My first computer memory was using a terminal
I vaguely remember when I was in elementary school in the 1970s in delaware some U of Delaware students or a teacher gave me access to a computer via a terminal. It was a simple login prompt to connect to the library and look things up and play some kind of exercises that had conditional decisions to build a story. It wasn't Plato or anything like that. That was my first memory of computers, but I must have been very young as I don't remember much else. The thing that impressed me was how you could decide what to do next and it changed a story's outcome. I think we had a picture book that went with it (?) I always wonder what that was all about. It was a one-day thing and that was it. Many years later I heard about something called project Delta at the U of Del but I have no idea if that was the same thing or if it was just some U of Del student looking for nearby kids to experiment with. I remember going to the librarian in elementary school and asking to use the computer in the back office , maybe 5th grade, but there were no computers for kids to use. I started going to RadioShack and using their computers probably in 4th grade and the Hallmark had a Timex Sinclair on display there, but I did have a family computer until the later 80s. I somehow knew BASIC, which makes me wonder if I was taught BASIC too. I remember making the computer say "Bill is Cool" over and over and I thought that was really funny at the time. Bill
Man, you youngsters had it good! Back before dirt, they gave us mechanical calculators in HS to learn on. Marchant and Monroe are names that come to mind. This training was *job* training. Knowing how to operate these calculators could have secured a HS graduate of the era a position in a bank or accounting firm. These behemoths were a step up from my Magic Brain stylus slide adder, which itself was merely a mechanization of an abacus, which could add or subtract and could multiply by repeated addition. (I actually had an abacus, but never really mastered it. I did pretty well on the Magic Brain.) I distinctly remember entering college and longing for one of the 4-function pocket calculators that had become available by then, but at $150 (that's $1200 in 2021 dollars), that was out of the question. So I enrolled in computer classes and learned FORTRAN programming, which held me in good stead through about 1983. Along the way, I used a desk-sized Wang programmable calculator (vintage about 1971 or so) and the HP-65 pocket calculator, the kind that NASA took along to Apollo-Soyez. Bruce NJ On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 4:06 PM Bill Degnan via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
I vaguely remember when I was in elementary school in the 1970s in delaware some U of Delaware students or a teacher gave me access to a computer via a terminal. It was a simple login prompt to connect to the library and look things up and play some kind of exercises that had conditional decisions to build a story. It wasn't Plato or anything like that.
That was my first memory of computers, but I must have been very young as I don't remember much else. The thing that impressed me was how you could decide what to do next and it changed a story's outcome. I think we had a picture book that went with it (?)
I always wonder what that was all about. It was a one-day thing and that was it. Many years later I heard about something called project Delta at the U of Del but I have no idea if that was the same thing or if it was just some U of Del student looking for nearby kids to experiment with.
I remember going to the librarian in elementary school and asking to use the computer in the back office , maybe 5th grade, but there were no computers for kids to use.
I started going to RadioShack and using their computers probably in 4th grade and the Hallmark had a Timex Sinclair on display there, but I did have a family computer until the later 80s. I somehow knew BASIC, which makes me wonder if I was taught BASIC too. I remember making the computer say "Bill is Cool" over and over and I thought that was really funny at the time.
