Remember when install disks were floppy?

[darmstadt]

And the corresponding piece of extremely noisy hardware: the card punch.

I used one of them in my first job but if there was only 1 or 2 cards to punch I would use this:



and the cards were read into this:

[OwlHoot]

ISTR that MPLAB 4 came on 6 floppy disks.

Just downloaded MPLAB X.

Which was 367Mb or so.

Without any tool chain.

The toolchain just added another 64Mb.

It's all getting too much for a poor old lizard to cope with.

The idiot's guide is a mere 220 pages long.

I think it's time I retired.

370 Mbytes doesn't seem that bad at all these days (depending on the app I suppose).

I wonder what the largest install package is, including all the options, and documentation set.

Gnu Unix, including all packages, must be a couple of Gbytes at least by now, although the complete Epson printer software suite must give it a run for its money - ISTR at least two or three Gbytes just to run a thick little laser printer!

and I read somewhere that the complete Oracle document set is longer than every surviving book in the World from the dawn of history to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 (and it's probably up to 1553 by now).

[NickFitz]

Aye.

The youf of today don't know nuffin about toggling in card reader bootstraps.

Only 16 instructions but it generally took at least 20 minutes to get the fecker right.

At school, if one was first into the computer room one had to enter the bootstrap into the PDP-8/e to load BASIC (or whatever) from the high speed punched paper tape drive, using the toggle switches on the front, which at least meant one got an early introduction to octal-to-binary conversion. It would appear from this simulator page that the code in question was:

07756  6032  KCC
07757  6031  KSF
07760  5357  JMP .-1
07761  6036  KRB
07762  7106  CLL RTL
07763  7006  RTL
07764  7510  SPA
07765  5357  JMP 7757
07766  7006  RTL
07767  6031  KSF
07770  5367  JMP .-1
07771  6034  KRS
07772  7420  SNL
07773  3776  DCA I 7776
07774  3376  DCA 7776
07775  5356  JMP 7756
07776  0000  AND 0
07777  5301  JMP 7701

Also, turning the computer on with a key seems to be a lost technique

[malvolio]

Were you a cheerful young buck back then?

Suppose so. For one thing I'd just got married and switching from micro biology to computer ops doubled my take home overnight.

And I used the Teletype as pictured, complete with the little speaker so you could hear what the CPU was doing. Hands up who remembers:

FI #XQMY #UTIL
GI #XQMY 12
GO #XQMY 20
GO #XQMY 21
DE #XQMY

[original PM]

I heard your mum likes a floppy

or something

[northernladuk]

I remember when install disks came on either 700 punch cards or a spool of punched tape 8 inches in diameter...

Looking back at that system, they had a dedicated power room and air conditioning plant and several hundred square feet of tin and wires to give you 64K of 8 bit memory and 40 Mb of disk storage spread over 5 11-platter disks. Add a train printer and a card reader, 6 tape decks with a different storage protocol to the disks and a tape reader and you're good to go.

Come to that, it didn't have an OS either...

Were you a cheerful young buck back then?

[malvolio]

I remember when install disks came on either 700 punch cards or a spool of punched tape 8 inches in diameter...

Looking back at that system, they had a dedicated power room and air conditioning plant and several hundred square feet of tin and wires to give you 64K of 8 bit memory and 40 Mb of disk storage spread over 5 11-platter disks. Add a train printer and a card reader, 6 tape decks with a different storage protocol to the disks and a tape reader and you're good to go.

Come to that, it didn't have an OS either...

[SimonMac]

[zeitghost]

ISTR that MPLAB 4 came on 6 floppy disks.

Just downloaded MPLAB X.

Which was 367Mb or so.

Without any tool chain.

The toolchain just added another 64Mb.

It's all getting too much for a poor old lizard to cope with.

The idiot's guide is a mere 220 pages long.

I think it's time I retired.


Aye.

The youf of today don't know nuffin about toggling in card reader bootstraps.

Only 16 instructions but it generally took at least 20 minutes to get the fecker right.

Then again, I think we had it easy compared with:

http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcfo...hp/t-9441.html

And then again, on youtube:

Mmmmmm.

ASR33.

Mmmmmmm.

A. N. Other paper tape reader.

After all that downloading, it turns out that MPLAB X is based on open software, net beans & all that tulipestuff.

Which means that the project we attempted to run died ingloriously with an incomprehensible error message.

And then I went on to kill his PICKIT 3 dongle thingie with MPLAB 8.

Ho hum.

Never mind, here's a nice picture of a card reader.



And the corresponding piece of extremely noisy hardware: the card punch.

Doesn't work any more, try this:

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computing...nivac1710.html

I'm sure it easily exceeded 90dB in the small room it inhabited.

I used one of them in my first job but if there was only 1 or 2 cards to punch I would use this:

I remember that thing.

ISTR that we used it to program up FET testers.

One of the funnier things was watching someone attempting to edit a binary image on a card & get the checksum right using one of those.

I'm not sure he succeeded, but it took a lot of cards before he gave up.