Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT: 25-29 October 2010 (1781-1785)
Skewbrow:
You guys are beating me hands down on old computer stories, but I share mine anyway. My first encounter was at the high school with a device that had 16k of memory, running a Basic interpreter, and you could turn its display to "B/W graphics mode" with a resolution of 72x60 pixels. A classmate coded a demo showing a space shuttle lift off (also a novel thing at the time). The only mass memory device on it was a tape deck. A C60 cassette would hold aplenty. I can still hear the bits sing as a 4kB game loaded up in only like 3 minutes. First year at college we had a line printer I/O access to the mainframe, but those were shortly afterwards replaced with VT52s. E-mail account? Got my first one on my second year at grad school. They had this splendid idea that your e-mail address consisted of your password to the local IBM mainframe followed with @nd.edu. You gave your e-mail address only to friends far away. After all, who else would need your e-mail address? Nobody thought this practice to carry any risks :roll:
Carl-E:
nd.edu - Notre Dame?
Oh, for the trusting days of the early internet, sending unencrypted passwords through telnet dial ups to check bulletin boards full of acsii porn art...
jwhouk:
Rule 34 was in effect even before there were personal computers.
Carl-E:
Purely for historical purposes. (Probably still NSFW)
I recognize a bunch of these, actually. Had a few hanging in my room (c'mon, it was the 70's). One of them even has a header talking about the old 132 column printers with the folding paper that made the long nudes printable.
Damn, I'm feeling old now.
zadojla:
--- Quote from: Carl-E on 30 Oct 2010, 12:01 ---Was there at least a card punch? Or did the poor intern have to sit there with a stylus and fresh cards?
--- End quote ---
029 and 129 keypunches, and a 1402 reader/punch attached to the system. The printer was a 1403 model 3, and could have produced the "art" linked to above, which was usually done with a card-to-print utility and an "appropriately-formatted" input deck.
We old-timers still refer to any 80-byte fixed length record as a "card". I haven't seen physical cards in use since 1985.
Nowadays, I'm not even allowed on raised floor.
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