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The most common keypunch machines were the IBM 029 and later the 129. The 129 had some storage capability and could store several puch programs.. If yiu worked with cards and card handling equipment you acquired and hung on to one of these..... the mighty IBM car removal tool..
Ah, I spent too many hours at one of those while in school....
The worst punch card incident I know of was during the spring registration of my Junior year. The entire registration program (for the IBM 360), data, etc. was on punch cards in those long boxes they came in. They were transporting the entire set of cards (never understood why they were moving them) from the computer center to the Admin building in a shopping cart. While the poor assistant was wheeling the precious cargo past the reflecting pond in front of the Admin building, a wheel caught in a crack or something, and the entire load tumbled down the bank into the reflecting pond, scattering punch cards everywhere. Seeing the cards scattered about, in and out of the water, was somehow like seeing the aftermath of some terrible accident or massacre. Registration took a little longer that semester......
This, to me, is one of the greatest examples of the ingenuity, determination, and courage of the human species!
Yeah, I think nowadays the younger generation (much like the older generation) tends to disregard those "old folks", thinking that all this new technology is actually new. What few realize is that the "new technology" was actually developed back in the 60's, and what we have now are just improvements on those basic designs. Heck, look at today's motherboards compared to a motherboard from back in the early 90's. Almost identical. And those were being developed and designed decades prior to that. And programming languages like C/C++ are hugely similar to Fortran, using very similar concepts. But like us older folks, we loved to think our parents' generation was just old fuddy-duddy's
I did some coding in Fortran, but not a ton.. Mots of my work was in MVS assembler or in the early days RPG.. I was, though a JCL master....
I remember when PDP-8's were new! I even remember other computers that were octal based instead of hexadecimal based. Where basic instruction sizes were 12 or 24 bits instead of 8 or 16 or 32.
And at my college the Computer Science guys had an actual early flight computer from the space center to tinker with that was way more primitive than anything discussed so far here.
PS: I wasn't a computer science major I was Electrical Engineering, so I only got one formal course in FORTRAN. The CS guys went on to learn COBOL!!! and ALGOL and PL1 and FORTH and LISP. I think I got the better end of the stick. A few years later, despite not learning LISP, I discovered list processing techniques and used them in assembler to great success in many very sophisticated control and multi-tasking operations. It was aided by the fact that the Motorola 680x0 family of CPUs were CISC machines (Complex Instruction Set Computer) instead of RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computers) and the complex instruction set had several special instructions for linking and unlinking lists by manipulating multiple words of memory as an atomic (indivisible) operation so that interrupts couldn't interfere with the multiple address changes required to insert/remove/extend/delete elements of linked lists. It made some processes so much more understandable and reliable. I tended to think of these programs as DNA expression machines, scooting along a strand of DNA and outputting complex proteins based on the structure of the lists.
But I also remember talking to some of the "old-timers" of the day who used to work on way earlier machines that were programmed using a "Patchboard".
Because grand theft auto started to look like a pretty good career alternative after a couple of years in the computer science program.
I love that ad. "IMSAI ... Thinking ahead for the 80's"
Too bad they went under back in 1979.
I was never in the IBM mainframe world. Never knew much JCL. The IBM 1130 had a tiny fraction of it though, but I'm not even sure it was called JCL. I do remember glancing at RPG language and somehow I remember an odd shaped punched card associated with it. Almost square yet held something like 96 columns?
Patchboard - ah yes, I remember those - used in the old Unit record/Tabulating Equpment - we were just starting to get rid of these when I started.. got a pic somewheres....
Cobol and Pascal anyone
Learned COBOL, never used it,,,
I remember being stoked to get a 28.8 modem. And then a 56k before my ISP could accommodate it.
And the joy of finding the mute function on the modem so you could get online at 3am and not wake up the house. I worked nights, and showed that setting to my dad on his computer so I could sleep during the day without his modem waking me up with all its screeching.
I didn't get much further than BASIC, aside from the aforementioned magazine stuff (IIRC they billed it as MLX - Machine Language), so when my Jr High launched a computer course, I signed up for it. Despite my knowledge of BASIC, DOS, and my self-taught debugging of hexadecimal magazine code, they said my math scores were too low to qualify for the class. I spoke to some of the kids who did get in, and they were discussing issues with a program they had been working on. I offered suggestions for correcting their data statements that solved the issue. They asked me how I could know so much about computers and get a D in Algebra II. I asked them WTF Algebra II had to do with BASIC and hexadecimal data statements. You get 00-9F and a handful of If/Then/For/Next/Goto statements,it wasn't exactly rocket science.
