[fritz]

"keithr" <keith@nowhere.com.au> wrote in message news:4cf5905d$1@dnews.tpgi.com.au...

On 27/11/2010 12:24 AM, Mr.Magoo wrote:
On 25/11/2010 5:56 AM, Don McKenzie wrote:

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

I mentioned this one coming up for auction, a week or two back:
http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/computers/rare-apple-i-computer-sells-for-216000-in-london-20101124-1861g.html


yes it sold, and for an interesting price.

I wonder if my piece of art is worth anything?
http://www.dontronics-shop.com/australias-first-pc.html

Cheers Don...

===================



Hmmmm.. wonder what I could get for my Vic20..


A good slapping?

Probably nothing - no-one is interested in the Vic 20.
There is one on eBay for $55 - it's been there since July !!!!

 

[Ahem A Rivet's Shot]

On 1 Dec 2010 13:30:22 GMT
jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> wrote:

Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
On Wed, 1 Dec 2010 06:25:51 +1100
"Rod Speed" <rod.speed.aaa@gmail.com> wrote:

Some gutless fuckwit desperately cowering behind
jmfbahciv wrote just the puerile shit that any 2 year old could leave
for dead.

Hey Barb, I think you've broken it.

grin> Looks that way. He still hasn't really answered my question. So
I'll guess he wasn't the one to make the decisions and doesn't know
all the details of that particular site.

Trying to get back to an on-topic....

I remember the 33s causing field service to create new swear words.

Having seen the insides of a 33 I'm not surprised.

However, I don't remember keypunches doing that. I do remember one

There was more electronics and less mechanical wizardry in the card
punches I knew (029s).

33 which took about a month to fix (one of the ones I busted by
typing too fast).

That probably bollixed up the mechanical ASCII encoder/keyboard
mechanism, I would hate to try and fix that, I was always amazed that they
got it to work at all let alone in mass production.

If a keypunch broke badly enough to get IBM
in to fix it, it didn't take long to have it working again.

So, another question is: Speedybongzalas implied that keypunches
were difficult to fix. Were they really?

I doubt it from what I've seen of the innards of them, but I've
never tried it.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays
C:>WIN | A better way to focus the sun
The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see
You lose and Bill collects. | http://www.sohara.org/

 

[Charlie Gibbs]

In article <PM00049645A739A706@ac819a42.ipt.aol.com>, See.above@aol.com
(jmfbahciv) writes:

Anne & Lynn Wheeler wrote:

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.

I think that was a common practice becuase of slow assemblies.

Yup. We had a large production program that I'd patch until the
whole thing fell apart - only then would I try to wheedle the 40
minutes of machine time that it took to re-assemble it.

I finally wrote my own assembler. Although it had a number of very
nice features that were missing from the stock assembler, its primary
goal (which I achieved) was to run twice as fast. It was a bit easier
to scrounge 20 minutes of machine time than 40.

--
/~\ 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!

 

[Charlie Gibbs]

In article <PM000496595862B699@ac83992d.ipt.aol.com>, See.above@aol.com
(jmfbahciv) writes:

Fly specs could cause bugs.

That one's a keeper, Barb.

--
/~\ 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!

 

[Charlie Gibbs]

In article <id25h3$84e$1@news.eternal-september.org>, frizzle@tx.rr.com
(Charles Richmond) writes:

On 11/28/10 7:25 PM, 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.

The "covered wagon" helped settle the American west. Just because
the "covered wagon" was *not* a steam train or an airplane, that
is *no* reason that one should curse the "covered wagon".

Those computer cards are a big part of what got us where we are
today. It seems mighty ungrateful for anyone to curse or revile
them... If it's part of one's "right of passage" to throw the past
into the trash bin, one might consider these things.

s/right/rite/

On second thought, given the modern culture of entitlement,
perhaps you're right after all...

--
/~\ 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!

 

[Charlie Gibbs]

In article <SeCdnYVn0du1BWjRnZ2dnUVZ_h2dnZ2d@giganews.com>,
Bill_Leary@msn.com (Bill Leary) writes:

"Charles Richmond" <frizzle@tx.rr.com> wrote in message
news:id25h3$84e$1@news.eternal-september.org...

