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

[Joe Thompson]

jmfbahciv wrote

I'm older than you, fuckwit.

Childhood is determined by more than the calendar. -- Joe

 

[Joe Pfeiffer]

Joe Pfeiffer wrote


Nope, the punches are useless without the readers.

Not real good at understanding subtle humor, are you?

 

[Roland Hutchinson]

But removes hard-copy data and code backup which is human-readable.

That's what the line printer is for!

--
Roland Hutchinson

He calls himself "the Garden State's leading violist da gamba,"
.... comparable to being ruler of an exceptionally small duchy.
--Newark (NJ) Star Ledger ( http://tinyurl.com/RolandIsNJ )

 

[Charlie Gibbs]

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.

 

[Charlie Gibbs]

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.

Look on the bright side. The data was still there. (Heck, it was
now everywhere.) A bit of work with the card sorter and everything
was back together again, with nothing lost but time. (If the cards
didn't contain fields on which you could do whatever sorting was
necessary, it was time for a talk with whoever designed the layout.)

 

[Rod Speed]

Joe Thompson wrote

Childhood is determined by more than the calendar.

More puerile shit.

 

[Rod Speed]

Joe Pfeiffer wrote

Not real good at understanding subtle humor, are you?

Thats not humor, subtle or otherwise, just puerile shit.

 

[Rod Speed]

Charlie Gibbs wrote

[email protected] (Rod Speed) writes

Look on the bright side. The data was still there.
(Heck, it was now everywhere.) A bit of work
with the card sorter and everything was back
together again, with nothing lost but time.

Nope, there was nothing to sort on.

(If the cards didn't contain fields on which you could do whatever sorting
was necessary, it was time for a talk with whoever designed the layout.)

You quite sure you aint one of those rocket scientist fellas ?

 

[Joe Thompson]

Joe Thompson wrote


More puerile shit.

Ah jeez, I know I shouldn't bait somebody with the emotional development
of a nine-year-old, but it's been a stressful week and the opportunity
to just point and laugh was too good to pass up. -- Joe

 

[Joe Pfeiffer]

Joe Pfeiffer wrote


Thats not humor, subtle or otherwise, just puerile shit.

Wow. I thought I'd encountered "dense" before, but this is a whole new
league.

 

[SG1]

Ah jeez, I know I shouldn't bait somebody with the emotional development
of a nine-year-old, but it's been a stressful week and the opportunity
to just point and laugh was too good to pass up. -- Joe

Joseph I know 9 year olds with more maturity that Mr Speed. Roddles is at
least 5 years younger than you think.....

 

[Rod Speed]

Joe Pfeiffer wrote just the puerile shit thats all it can ever manage.

 

[Joe Pfeiffer]

Joe Pfeiffer wrote just the puerile shit thats all it can ever manage.

You use that word a lot. I don' think it means what you think it
means.

OK, I'm done. This is just too easy.

 

[Rod Speed]

Joe Pfeiffer wrote just the puerile shit thats all it can ever manage.

 

[Ahem A Rivet's Shot]

Bill Leary wrote just the peurile silly shit any 2 year old could leave
for dead.

Pot - Kettle - except in this case the kettle is a modern electric
one.

 

[Rod Speed]

Some gutless fuckwit desperately cowering behind Ahem A Rivet's Shot
wrote just the peurile silly shit any 2 year old could leave for dead.

 

[Ahem A Rivet's Shot]

Some gutless fuckwit desperately cowering behind Ahem A Rivet's Shot

Wow you can't even read as far as the signature block.

 

[Charlie Gibbs]

Charlie Gibbs wrote


You quite sure you aint one of those rocket scientist fellas ?

Nah, that was too simple. I worked with the really hard stuff:
payroll systems.

 

[Charlie Gibbs]

Or mention the merits of the use of a dry marker.

Hear, hear!

 

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

I liked handling cards. I hated handling papertape. I would rather
have my data in cards than on magtape.

Cards were great; DECtapes were the best.

I got summer job at the univ. doing port of 1401 MPIO to 360
assembler. The univ. had 709 with 1401 front-end for doing unit-record;
cards were read to tape on 1401 and the tape moved to 709 tape
drive. the 709 did tape-to-tape processing and the resulting output tape
was moved to 1401 tape drive for output to printer/punch (MPIO was 1401
program that handle card-to-tape and tape-to-printer/punch).

As part of eventually replacing the 709/1401 with 360/67, a 360/30 was
brought in to replace the 1401. While 360/30 had 1401 hardware emulation
mode and could run MPIO directly, I got hired to rewrite it in 360
assembler; except for requirement to duplicate MPIO function, i got to
design and implement my own program; dispatcher, interrupt handlers,
device drivers, error recover, storage management, etc.

The datacenter shutdown at 8am sat. and didn't re-open until 8am mon
.... so I had the machine room for 48hr period. I also got other
programming jobs ... and in the fall it was little difficult going to
monday morning class after not having slept for 48hrs.

The source assembler program eventaully grew to approx. 2000 cards
(could still fit in card box). The 360 assembler took a minimum 30
minutes to assemble the source and produce "TXT" deck (i.e. deck of hex
cards for execution loading). Since it took so long to assemble ... i
got pretty good at duplicating cards & punching patches. The "TXT" deck
just had hex "holes" ... no printing across the top and the 026 keypunch
was alphanumeric ... to get the correct combination of hex" holes, had
to used "multi-punch" feature ... use keyboard to force combination of
holes to be punched. Put the original card in the duplication slot and
then duplicate out to the columns for the patch ... multi-punch the new
hole combinations and then duplication the remaining columns.

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.

past post containing format of TXT card (as well as table for hex punch
hole combinations):
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007q.html#69 IBM System/3 & 3277-1

much, much later I was at SJR in san jose and my brother was regional
apple marketing rep (supposedly had largest physical region in CONUS).
He would come to town periodically and I could go to business dinners
with him. Got to argue with some of the mac developers about design
.... before the mac was even announced.