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I remember 5 bit paper tape and even worked on printing perforators and tape readers - wonderful noisy mechanical/digital machines. My first computer was a VIC 20 with cassette tape. My first PC was an Amstrad 10MB hard disk and the world was my mollusc. Heady times!
Life is like a s**t sandwich; the more bread you have, the less s**t you eat.
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Yeah... Being 32 years old my first computer was a C64.
From a future historians perspective you had Tesla patenting logic gates and 60 years later everything went *BAM*. What happened here? I don't know. Was it aliens?
.
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0bx wrote: Yeah... Being 32 years old my first computer was a C64.
Mine was too (SX64 specifically), and I'm 40% older.
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"Show me a community that obeys the Ten Commandments and I'll show you a less crowded prison system." - Anonymous
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DavidCrow wrote: and I'm 40% older.
So you are 44.8 years old? 
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In my first job we had one hard drive in the company, there were 4 of us on Apple II's running ProDOS and the bose would run builds on a 5MB hard drive. Sounded like a jet taking off when he started it up.
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I worked at one of the first computer stores in the Chicago area and we sold Alpha Micro timesharing systems. We got a CDC Hawk drive 5 MB fixed and 5 MB removable. Our first thought was that we'd never fill it.
Two weeks later...
Psychosis at 10
Film at 11
Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
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I never got to see what all they stored on the bosses drive but I bet there was some versioning and other stuff where they probably had it filled too!
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My first hard drive was the second floppy.
Twin floppy system on an RM380Z.
Then a 20MB IBM.
Today we are running a huge server with >lots TB and cloud backup, offsite data and drop box for data transfer.
I still pine for the mid 80's when Joe Public had no access to our systems and we were grand wizards.
How I would rule the roost on my AS400 when I worked in the The City.
---------------------------------
Obscurum per obscurius.
Ad astra per alas porci.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur .
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Oh the Research machines 380Z. Gosh that brings bsck good memories.
I may not last forever but the mess I leave behind certainly will.
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Now I remember an Olivetti with a 5mb hard drive on which we built a video rental system, later to be upgraded to 20mb when development was complete.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Yup. the first one I remember was the big foot drive.
It didn't fit in a 5.25 drive bay so it was mounted on top on clone power supplies.
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Of course, you were lucky.
I've still got an NT4 workstation sitting on a shelf which has much less of everything than my phone. They both work, but one is so old it's a joke and is utterly useless unless you want to cruise through a VS 1997 build.
Incidentally, it has VB5. Almost the same as VB6, which still sells for hundreds. 
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I saw for the very first time a PC booting from an hard disk at University. I thought it was a miracle.
Veni, vidi, vici.
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My first job was using a hybrid computer. The main part was a EAI 680 analogue computer with 3 foot square detachable patch panels. An EAI 640 digital computer was used to control this. It ran via cassette operating system (COS) and the cassettes were very similar to 8 track audio tapes. This latter was replaced soon after I joined by an EAI Pacer which used 5Kb disks the size of vinyl LPs although it still had to be bootstrapped via the “octal” switches on the front. For simulation work analogue ruled in those days.
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Fascinating.
Veni, vidi, vici.
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top tip: use sequoia view [^] to find out where the bloat is. Takes a while, but it's worth it.
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The first hard drive I purchased on my own was a 340MB Western Digital drive, for which I paid over $600. It was happily installed in a 386SX, 16 MHz machine with a whopping 1MB of RAM.
I've got data structures bigger than that now.
Software Zen: delete this;
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20 MB, that big! My first HD was 5 MB. Which was great for a CP/M-machine.
At that time, a hard disk had just two states:
Either it was new, or it was full. Sad, but true.
Alcohol. The cause of, and the solution to, all of life's problems - Homer Simpson
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Engineer 1 : I remember when all we had was a big time-sharing machine with only text-based terminals as an interface.
Engineer 2 : Text-based terminals?!? You had text-based terminals? I remember when our only interface was punch cards.
Engineer 1 : Punch cards?!? You had punch cards? I remember when all we had was paper tape.
Engineer 2 : Paper tape?!? You had paper tape? I remember when we hand to hand assemble code with toggle switches on the front panel of the machine.
Engineer 1 : Toggle switches?!? You had toggle switches? I remember when we had to wire-wrap all of the 0's and 1's?
Engineer 2 : 1's?!? You had 1's?...
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... one of the first computers I used was PDP-11 with twin 5Mb drives. To boot it you had to manually load the bootstrap program, about a dozen instructions, using the front panel toggle switches.
Not sure how much memory that had (probably 64k bytes = 32k words) but the very first computer I programmed was a PDP-8 with 4096 12-bit words of memory (i.e. 6kb). It supported 5 simultaneous users on teletypes but had no disk storage at all!
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Gus Gustafson
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600MB drives that took three of us to lift. We hauled them up three flights of stairs; had to do this often, as they would fail because the air conditioning couldn't keep the things cool enough. (vax/vms system)
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I remember the "Start" button was a physical button on the card and paper tape reader!
I remember, the "Program Manager" in Window 3.x will never take the place of the DOS prompt
I remember, the "Start" button will never take the place of Program Manager
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I remember when my dad got his first computer - an Altair 8800b with 32K of RAM with a Lear-Siegler ADM-3a dumb terminal.
"Those were the days, my friend . . ."
"Olorin I was in the West that is forgotten . . ." - JRR Tolkien
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Having 4K of RAM on my first computer (home built S100 bus Z80 system). All I had was a 2K monitor program (Zapple) that would allow me to dump memory, peak/poke memory, read/write at I/O ports, etc.
I learned to program the Z80 by the numbers since Zapple had no programming languages. I eventually wirewrapped a FSK board to be able to save programs to cassette tape. Since I had a reel-to-reel recorder I was able to up the speed from 1200 baud an amazing 9600 baud!! Fun times in the 70s.
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