Those computer cards are a big part of what got us where we are
today. It seems mighty ungrateful for anyone to curse or revile
them... If it's part of one's "right of passage" to throw the past
into the trash bin, one might consider these things.

"Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it."
-- George Santayana

One of the things I've been thankful for having started when cards
were still in use is that I've never had any problem understanding
files, records or fields. When you could hold the "records" in your
hand and look at the "fields" on the card it became very clear.

And if there was too much data to fit on a single card, you suffered
the nightmare of needing multiple physical records to hold a single
logical record. Awareness of this has a good influence on data design.

I've used this to teach the concepts several times. Most recently,
I had to bring up some pictures of cards on the screen because the
student had never seen any. But when I did they got an instant
"Oh, yeah!" Of course, "do not bend, fold, spindle, or mutilate"
didn't mean anything to her, but that's the way it goes.

You could always explain it as a form of data corruption, right down
to the level of a spindle hole flipping a single bit.

--
/~\ 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!

 

On Tue, 30 Nov 2010 18:00:20 +0000 (UTC), Roland Hutchinson
<my.spamtrap@verizon.net> wrote:

On Tue, 30 Nov 2010 04:07:51 -0600, ArarghMail011NOSPAM wrote:

I have had the best luck with a very lame brute force program that I
wrote, and it's not all that good.

Lessee...

Keyboard (once or maybe twice), proofread, and correct a few hundred
pages of listings: maybe two weeks' work, max.
Maybe you can type that fast, but I can't. And, I don't know

anybody who can. Several hundred pages of 1411 listings, mostly
full.

Develop an OCR program that's good enough to use for the purpose (but
still requires careful proofreading of its output): years, possibly
decades of work.
The program is already developed, and the output is pretty good, so

far. It's just that it is S L O W.

I would, with all due submission, suggest that one does not need a degree
in Engineering Management to figure out what to do in this situation.
No, I think not, as I don't have one, and I figured it out.

--
ArarghMail011 at [drop the 'http://www.' from ->] http://www.arargh.com
BCET Basic Compiler Page: http://www.arargh.com/basic/index.html

To reply by email, remove the extra stuff from the reply address.

 

[Rod Speed]

jmfbahciv wrote

He still hasn't really answered my question.

There wasnt any question that wasnt just puerile silly stuff.

So I'll guess he wasn't the one to make the decisions
and doesn't know all the details of that particular site.

Guess again.

Trying to get back to an on-topic....

I remember the 33s causing field service to create new swear words.

And you clearly never did maintenance on them yourself.

However, I don't remember keypunches doing that. I do remember
one 33 which took about a month to fix (one of the ones I busted by
typing too fast). If a keypunch broke badly enough to get IBM
in to fix it, it didn't take long to have it working again.

Pity about the cost of them and the cost of that maintenance.

With a decent collection of punches, there was always one or two with a problem.

Not surprising given that they were entirely electromechanical devices, no electronics at all.

So, another question is: Speedybongzalas implied that keypunches were difficult to fix.

Pigs arse I ever did.

Were they really?

Never said they were, just quite expensive to maintain because they werent that reliable.

Much more expensive to maintain than what replaced them.

 

[Rod Speed]

jmfbahciv wrote

keithr 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.

At the CSIRO Dept of Computing Research back in the mid 70s the hairy
legged "Computer scientists" used to output all their jobs to the
card punch as well as the printer. Some offices were stacked from
floor to ceiling with boxes of cards. The cardpunch itself was a
bastard to maintain, it was always jamming or punching askew. I got
the job of finding the problem which turned out to be that the
baseplate had been completely worn out under the springs that braked
the cards as they were fed into the punching station. The baseplate
was the thing that the whole punch was built on and was a non
replaceable part. So I got the job of telling them that either they
could buy a new punch (secondhand as the punch was obsolete) or do
without. There was much sobbing and gnashing of teeth, we took the
punch out and they never punched another card again which made it
obvious that the millions of cards that they had punched were a
total waste of time and money.

ABS were using cards as input right up to the early 80s.

Do you know how that practice began?

It didnt even happen. And I know because I worked there.

Was it a course all of them took which required
both media to be used for the course's problems?