Bill
Hello! Bill I think I did just top that, but everyone read on. I'll top all of that, when I was in elementary school, I got a chance to participate in a program that IBM setup using their mainframe families, and the Selectric based terminals, probably the 2741, in a remote mode. I was granted a logon code, and could spend about half an hour doing exercises. By the time it did end I was even allowed to do that without one of the teachers being present. Years later when visiting the IBM Research facility that Yorktown Heights has, I met just such a terminal, and had a chance to do stuff. The fellow I was with, well his father was an IBM Fellow for many years. To this day, when making use of Hercules to run an IBM OS, I think of that terminal when using telnet to talk to the emulator. Today, the people in my LUG, find my stories of such hardware to be odd. And think the IBM mainframe should be keeping the dinos in the museum in NYC and elsewhere company. In fact they refuse to believe that's what is managing their banking and credit card use, (still). ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again." On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 4:46 PM Bruce via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
Man, you youngsters had it good! Back before dirt, they gave us mechanical calculators in HS to learn on. Marchant and Monroe are names that come to mind. This training was *job* training. Knowing how to operate these calculators could have secured a HS graduate of the era a position in a bank or accounting firm. These behemoths were a step up from my Magic Brain stylus slide adder, which itself was merely a mechanization of an abacus, which could add or subtract and could multiply by repeated addition. (I actually had an abacus, but never really mastered it. I did pretty well on the Magic Brain.) I distinctly remember entering college and longing for one of the 4-function pocket calculators that had become available by then, but at $150 (that's $1200 in 2021 dollars), that was out of the question. So I enrolled in computer classes and learned FORTRAN programming, which held me in good stead through about 1983. Along the way, I used a desk-sized Wang programmable calculator (vintage about 1971 or so) and the HP-65 pocket calculator, the kind that NASA took along to Apollo-Soyez. Bruce NJ
On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 4:06 PM Bill Degnan via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
I vaguely remember when I was in elementary school in the 1970s in delaware some U of Delaware students or a teacher gave me access to a computer via a terminal. It was a simple login prompt to connect to the library and look things up and play some kind of exercises that had conditional decisions to build a story. It wasn't Plato or anything like that.
That was my first memory of computers, but I must have been very young as I don't remember much else. The thing that impressed me was how you could decide what to do next and it changed a story's outcome. I think we had a picture book that went with it (?)
I always wonder what that was all about. It was a one-day thing and that was it. Many years later I heard about something called project Delta at the U of Del but I have no idea if that was the same thing or if it was just some U of Del student looking for nearby kids to experiment with.
I remember going to the librarian in elementary school and asking to use the computer in the back office , maybe 5th grade, but there were no computers for kids to use.
I started going to RadioShack and using their computers probably in 4th grade and the Hallmark had a Timex Sinclair on display there, but I did have a family computer until the later 80s. I somehow knew BASIC, which makes me wonder if I was taught BASIC too. I remember making the computer say "Bill is Cool" over and over and I thought that was really funny at the time.
Bill
As long as we're reminiscing . . . Like Gregg, I had IBM exposure early. As a freshman in high school, (so 1965-66), we had a field trip to TJ Watson Research facility, in Yorktown Heights (only a bit north of my town of Chappaqua) NY. We were sat down at 2741 Selectric I/O terminals, and given a login to an early version of APL running on a 360. Ken Iverson, the author of the APL book, worked at TJ Watson. During my junior year (so 1967-68) he taught a class in APL to about 20 in my high school, myself included. IBM had this idea that they could get kids in middle school using APL and have them all trained to use IBM hardware once they graduated. When I got to Cornell University, and they offered a class in APL my second year, I was all set. The instructor was literally about a chapter ahead of the class every week, whereas my roommate and I, both graduates of Iverson's class in high school, could *teach* the class. I loved APL. I even had a "tiny-APL" that ran under CPM at one point, believe it or not. I modified the terminal I had (now in the Info-Age museum) to show APL characters if the right escape sequences were sent to it. Now I've got an open source APL, and I never use it. It's too wierd a language, without modern control structures or any libraries, so it's just a historical curiosity now. Bill Dudley This email is free of malware because I run Linux. On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 9:36 PM Gregg Levine via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
Hello! Bill I think I did just top that, but everyone read on. I'll top all of that, when I was in elementary school, I got a chance to participate in a program that IBM setup using their mainframe families, and the Selectric based terminals, probably the 2741, in a remote mode. I was granted a logon code, and could spend about half an hour doing exercises. By the time it did end I was even allowed to do that without one of the teachers being present.