My problems with Algebra II were more to do with asking for explanations and justifications of the Pythagorean Theorem. I could do the work, but I questioned the credibility of 2000 year old "learned masters" by asking "show me the progression that leads to this expression you're asking me to solve and I'll solve it, otherwise it's a fictional construct that has no business being taught as mathematical fact". They really loved it when I told them you cannot rearrange an expression to make it easier to solve unless you can prove to me that expression is derived through a natural mathematical progression, which of course they couldn't because it wasn't possible.
And then they hit me with (6x+9y)=(9x-6y) and I responded with "correct". "If you tell me 1=1, you are correct. If you tell me 6x+9y = 9x-6y, the answer is "correct". If you want me to solve the equation, you have to phrase it as an equation, not a statement. The equals sign in the middle makes it a statement. Whether it's true or not is not the question. It's a statement, and given the right circumstances, 6x+9y can be equal to 9x-6y, hence, the answer is "yes" at all times."
They hated me for that because they couldn't argue the logic loop.
I made an algebra teacher lose it one day when he gave me a string of letters and asked me to solve the problem and I told him give me some numerical values for those letters and I'd solve it
My first computer:
Actually, IIRC, the PDP-8s used 12 bit instructions/registers. Yep, Octal. I know from using the bloody front-panel toggle switches to input the RIM loader so I could actually boot off of DECTape. The PDP-10 used 18 bits, and the PDP-11 used 21 or 22 (the 11/70 used 22, which was an extra bit.)
Turn knob to Address. Set all toggle switches to OFF. Click 'deposit'. Turn knob to Data+advance. Set toggle switches to value of first instruction. Click 'deposit'......RIM Loader was about 111 instructions. Took about an hour to start the machine up that way.
The PDP-11/70 (like what I used at the university) had a BACKPLANE. Microcode? It's WIRES. If you needed to patch a microcode bug, you REWIRED the CPU. Here's what it looked like:
Ah, the nostalgia.....
(edited to correct misremembered bit lengths between the DEC generations....)
Cool! I still have wire wrap tools and small reels of the TFE-insulated silver-plated wire we used for backplanes. Handy for home prototyping too!
A few years ago I felt pretty old...we needed to upgrade the ancient control system for one of our lab reactor units, and we finally had the money. I had been nursing and rebuilding the old SYSMAC S-6 controllers for many years. My boss did not want me doing the upgrade design, control code translation and programming, he wanted me doing process chemistry stuff. So, I said fine with me. When we contacted the manufacturer for help with the upgrades they were floored "YOU STILL HAVE WORKING S-6's??!!!". So it turned out we had the last working units in the world that they knew of, and they said that the only person still alive that they were aware of that knew S-6 control code was this guy named Mike Myers....which was me....so....didn't take that long, really.
It could be done with the Hayes command set, (although not all modems supported the full set of commands)
ATM0
ATM1
ATM2
ATM3
Ah, the wonders of wirewraped circuit boards. Our Raythons (mid to late 70s era) had wirewrapped boards. NASA had a service contract with them so when updates or fixes to the board were available they would either send us a new board or send us the instructions on how to change the wirewrapping manually. I remember several times when a new board would arrive and upon inspection we'd find a "dead bug" on the board. The factory would glue an integrated circuit chip onto the wirewrap side of the board upside down and wirewrap to its legs!
Hey, it worked. 
And while speaking of replacing computer boards, these were big things, almost a foot and a half square(ish) and often had many EPROM chips (Eraseable Programmable Read Only Memory) that had the firmware to run the on-board fundamental functions. It was the policy of NASA to photograph and itemize everything that arrived at the receiving station at the space center before it was forwarded onto the addressed department. We received a new circuit board once for something and it just didn't work.
We did some diagnostics and finally determined that the EPROMS were blank. It turns out that the EPROMS were the type that had little windows over the integrated chip part to permit you to shine UV light on them to erase their data. It seems that the photographer's flash had enough UV to erase all the EPROMS in our board. 
A new set of EPROMS was ordered from the manufacturer and the photographer's standard practices were modified when he saw chips with little windows on them. 
