Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2026 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
It was a sad day in Jr High when the Xerox replaced the mimeograph. No more cheap ink-huffing highs. Test scores across the campus fell dramatically after that day.
LeatherGryphon, ARPANET Host #1 (UCLA-NMC) was an SDS Sigma-7. The woman who happened to be in the computer room the day one of the RADs had a head crash said that it sounded like someone stumbling through a lot of (metal) garbage cans.
It ran a one-of-a-kind operating system, called the Sigma EXecutive, or SEX. And so there were SEX manuals, advice on SEX techniques ('programming, that is'), etc.
A $6K computer these days is easy to build. Latest Intel i7 that supports 40 PCI lanes, mobo that supports the chip and its functions, most RAM it can hold, biggest SSD drives they make, and 2 TitanXp and you're pretty much there. No printer, no optical drive, and you better have a monitor/TV already. If you did have anything left, dump it into another GPU.
Or just buy the latest MacPro? Useful software will cost extra, though. ProTools, video editing, the things you do when you want your computer to do more than your phone does.
Remember the lines to use the keypunch
In 1968 my college had an IBM-1130 computer with an IBM 1402 (I think) printer that was a chain printer with a couple copies of the character set on the chain. As a character came into position along the horizontally rotating chain line a hammer would fire and imprint the charcter onto the paper. At any one instant any character of the chain that was in position would fire its hammer but statistically not more than 10 at a time. One of the first tricks the clever boys in the computer room came up with was writing a program to fire all 132 hammers to hit all 132 characters across the chain simultaneously and sequentially. WHAM, WHAM, WHAM, WHAM,..., Can you say rapid fire machine gun? Much fun until we were ordered not to, on pain of expulsion from the computer room and threat of paying for replacing a broken chain or chain transport mechanism or fried hammer electronics.
What is wrong with the teenage brain?
My first computer was a PC1500 by sharp......basically a basic programmable pocket calculator. Handy little machine. Made a lot of freinds with it, since it could spit out statistical plots, cool when I got my masters in biology. Then came the C64, the C128 and a PC AT......the rest is history. And last sunday I bought a mechanical keyboard (Razer Chroma V2 green) and that sounds just like the old IBM keyboard and feels more or less the same, great for gaming and for typing, and I hope it's keys are a match for the onslaught of Blender on the Shift, Alt and CRTL keys.......my last Rapoo keyboard lost it's shift function, so I decided to go all outg on it's replacement in the faint hope that the stack of partially dead keyboards does not grow beyond it's current status anytime soon.
Greets, ArtisanS.
I remember when "Iomega" introduced the 100 mb zip disk/drive
and many people, in the print shop where I worked, proclaiming
they will "never need to buy another storage disc"
I remember when rubber garbage cans first came out. Our local pickup guys liked to crumple the metal cans against the back of the truck if you didn't put your trash in a bag. Apparently no one told this particular crew about rubber cans, so when he slammed it against the truck, it retaliated. All 3 guys came over to look at it and try their luck at crumpling it. All 3 went away disappointed and with a fresh smack in the face from our brand new rubber trash can.
Then it became a game of who can punt them into the yard the farthest once they were dumped.
Imagine being the guy who bought the version that had the parallel port connector instead of serial port. Yup, this guy has a perfectly good Zip100 drive that can't connect to anything.
Remember teletype
Great device. You could type anything you wanted as long as it was all upper case characters.
That and a few special characters and control codes which was all 5-bits would permit.
..I remember loading Windows 3.1 "Insert install disk #9...."
...felt like that when I bought my old 32 bit notebook with 4 GB of memory and an 8 GB HDD 12 years ago (the previous computer I purchased was a Pentium 133 with 16 MB of memory, a whopping 225 MB HDD, and a 2MB graphics card).
...then I got into 3D graphics.
I'm not sure - I wrote one for the 1403 (600 lines per minute, same design) that 'followed' the same character along the print line. Sounded like a giant zipper.
The first hard drive I bought was a Western Digital 40 megabyte drive on a card cost me close to $400.00 and everybody was like are you insane you'll never need that big a drive
The Burroughs medium system series (B-2500 through B-4900) used a teletype as the console - and the operators hated it when my programs generated a console error message. Nulls in the print string caused the head to 'quiver' in place, bell characters caused the bell to ring, and case shift pulsed the type drum up or down. And my error messages started "bell; bell; null; null; bell; upper case; lower case; null; bell" and then the text message.
My first computer was a Tandy 1000 (because it had much better graphics than a PC with a CGA, a better keyboard than the PC Jr., and at +/- $2500 with monitor, was far cheaper than either). 8088 CPU running at a screaming 4.77 mHz, and 128K ram. At the time, TRS was selling 10-meg hard drives for $1,000 and 300 bps modems for around $300. Really miss those days...
No pics from my career - 34 years at the same outfit, 30 of them as systems programmer both unofficially and officially. In that time we went from Burroughs B-2500 through a Honeywell DPS-8 to an IBM 4381 and finally to a series of IBM RS-6000 systems. And from MCP-V (pronounced em-cee-pee-vee, Master Control Program Five) to GCOS-3 (formerly GECOS-3, General Electric Comprehensive Operating System) to MVS, MVS-XA, and finally MVS-ESA and AIX. And an assortment, over the years, of key-to-tape, key-to-disk, and minicomputers and the networks required to support them. And pretty much all my responsibility.