Years later when visiting the IBM Research facility that Yorktown Heights has, I met just such a terminal, and had a chance to do stuff. The fellow I was with, well his father was an IBM Fellow for many years. To this day, when making use of Hercules to run an IBM OS, I think of that terminal when using telnet to talk to the emulator.
Today, the people in my LUG, find my stories of such hardware to be odd. And think the IBM mainframe should be keeping the dinos in the museum in NYC and elsewhere company. In fact they refuse to believe that's what is managing their banking and credit card use, (still). ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 4:46 PM Bruce via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
Man, you youngsters had it good! Back before dirt, they gave us mechanical calculators in HS to learn on. Marchant and Monroe are names that come to mind. This training was *job* training. Knowing how to operate these calculators could have secured a
HS
graduate of the era a position in a bank or accounting firm. These behemoths were a step up from my Magic Brain stylus slide adder, which itself was merely a mechanization of an abacus, which could add or subtract and could multiply by repeated addition. (I actually had an abacus, but never really mastered it. I did pretty well on the Magic Brain.) I distinctly remember entering college and longing for one of the 4-function pocket calculators that had become available by then, but at $150 (that's $1200 in 2021 dollars), that was out of the question. So I enrolled in computer classes and learned FORTRAN programming, which held me in good stead through about 1983. Along the way, I used a desk-sized Wang programmable calculator (vintage about 1971 or so) and the HP-65 pocket calculator, the kind that NASA took along to Apollo-Soyez. Bruce NJ
On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 4:06 PM Bill Degnan via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
I vaguely remember when I was in elementary school in the 1970s in delaware some U of Delaware students or a teacher gave me access to a computer via a terminal. It was a simple login prompt to connect to the library and look things up and play some kind of exercises that had conditional decisions to build a story. It wasn't Plato or anything like that.
That was my first memory of computers, but I must have been very young as I don't remember much else. The thing that impressed me was how you could decide what to do next and it changed a story's outcome. I think we had a picture book that went with it (?)
I always wonder what that was all about. It was a one-day thing and that was it. Many years later I heard about something called project Delta at the U of Del but I have no idea if that was the same thing or if it was just some U of Del student looking for nearby kids to experiment with.
I remember going to the librarian in elementary school and asking to use the computer in the back office , maybe 5th grade, but there were no computers for kids to use.
I started going to RadioShack and using their computers probably in 4th grade and the Hallmark had a Timex Sinclair on display there, but I did have a family computer until the later 80s. I somehow knew BASIC, which makes me wonder if I was taught BASIC too. I remember making the computer say "Bill is Cool" over and over and I thought that was really funny at the time.
Bill
Okay, I'll play. I joined Explorer Post 385 in State College, PA in 1969 as a 9th grader. Our emphasis was computer programming, which was fairly unusual for the time. We took programming classes from PSU grad students and area professionals, starting with FORTRAN and continuing with IBM 360 Assembler and PL/1. EP385 was sponsored by HRB Singer, and we had an account on the IBM 360/67 at Penn State. The preferred FORTRAN compiler was WATFOR (University of Waterloo FORTRAN). PSU upgraded to a 370, and we moved on to WATFIV (Waterloo FORTRAN IV). I still have some printouts from 1975 with the JCL and listings of some of my FORTRAN programs. Mike Loewen mloewen@cpumagic.scol.pa.us Old Technology http://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/
On Fri, 21 May 2021, Mike Loewen via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
I joined Explorer Post 385 in State College, PA in 1969 as a 9th grader. Our emphasis was computer programming, which was fairly unusual for the time. We took programming classes from PSU grad students and area professionals, starting with FORTRAN and continuing with IBM 360 Assembler and PL/1. EP385 was sponsored by HRB Singer, and we had an account on the IBM 360/67 at Penn State. The preferred FORTRAN compiler was WATFOR (University of Waterloo FORTRAN). PSU upgraded to a 370, and we moved on to WATFIV (Waterloo FORTRAN IV). I still have some printouts from 1975 with the JCL and listings of some of my FORTRAN programs.