Nope. There might have been one loon or two that went that route but I doubt even that.

 

[Frank Slootweg]

jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> wrote:

Frank Slootweg wrote:
jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> wrote:
Frank Slootweg wrote:
Roland Hutchinson <my.spamtrap@verizon.net> wrote:
On Mon, 29 Nov 2010 13:54:01 +0000, jmfbahciv wrote:

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.

Sure it can. It's compatible with the ten-finger interface.

Scanning it with OCR sofware is much easier and has remarkably
good/reliable results.

Sometimes. Think about the listings generated by ribbon ink.

I have had some remarkable results with my lowly EPSON (Perfection
V30) scanner. Also on very old policies which were printed by a (ribbon
ink) line-printer,

Do you know which one? How did you eliminate the lines?

No, I don't know which line printer, I only have the printouts.

I don't understand what you mean by "How did you eliminate the
lines?". Which lines? Or do you mean 'computer paper' (or whatever it
was called), which was two-colored, mostly white-with-green, are those
(green) lines the lines you mean?

FWIW, the policies were printed on - somewhat translucent - 'white'
paper.

[...]

 

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

"Charlie Gibbs" <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:

Yup. We had a large production program that I'd patch until the
whole thing fell apart - only then would I try to wheedle the 40
minutes of machine time that it took to re-assemble it.

I finally wrote my own assembler. Although it had a number of very
nice features that were missing from the stock assembler, its primary
goal (which I achieved) was to run twice as fast. It was a bit easier
to scrounge 20 minutes of machine time than 40.

re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010p.html#11 Rare Apple I computer sells for $216,000 in London

I had the machine time ... since I got 48hrs straight every weekend ...
it was that it was usually faster to patch it than re-assemble.

I had conditional assembly ... one that ran stand-alone ... with its own
device drivers, interrupt handlers, etc that assembled in approx. 30
mins ... and the one that ran under os/360 using open/close, read/write
and DCB macros that assembled in approx. an hour (on 360/30) ... the DCB
macros taking 5-6 mins elapsed time each ... it was possible to see it
in the front panel lights when it had hit a DCB macro.

the folklore was that the person doing opcode lookup assembler routine
had been told that it had to be done in 256 bytes (or some such) ... so
the lookup table was reloaded from disk on each statement. the assembler
got much faster when somebody improved opcode lookup (using the memory
to keep the table loaded).

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

 

[Bill Leary]

((..portions omitted..))
"Charlie Gibbs" <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote in message
news:1747.22T415T5034072@kltpzyxm.invalid...

In article <SeCdnYVn0du1BWjRnZ2dnUVZ_h2dnZ2d@giganews.com>,
Bill_Leary@msn.com (Bill Leary) writes:
One of the things I've been thankful for having started when cards
were still in use is that I've never had any problem understanding
files, records or fields. When you could hold the "records" in your
hand and look at the "fields" on the card it became very clear.

And if there was too much data to fit on a single card, you suffered
the nightmare of needing multiple physical records to hold a single
logical record. Awareness of this has a good influence on data design.

Since I often work in embedded systems, some with very limited memory, this
has come back to me fairly often. Instead of making records big enough to
handle the worst case, I can make them big enough to handle the common case,
saving a lot of memory, then usually with a single bit indicate "look to
next record for more of this record's data" or other tricks to that effect.
Using extra space only when actually necessary.

I've used this to teach the concepts several times. Most recently,
I had to bring up some pictures of cards on the screen because the
student had never seen any. But when I did they got an instant
"Oh, yeah!" Of course, "do not bend, fold, spindle, or mutilate"
didn't mean anything to her, but that's the way it goes.

You could always explain it as a form of data corruption, right down
to the level of a spindle hole flipping a single bit.

I don't recall that I ever needed to into that, but yes, that would work.

- Bill

 

[maus]

On 2010-12-01, fritz <yaputya@microsoft.com> wrote:

"keithr" <keith@nowhere.com.au> wrote in message news:4cf5905d$1@dnews.tpgi.com.au...
On 27/11/2010 12:24 AM, Mr.Magoo wrote:
On 25/11/2010 5:56 AM, Don McKenzie wrote:

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

I mentioned this one coming up for auction, a week or two back:
http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/computers/rare-apple-i-computer-sells-for-216000-in-london-20101124-1861g.html


yes it sold, and for an interesting price.

