12 Feb
2013
12 Feb
'13
7:28 a.m.
A big part of the reason IMO for the excitement in the earlier years of
computing technology was that models were varying and unique, whereas today
they are uniform and ubiquitous. There's not much today that differentiates
computers from the desktop machine on up to super computers except for the
scale. "Back then" computers used a variety of different processors and had
different models had strong points to them, storage technology was
different, etc.
Not to say that modern day computing technology isn't impressive. But we
have since at least the last decade or two entered an era of incremental
changes rather than radical ones.
On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 9:11 AM, Jerome H. Fine <jhfinedp3k at compsys.to>wrote:
John Many Jars
wrote:
Or at least programming skills. I think the Vintage/classic years
were more exciting, but maybe that was because I
was a kid, and these
adults let me play with all this cool adult stuff! (And sometimes
they didn't let me, but I did anyway...)
On 11 February 2013 22:45, Murray McCullough
<c.murray.mccullough at gmail.com**> wrote:
> Back in the early years of mass-computerism you had to be a
> hobbyist/experimenter with good soldering skills to make computers do
> what you wanted them to do. Today they do it without your input and/or
> knowledge. Is that not scary? Were there prognosticators who predicted
> what would be now, 35-40 yrs. on? Vintage/classic computing were the
> safer years, maybe not as exciting! Maybe part of the answer is not to
> be connected but we would lose out on participating in this forum and
> so much more.
>
> It was possible to feel the same way even when we were
officially adults, but
still going to school. Back in 1960
when I was just 22, the adults let me play with an
IBM 650 (which was probably about as fast as a
calculator is today although it at least had 2000 words
of memory on a drum for both program and data - no
core yet even back then). The IBM 650 was a room
with a single computer and Air Conditioning. There was
no operating system and ONLY one person at a time
could use the hardware. My program took an hour to
calculate one value and I was able to get time from
midnight until the first person on the morning shift took
over (and stored the results produced on punched cards
in my box) when they cane into use the computer in the
morning.
So I never had to learn how to solder anything. Maybe
that is why I am a software addict rather than the more
"normal" hardware addict which is on this list.
Jerome Fine