It wasn't long after that that EEPROMS (Electrically Eraseable Read Only Memory) were developed.
heh... we had a similar photgraphic momnet back in the day.. The company wanted a photo record of the datacentre.. When it came time to shoot the tape area, all of us on the floor warned the photographer not to use flash.. but he did.. Tapes used a reflective metal tape marker about 20 feet before the end to signal via a reflective spot and sensor, then end of tape, which would stop the drive in a controlled manner.. So the photogtapher ignored us, knowing better, and triggered the flash... Every drive immediately went into stop/rewind mode, killing a bucnh of production batch jobs...
mais que c'est drole......
Ah, the old Hayes 300 baud smartmodem. Did you know you could run it at 450 baud?
And wire-wrapped backplanes. Our DPS-8 started crashing with no apparent repeatable reason and it took an extremely talented regional FE 17 hours to track the problem. The wire-wrap was what at the time was called 'modified' - the first 3/4 turn was insulated,followed by 5 to 7 turns of bare wire - and we had a hair-line fracture in one wire just inside the insulation. Every time someone heavy enough walked to close to the cpu the fracture opened, and down she went.
My first real programming assignment as a genuine programmer - was to write (in PL/I) a working 402 tab machine emulator with full functionality. Define input columns on cards, output print fields as text (left-justified) or numeric (0, 1, or 2 decimal positions), headings (page and column) and major/minor control break fields. For an encore, I had to write an emulator for the 519 reproducing punch that could match/merge up to four cards to a single output. When I left the company 5 years later (1974) they were still using those two programs to generate about 25% of the monthly reporting.
The rest of the time there was spent converting 1440 autocoder to PL/I.
FWIW, the only formal language training I ever had was a 1-semester course in Fortran IV at Purdue. Then I took a part-time job at the data center as a computer operator (class 2 clerical, business machine operator) that paid about $2.20 an hour - and carried an account code that was good on both the IBM 7094-II and the Control Data 6500 for 5 minuts cpu at a shot and up to 50 pages of output and all run categories. I picked up assembler (IBM and CDC), failed at figuring out lisp and snobol (list processing) but got moderately good at MAD (Michigan Algorithmic Decoder, and Algol-64 equivalent) - none of which really prepared me for real-world work after I flunked out of the engineering program.
On hair line fractures... we had a server attached SCSI array (old SCSI, with drive terminatin resistors) that would periodically disappear from the server. Intermittent as all get out. Always checked out clean, cables were replaced, etc.. Turns out one leg of one of the three resistor terminators was cracked. and vibration would open that crack every once in a while, killing the termination.. Much fun troubleshooting that one...
a 402 emulator? impressive.. I can remember we had a reaql 402 up and running into the early 70's..
I'm absolutely impressed by all the IT experience assembled (sic!) here. If y'all ever have some spare time and some old CD drives, You might want to have a try to build a copy of the Floppotron.
No need to judge the new generation - they are as crazy as all the generations that came before them
...
Looks like something OK-GO would put together.
Well reading through the posts I am reminded of how much of a packrat I am, as I mentioned earlier. I'm pretty sure I threw out all the old IBM punchcards I had for various programs I had written, although I would need to go rummaging to be certain. I do, however, still have a copy of Ten Statement Fortran from school. We were also envious of the APL guys who could type their stuff directly into a terminal.
Somebody mentioned Zip drives? Got two in my collection, along with about 10 disks (I wonder what's on there?). But hey, I also have the big gun - a Jazz drive. You needed a SCSI interface for that, of course, but the disks were a whopping 1 GB (later 2) ! Unfortunately, the disks had an annoying habit of dying click, click, click. I'm also not certain of what treasues I might have on the two disks that I still have left of them, either.
Modems? Well I was never terribly excited by them, and so I only really have two left in my collection. One of the best was the USRobotics Courier line, but they were huge slabs in their external form. I happen to have a Courier X2 V.90 in one of its rarest forms - an internal modem. I got the latter when I believe that I accidentally fried my Sportster 56k with ESD. I was really bummed about that. I hated those Winmodems with a passion and would only buy hardware modems. The other one I still have was something that I didn't think even existed until I stumbled across one - a hardware modem that ran on the PCI bus. It was made by Conexant\Rockwell although it was IBM branded.
I also have a working copy of a 5.25" floppy drive in case anyone has any discs they need read.
I am in awe of the Floppotron! Even I am not that much of a hoarder.
I still have at least 10 5.25" drives on older computers. I think I still have at least one 8" floppy drive, and a double-height 5.25" 10 mb (yes mb) drive. Also one ADM-33a dumb terminal - used to have more, but the family did an intervention. Think I still have the little 4040 cpu evaluation set-up (4-bit predecessor to the 8080), and the one for the 8080. My old Atari 150 baud modem is still around too. It was so slow that you had to type slow to avoid overflowing the character buffer. Still have a computer in the shop I built with the old, and rare, AMD K6-III cpu.