I wonder if my piece of art is worth anything?
http://www.dontronics-shop.com/australias-first-pc.html

Cheers Don...

===================



Hmmmm.. wonder what I could get for my Vic20..


A good slapping?

Probably nothing - no-one is interested in the Vic 20.
There is one on eBay for $55 - it's been there since July !!!!

some interest in the 64, a basic internet connection has been
operated off one. They are easily set up as controllers for
displays. (Amateur versions of traffic displays).

--
greymaus
..
..
....

 

[jmfbahciv]

Charlie Gibbs wrote:

In article <SeCdnYVn0du1BWjRnZ2dnUVZ_h2dnZ2d@giganews.com>,
Bill_Leary@msn.com (Bill Leary) writes:

"Charles Richmond" <frizzle@tx.rr.com> wrote in message
news:id25h3$84e$1@news.eternal-september.org...

Those computer cards are a big part of what got us where we are
today. It seems mighty ungrateful for anyone to curse or revile
them... If it's part of one's "right of passage" to throw the past
into the trash bin, one might consider these things.

"Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it."
-- George Santayana

One of the things I've been thankful for having started when cards
were still in use is that I've never had any problem understanding
files, records or fields. When you could hold the "records" in your
hand and look at the "fields" on the card it became very clear.

And if there was too much data to fit on a single card, you suffered
the nightmare of needing multiple physical records to hold a single
logical record. Awareness of this has a good influence on data design.

Or you made each input record self-contained. We did that with our
USAGE data spec (computer usage data for downstream billing programs).

I've used this to teach the concepts several times. Most recently,
I had to bring up some pictures of cards on the screen because the
student had never seen any. But when I did they got an instant
"Oh, yeah!" Of course, "do not bend, fold, spindle, or mutilate"
didn't mean anything to her, but that's the way it goes.

You could always explain it as a form of data corruption, right down
to the level of a spindle hole flipping a single bit.

It hadn't occurred to me (before Bill's post) that cards helped
concepts of the unseen bits...but they did.

/BAH

 

[jmfbahciv]

Frank Slootweg wrote:

jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> wrote:
Frank Slootweg wrote:
jmfbahciv <See.above@aol.com> wrote:
Frank Slootweg wrote:
Roland Hutchinson <my.spamtrap@verizon.net> wrote:
On Mon, 29 Nov 2010 13:54:01 +0000, jmfbahciv wrote:

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.

Sure it can. It's compatible with the ten-finger interface.

Scanning it with OCR sofware is much easier and has remarkably
good/reliable results.

Sometimes. Think about the listings generated by ribbon ink.

I have had some remarkable results with my lowly EPSON (Perfection
V30) scanner. Also on very old policies which were printed by a (ribbon
ink) line-printer,

Do you know which one? How did you eliminate the lines?

No, I don't know which line printer, I only have the printouts.

OK. Some were pretty good at printing and others were awful. I was
curious.

I don't understand what you mean by "How did you eliminate the
lines?". Which lines? Or do you mean 'computer paper' (or whatever it
was called), which was two-colored, mostly white-with-green, are those
(green) lines the lines you mean?

Yup.

FWIW, the policies were printed on - somewhat translucent - 'white'
paper.

How wide was the paper? Or was it TTY paper?

/BAH

 

[jmfbahciv]

Charlie Gibbs wrote:

In article <PM00049645A739A706@ac819a42.ipt.aol.com>, See.above@aol.com
(jmfbahciv) writes:

Anne & Lynn Wheeler wrote:

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.

I think that was a common practice becuase of slow assemblies.

Yup. We had a large production program that I'd patch until the
whole thing fell apart - only then would I try to wheedle the 40
minutes of machine time that it took to re-assemble it.

I finally wrote my own assembler. Although it had a number of very
nice features that were missing from the stock assembler, its primary
goal (which I achieved) was to run twice as fast. It was a bit easier
to scrounge 20 minutes of machine time than 40.

Curious (20 min vs 40 min). Could make a guess of how many minutes
were the threshold? 30 mins?

/BAH