I miss the wild-west nature of the early micro days - outfits like Smoke Signal Broadcasting and itty-bitty-machines (who were allowed to keep the name but prohibited from using the ibm abbreviation) and the early magazines. Especially the rag (literally - recycled newsprint) "Doctor Dobb's Journal of Computer Calesthenics and Orthodontia" subtitled 'Running Light Without Overbyte' from the People's Computer Company.
that brought back memories. My younger son was working on the Iomega Tech Support team over here, and he relocated to Dublin with them. He di buy me an iomega disc drive (External) for Christmas that year/
Thats nothing compared to an IBM 1403 printer running at full chat. They used a print chain and hammer system. So noisy that they had a rather heavy cover that acted as a sound deadener. Core memory, yeah,still remember trying to explain to a newby systems guy why every read through old school core was a desructive read... and on old DASD - the IBM 3330 had removeable disk assemblies.. you kept them in what looked like a cake platter - just make sure its locked before you pick it up - not a fun day at the shop when the bottom drops out and the disk pack hits the floor..
and on paper tape? I still have some..
,..yeah I remember that stuff as well.
Oops, correction. Yeah, our college printer was an IBM 1403, not a 1402. The card read/punch machine was the 1402. The big game with the 1402 punch was to make "lace" cards. Punch out every hole. Chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp. We were warned about that too.
Aghh card racks Carefully rack cards go to move them and somebody knocks it outta your hands cards all over the floor
...to this day, the loudest and most intense shriek I ever heard (followed by a chain of expletives that would have made a longshoreman wince) was when somebody on their way to the card reader room dropped their entire box of cards, which contained the latest revision of his programme,on a smooth highly polished floor (causing them to effectively "scatter to the four winds").
When I first started at the Kennedy Space Center (1974) I was given control of a Raytheon 706 minicomputer and tasked with creating graphic output on a Gould electrostatic printer. At my disposal was 8K 16-bit word core memory, no disk drive
, a desktop card reader, a fanfold printer, an ASR-33 teletype with a 10 characters per second (cps) paper tape read/punch, a card keypunch, an assembler stored on papertape, a FORTRAN compiler stored on papertape and thankfully a high-speed optical papertape reader. The program I had to implement was to be written in FORTRAN and it was to draw contour maps of electrical field intensity over the space center.
The process of doing a FORTRAN compile was:
1) read the FORTRAN compiler phase 1 into memory via the high speed papertape reader.
2) read your keypunched FORTRAN program cards into the computer. The compiler would then spit out an intermediate binary paper tape at 10 cps of the first phase results of FORTRAN compilation.
3) read the 2nd phase of FORTRAN compiler into memory via the high speed papertape reader.
4) read the 1st intermediate papertape in via the highspeed PT reader.
5) The 2nd phase of the FORTRAN compiler would then spit out a 2nd intermediate papertape at 10cps.
6) read the final phase of the FORTRAN compiler into memory via the highspeed PT reader.
7) read the 2nd intermediate PT output into the compiler via the highspeed PT reader.
8) At this point (assuming that you didn't get compilation mistakes in any of the previous phases) the FORTRAN compiler finally spits out an assembler language version of your program onto papertape at 10cps.
9) Now, you can load the Raython assembler into memory via the highspeed PT reader.
10) Feed the PT assembler language output from the FORTRAN compiler into memory via the highspeed PT reader.
11) Finally, the assembler spits out a binary version of your program onto papertape at 10cps.
12) At this point you can load your binary executable into memory along with separate papertapes of each of the libraries and subroutines that it needs. I had a library of hundreds of tiny papertapes.
13) Then you test your program and get bogus results and you go back to the drawing board.
Oh, did I mention that the various PT outputs of the compiler and assembler were often quite long and were punched without a takeup reel so they had to be rolled up by hand. Also the highspeed PT reader had no takeup reel so the tape just whizzed through the reader and flew half-way across the room onto the floor to be rewound by hand.
Shortly after I pointed out this problem, one of the NASA managers dropped a battery powered handheld PT winder on my desk one morning. It was like Christmas. 
Eventually my lab of computer equipment grew into a workable "modern" set with magnetic tape drives and disk drives and I was finally able to forget about papertape. Yea!
Oh, and it wasn't for several years that we finally got a second computer that had floating point capability from Raytheon. Until then I had to do all my math in augmented fixed-point arithmetic until I wrote my own floating point subroutine library. It was a cool time to be a programmer.
...and with those "bearskins and stone knives" we made it to the moon and back.
The Apollo Mission Guidance Source Code and it's creator.
I remember those zip disk/drives. I thought they were cool and had multiple of them. No longer have them as they got lost somehow.
I remember when people were afraid of 1TB HDD. Why would anyone would need a TB drive. I have filled 1.97 TB on my external HDD and I know some of it are duplicates but accounting for that It is still like almsot a TB worth of stuff.
Wow My current DIM content is about 1 TB I think.
I checked my DIM and just DIM alone I have 4 files over 1 GB. I searched for Hexagon stuff found about 9 hexagon related files that would not fit on a 100 MB zip drive. 13 files adding up to 6.5 GB not MB. t
Worse than that.. working in the URE section on the card sorters.. and hearing the sickening sound of the sorter ripping your card decks to shred and scattering the remains on the floor...
Geez, Fortran punch cards and paper tape? My great grandfather told me about those
Next you'll be talking about PDP-11's and IBM 360's.
BTW, what was the name of those big keypunch machines with the card feeder that had a stack of Fortran cards and mechanically slid one into the spot over the big keypad and you punch each card with a single line of Fortran code? And then you take a box of cards to the computer room and they put it in the queue and run it for you, and after class you stop by and pick up the big printout that said you made a mistake in card 374?
Ah, this is the one I was thinking of...an IBM thing...