I remember those old internal PCI modems, from back when I used AOL. Still have a few of those too, but not exactly useful these days : )
Oh dear gawd ... hello memory lane ....! I was a bit later to the game than many, so missed using the Leo mainframe (among the first HMG general use computers IIRC) and so started on the iCL-1900s we had then, running what I still think of as a proper OS, George 3. One of the 1900s, a 1904 had a Front-End Processor (FEP) - can't remember the model/name) which had been programmed (in BASIC I think) to make using the 1904 easier, adding 'query commands', ?V, ?C, etc., to peform handy functions. The 1900s were 6 bit byte machine and had less memory than most modern watches.
They were accssed via teletypes and, in one room, a few Elbit VDUs. One 'fun' thing was to use ?ASEND ... and I cannot recall the rest now, sadly, but you identified the MOP (the terminal) to send to and you could get it to ring it's bell and send form-feeds, that blanked the screen of the Elbits but did, of course, send the fan-fold paper of the DECwriters (the teletypes we had) feeding like a mad thing! Daft and fun in very small doses! There eas one sequence you could send that locked an Elbit and you had to know the key combination to unlock it (quite simple, luckily!)
Then we got an IBM-3081, and Ericsson terminals, some of which had extra 'wired' characters overlaid on the keyboard in a different colour - and those were teh APL keyboards. Never, ever got to grips nor used APL! All I can recall is one collague, a chap named Will, wrote a one line program that looked like a Greek dictionary had vomited whilst on a roller-coaster that took keyboard input (a Pay ID number), used that to look up, and then display some basic data from the VSAM personenel file we had. No idea how he did that; it'd take a bit more than one line in COBOL - which I do know!
First connectivity was an acosutic coupler (300 baud, IIRC), followed by IRMA cards in IBM PC XTs to have then act as dumb terminal for the IBM mainframe.
On the home front it all started when a colleague (prior to my computing days) got a Sinclair ZX-80, then an -81 (with 16Kb back pack thingy). Tony later evolved into using BBC computers, complete with networking them. A very smart cookie is Tony! I got a BBC Model B, which I think helped get me my programming job as at the interview we spent 3/4 of the time talkig abuut them as one of the panel had just got one ...!
First 'home' internet was a friend who used Trumpet Winsock to laod an IP stack to enable him to use a modem for dial-up. A bit later on he'd just upgraded - maybe to a 56K Hayes modem and was having issues setting it up. I can still remember sitting with him and gently cursing along with him, and then we stumbled over the test program and tried that. And can recall so clearly the sounds of the modem doing it's dialling test and the voice saying, "emergency services, how can ..." before my mate pulled the plug! Of course, being a US based company the test program involved sending a series of 9s down the line ... and in the UK 999 is not the number you really want to play with! Mind you, a while later he also dropped his brand-new Intel DX4 chip, pin first onto his work top, bending soem of the corner pins. Some very careful work after some very uncareful language actually worked and the chip functioned when put in the ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) socket!
Back to the IRMA cards at work. There was a PROM upgrade and despite me and a colleague, Steve, being happy pulling the XTs apart we had an engineer down orm the maintenance company to do it, as the PROMs were, IIRC, £900 apiece. A little while later we were asked to do an audit of stuff so we - Steve and I - started pullign the XTs apart, noting serial numbers of things such as the AST SixPaks installed, etc. With one of the cmnputers we'd just pulle the IRAM card, noted numbers and had started to re-insert when one of use said, "whoa .. go back, lift that out again ..." We did so and both looked and there, atop the new PROM was a label, whcih was fine. The dark brown/black burn mark not so much! We found out that the engineer had insrrted the PROM 180 degrees out of whack! I can still remember another colleague, Jeremy, peeking out from atop a filing cabinet, a la Kilroy saying, "who's gonna tell the boss?"
On the IBM we used JES/3 - despite JES/2 seeming to be more 'popular' from what I understand. Great language, just 3 or 4 verbs but thousands of optional keywords! Of course now the IBM can run Linux and MVS/XA became MVS/ESA and then z/OS, with 32-bit addressing slowly becoming the norm over 24-bit (expressions such as above and below the line being commonplace). If you were feeling excessive you could arrange for your JCL to request a whopping 8MB address space for your program! Mind you, it's been a while since I have used a mainframe so that may well have changed by now - but I kind of hope not!