This was on punch cards, of course. We wrote out our programs on coding forms, then headed to the keypunch room to punch the deck on IBM 029 keypunches. You then took your deck to the dispatch area, filled out a form and submitted your deck to the dispatcher. Some time later, possibly hours depending on how busy it was, you got your deck back with the output listing. Hopefully, it ran. If not, you headed back to the keypunch to fix your error(s), lather rinse and repeat. Mike Loewen mloewen@cpumagic.scol.pa.us Old Technology http://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/
Hello! Funny you mentioned it, there are supposed to be machines like that hiding in storage back at the VCF facility. ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again." On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 10:50 PM Mike Loewen via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
On Fri, 21 May 2021, Mike Loewen via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
I joined Explorer Post 385 in State College, PA in 1969 as a 9th grader. Our emphasis was computer programming, which was fairly unusual for the time. We took programming classes from PSU grad students and area professionals, starting with FORTRAN and continuing with IBM 360 Assembler and PL/1. EP385 was sponsored by HRB Singer, and we had an account on the IBM 360/67 at Penn State. The preferred FORTRAN compiler was WATFOR (University of Waterloo FORTRAN). PSU upgraded to a 370, and we moved on to WATFIV (Waterloo FORTRAN IV). I still have some printouts from 1975 with the JCL and listings of some of my FORTRAN programs.
This was on punch cards, of course. We wrote out our programs on coding forms, then headed to the keypunch room to punch the deck on IBM 029 keypunches. You then took your deck to the dispatch area, filled out a form and submitted your deck to the dispatcher. Some time later, possibly hours depending on how busy it was, you got your deck back with the output listing. Hopefully, it ran. If not, you headed back to the keypunch to fix your error(s), lather rinse and repeat.
Mike Loewen mloewen@cpumagic.scol.pa.us Old Technology http://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/
On Fri, 21 May 2021, Gregg Levine wrote:
Hello! Funny you mentioned it, there are supposed to be machines like that hiding in storage back at the VCF facility.
There's an 029 in the musuem, which I had working at one point. It needs some more TLC. Mike Loewen mloewen@cpumagic.scol.pa.us Old Technology http://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/
Sure good to hear from you “old-timers.” My first recollection was in 1952, fresh out of high school, working with Potter Instrument. I started by QC testing components, ie., resisters, capacitors, tubes and condensers. To make my job easier, I designed a simple testing jig. John Potter was impressed enough to make me a engineering technician/field service engineer. I constructed “decades”, soldering components on to printed circuit boards [NOT integrated circuit boards]. I graduated to a project funded by Harvard University, which was an attempt to read (using photoelectric cells) typed Master’s Theses and print (copy) the document using an early ink jet printer. To my knowledge the project failed, due to limitations of the photoelectric cells. I assisted in the installation of several Potter testing units in commercial and military units. We input data using Teletype terminals (punched paper tape) using “Potter” codes. My career with Potter ended when I was drafted into the US Army during the Korean War. In later years I worked for Reeves Instrument Corp., Litton Systems Inc, Howard Research Corp, Control Data Corp and the US federal government. In my later years I was one of the pioneers in the office automation and digital optical storage fields. I retired in the year 2000. Felix Krayeski Sent from Mail for Windows 10 From: Gregg Levine via vcf-midatlantic Sent: Friday, May 21, 2021 9:36 PM To: vcf-midatlantic Cc: Gregg Levine Subject: Re: [vcf-midatlantic] My first computer memory was using a terminal Hello! Bill I think I did just top that, but everyone read on. I'll top all of that, when I was in elementary school, I got a chance to participate in a program that IBM setup using their mainframe families, and the Selectric based terminals, probably the 2741, in a remote mode. I was granted a logon code, and could spend about half an hour doing exercises. By the time it did end I was even allowed to do that without one of the teachers being present. Years later when visiting the IBM Research facility that Yorktown Heights has, I met just such a terminal, and had a chance to do stuff. The fellow I was with, well his father was an IBM Fellow for many years. To this day, when making use of Hercules to run an IBM OS, I think of that terminal when using telnet to talk to the emulator. Today, the people in my LUG, find my stories of such hardware to be odd. And think the IBM mainframe should be keeping the dinos in the museum in NYC and elsewhere company. In fact they refuse to believe that's what is managing their banking and credit card use, (still). ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again." On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 4:46 PM Bruce via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
