General Discussions

**Learning Newbie** · 07:13 PM

We used to develop our web sites on these little punch card things, that you'd put into the mainframe and come back the next day to see if it was done rendering yet. Every now and then we had a bug in the system, and someone needed some pesticide and a vaccuum. It wasn't about gigabytes and megahertz, it was vaccuum tubes.

And we did our coding barefoot in the snow, walking up hill. In both directions.

Plus it used to be a standard called ANSI which is funny because that stands for American national standards institute. But in the text/character based days of DOS (and not just MS DOS, there was DR DOS too, and that was a huge advance over primitive machines!) we had our own totally different ways to "mark up" a document and add color and whatnot. People even used to draw in this language.

Adam started a wave of making fun of old "grandpa" so I really wanted to make the results public to punish him, and send the guy to the link exchange forum, but it makes me wonder. The web is the most diverse place in history. I'm really excited to see the results of this poll!

**seolman** · 08-13-2007, 08:28 PM

HA! Web design using punch cards is sissy stuff.

I was designing web sites before there was electricity. We had to view our monitors by candle-light and deliver the sites by horse-drawn carriage. When it was too cold to use the horses we walked for up to 20 miles barefoot to and from the customers offices, uphill both ways (re-used)...

**mgraphic** · 08-13-2007, 08:52 PM

In my day - I used to code a picture of Alfred E. Newmen in BASIC on a Commodore 64 from a script published in my subscriptions of MAD magazine. We only had a audio cassette tape to backup and save data on. Then the Apple came out and a floppy drive WAS the hard drive, and you were considered to be "cool" if your system had TWO floppy drives.

**LadynRed** · 08-13-2007, 09:05 PM

I'm only a little older than Seolman.. so... my first job as a computer operator (yeah.. that BOFH) was on an old Univac9200 system.. no CRT display.. I had 4 rows of 4 sets of 4 lights - and the codes for the processing were displayed in BINARY by those lights. We used 10-head disk drives that weighed 40lbs each and I juggled thousands and thousands of 80-column punch cards on a daily basis - and I could read those punch cards by the position of the holes -- they were not printed ! Do you know anyone that can read EBCDIC ???

**seolman** · 08-14-2007, 12:13 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by LadynRed

I'm only a little older than Seolman.. so... my first job as a computer operator (yeah.. that BOFH) was on an old Univac9200 system.. no CRT display.. I had 4 rows of 4 sets of 4 lights - and the codes for the processing were displayed in BINARY by those lights. We used 10-head disk drives that weighed 40lbs each and I juggled thousands and thousands of 80-column punch cards on a daily basis - and I could read those punch cards by the position of the holes -- they were not printed ! Do you know anyone that can read EBCDIC ???

Univac Wow? I remember working on a Digital VAX1170 using the Sci-Cards CAD software when CAD was so new the two terminals we used for multi-layer PC design cost $500K each. I knew nothing about the hardware side but I was awed by the massive tape drives on the system. Now my laptop can do the same thing...unreal.

**ForrestCroce** · 08-14-2007, 12:45 AM

Hmmm. I'm a youngster in this crowd. My first computer was an IBM, ugly as all get out, that ran Basic as it's o/s. Back when line numbers were something you typed and were required ... instead of something not really there, but a display property you can turn on and off in text editor. I played around with Turbo Pascal and C++ on a Tandy 1000 with Desk Mate, a horrible excuse for an o/s with an embedded but lousy word processor.

My laptop is dead. I'm very unhappy to be using a desktop in the meantime, and you wouldn't believe how difficult it is to find the striping algorithm for my controller's raid 0 ... I know when I send it in, they're going to re-image the machine as step 1, and I don't want to loose the data. Sorry, DavBob mentioned what his laptop can do. Mine is a good paper weight.

Anyway, to answer the question, I'm 29.

**ADAM Web Design** · 08-14-2007, 02:20 AM

30...and my first computer was a Dragon 32 that my grandfather bought at a flea market and then gave to me when "it won't program the way I tell it to!" (Translation: he had no idea what he was doing and once wrote an 800-line program to spit out "Hello Jimmy!" in an endless loop).

**KML9870** · 05:38 AM

36....for another 4 weeks. My first computer was a Commodore 64 and that was amazing. I remember computers like LadyNRed is talking about, but didn't work on them. I learned COBAL & Pascal & Basic.

**hamesy** · 08-14-2007, 05:57 AM

Well I must be the baby, I'm only 20. My first computer was an Amiga 600. I was probably only around 6-7 at the time. I remember using Deluxe Paint (at the time I thought that was such a cool program) and playing games such as, Formula One Grand Prix, Pushover and Monkey Island. Brings back memories.

**KML9870** · 08-14-2007, 07:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hamesy

Well I must be the baby, I'm only 20.

Nah, my kid (17) is around here sometimes and his first computer was a 486. Dan is around too and he is two years younger than DarkLink.

**Learning Newbie** · 08-14-2007, 05:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

(Translation: he had no idea what he was doing and once wrote an 800-line program to spit out "Hello Jimmy!" in an endless loop).

Do you think I could get a copy of this script? I think I could sell it to Varsity as a way to improve his site. I'll give your grandpaps a 50 % cut.

**D-not** · 05:58 PM

err

Code:

class MAIN
{
x = 1;
while( x = 1)
{
System.Console.Writeline( "Hello Jimmy" );
}

800 lines?

EDIT 17 BTW XD

**Learning Newbie** · 08-14-2007, 06:29 PM

What is "4966 796F75 63616E 72656164 74686973. 796F75 617265 61 6765656B", D-Nice?

**D-not** · 08-14-2007, 06:33 PM

HEX of course, care to figure out what it means?

And that's D-isn't to you XD

**Learning Newbie** · 08-14-2007, 07:04 PM

I'd have to agree, D-Nice.

"If you can read this you are a geek"

Sorry for calling you D-Nice, I'm not making fun of your name. My nephew got me into rap music, and there's a rapper with a very positive message who calls himself D-Nice. Your name, D-not, obviously reminds me of him.

I used Excel to read your code:

Public Sub test()
Dim s As String, c As String, o As String
Dim i As Integer

s = "4966 796F75 63616E 72656164 74686973 796F75 617265 61 6765656B"
s = Replace(s, " ", "")

For i = 1 To Len(s) Step 2
c = "&H" & Mid(s, i, 2)
o = o + Chr(CInt(c))
Next i

Debug.Print o
End Sub

**D-not** · 08-14-2007, 07:18 PM

Yes, I am a miracle child indeed :P I actually wrote that out from what I remember of the Hex table. I'm amazed I got it right XD

**Learning Newbie** · 08-14-2007, 07:47 PM

You did that from memory?? In my day, we had memory, but then we all got old and forgot.

**D-not** · 08-14-2007, 10:54 PM

Yeah, out Computer Science teacher had us e-mail project descriptions to him written in Hex to get us to remember

**mgraphic** · 08-14-2007, 11:12 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by D-not

Yeah, out Computer Science teacher had us e-mail project descriptions to him written in Hex to get us to remember

If it were me, I'd write a function to automate it!

**D-not** · 08-14-2007, 11:15 PM

The submitting computer was restricted the File movement and the E-mail program on it. The closest someone came was making one and putting it on their transfer drive. They couldn't get it to run. I only ran the E-mail program no other programs. Of course the last day he taught us all the work-arounds to it XD I resented that