| OK, OK, OK, I'll tell you something about me. I am old enough to have worked on one of the first computers, an IBM 7090 when I was in graduate school. This system had a whole 128K of memory and was kept in an air conditioned room, where it barely fit. It did run at 0.5 Mhz however. This machine was so "expensive" and hard to operate that you gave the "jobs" on a deck of IBM punched cards to the operator for processing. My first job produced eighteen pages of zeros and I was greeted by stares when I went to pick it up. Oh yes, all output was on paper and picked up the next day, if you were lucky. If you needed to change something you punched some new cards and started again. The language was FORTRAN (formula translator). If you dropped the cards you could put them through a sorter and get them back into order. See you kids don't have it too bad today <g>. I also was on the original Internet when it was run by the government by ARPA. It was all text as the WWW was not invented yet. I could telnet and FTP as well as send E-mail. Presently...I just retired as a Principal Scientist at one of the major Pharmaceutical Companies. My responsibility included laboratory data acquisition systems. I have three children and six grandchildren. I'm married to a wonderful woman named Susan. My hobbies include surfing the Internet, digital photography and amateur radio where my call sign is K2PYY., I also enjoy listening to oldies music. I have recently relocated to southeastern Florida to enjoy the warm weather. |
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| Look at the "mighty" IBM 7090 and that huge console and consider the massive 128 K of memory. No, that's not me in this picture, as only the high priests of computing were ever allowed to be in close proximity to a system as "powerful" as this. Yes, we were allowed to run the system with 1 K of memory. That was the cheap one at $80,000. No disk drives, they weren't invented yet, but lots of tapes <g>. The first drive was miraculous and had about 100 MB of storage and about 0.1 second access. It sure beat tape though. The IBM 2302 Drive below had platters 24 inches in diameter. |
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