Man, you youngsters had it good! Back before dirt, they gave us mechanical calculators in HS to learn on. Marchant and Monroe are names that come to mind. This training was *job* training. Knowing how to operate these calculators could have secured a HS graduate of the era a position in a bank or accounting firm. These behemoths were a step up from my Magic Brain stylus slide adder, which itself was merely a mechanization of an abacus, which could add or subtract and could multiply by repeated addition. (I actually had an abacus, but never really mastered it. I did pretty well on the Magic Brain.) I distinctly remember entering college and longing for one of the 4-function pocket calculators that had become available by then, but at $150 (that's $1200 in 2021 dollars), that was out of the question. So I enrolled in computer classes and learned FORTRAN programming, which held me in good stead through about 1983. Along the way, I used a desk-sized Wang programmable calculator (vintage about 1971 or so) and the HP-65 pocket calculator, the kind that NASA took along to Apollo-Soyez. Bruce NJ
On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 4:06 PM Bill Degnan via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
I vaguely remember when I was in elementary school in the 1970s in delaware some U of Delaware students or a teacher gave me access to a computer via a terminal. It was a simple login prompt to connect to the library and look things up and play some kind of exercises that had conditional decisions to build a story. It wasn't Plato or anything like that.
That was my first memory of computers, but I must have been very young as I don't remember much else. The thing that impressed me was how you could decide what to do next and it changed a story's outcome. I think we had a picture book that went with it (?)
I always wonder what that was all about. It was a one-day thing and that was it. Many years later I heard about something called project Delta at the U of Del but I have no idea if that was the same thing or if it was just some U of Del student looking for nearby kids to experiment with.
I remember going to the librarian in elementary school and asking to use the computer in the back office , maybe 5th grade, but there were no computers for kids to use.
I started going to RadioShack and using their computers probably in 4th grade and the Hallmark had a Timex Sinclair on display there, but I did have a family computer until the later 80s. I somehow knew BASIC, which makes me wonder if I was taught BASIC too. I remember making the computer say "Bill is Cool" over and over and I thought that was really funny at the time.
Bill
On 5/21/21 10:43 PM, Lois Krayeski via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Sure good to hear from you “old-timers.” My first recollection was in 1952, fresh out of high school, working with Potter Instrument. I started by QC testing components, ie., resisters, capacitors, tubes and condensers. To make my job easier, I designed a simple testing jig. John Potter was impressed enough to make me a engineering technician/field service engineer. I constructed “decades”, soldering components on to printed circuit boards [NOT integrated circuit boards]. I graduated to a project funded by Harvard University, which was an attempt to read (using photoelectric cells) typed Master’s Theses and print (copy) the document using an early ink jet printer. To my knowledge the project failed, due to limitations of the photoelectric cells. I assisted in the installation of several Potter testing units in commercial and military units. We input data using Teletype terminals (punched paper tape) using “Potter” codes. My career with Potter ended when I was drafted into the US Army during the Korean War. In later years I worked for Reeves Instrument Corp., Litton Systems Inc, Howard Research Corp, Control Data Corp and the US federal government. In my later years I was one of the pioneers in the office automation and digital optical storage fields. I retired in the year 2000. Felix Krayeski
Wow, hats off, that's quite the illustrious career in computing and instrumentation! Very cool indeed. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA
participants (7)
-
Bill Degnan -
Bruce -
Dave McGuire -
Gregg Levine -
Lois Krayeski -
Mike Loewen -
William Dudley