A Couple Humorous Notes On Computers

fmdog44

fmdog44

Well-known Member
Location
Houston, Texas
The Mark I was invented in 1937 and built by IBM. It took five years to build (five years?!) and was assembled at Harvard University in 1944 and used by the military (of course!). It consisted of 750,000 parts. It weighted five tons, fifty-one feet long and was eight feet high.
In 1967 Texas Instruments built the first hand-held electronic calculator.
The first pocket size calculator the Buscicom LE-120A retailed for $395 in 1971.
The TI-2500 DataMath calculator sold for $149 in April 1972.
In 1981 TI introduced the first solar powered calculator, the TI-2500 and sold for $149.
The term "computer bug" was coined by programmer Grace Hopper in 1947 when she fund a moth stuck inside Harvard's Mark II computer.
Personally, I hate to admit it but I actually believed computers were a mere passing fancy. True story.
 

I’ve been along for the whole ride. Someone close to me was pioneering on mainframe industrial software in the 1970s for production scheduling when processing was done on acres of mainframes & giant tape drives which produced giant stacks of paper printout. In the late 80s I had to enter my MS thesis data on hundreds of punch cards to feed in & if you entered one number on one card, had to do the whole thing over. (Of the do not fold, spindle or mutulate days). Bought my first desktop PC in 1992. Just replaced my iPad on Sep 1.
 

I was somewhat surprised to hear in the movie "Hidden Figures" that when complex math calculations were required they use people (in this case women) as "computers". I guess that was the best description of what they actually did = compute math problems.

In the '90's I said to my wife, maybe we should get a computer that could connect to the internet. She said, "what do you do with the internet"? Now she is on it multiple times a day.

In 1995 Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbal has a similar discussion on on air.

 
The first commercial computer I saw was an IBM model,
it was about 100' X 100' I went to speak to my brother
who was a programmer and he was working on it.

I asked him "where is this computer"? he replied "you are
standing inside it"!

Now we carry much more powerful ones in our pocket as
telephones.

Mike.
 
I was one of the first 'kids' on my block to get a computer. I had Windows 95. It even had a slot for floppy discs. Wow!!! And before people start typing their fingers off, YES, there was a Windows 95. Next year, I got a free upgrade to Window 96. Then came, Windows 98 (?). Followed by Windows ME. Then came ????????
 
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I was one of the pioneer computer programmers, back in the 70's and 80's, (That was my second career, after being a teacher.) We worked on the big mainframes that took up a whole room. I remember how great it was when they started using minicomputers, which were about the size of a washing machine.

There was no internet, of course, the closest we came was an LAN (Local Area Network). And I was so excited when the first desktop came out and I was able to plug in my home phone and call the main computer from home, so I didn't have to go in to work every day!

What a long way we've come.
 
I remember using one of those big IBM 360,s (I Think) during my graduate work. Dragging all those punched cards around was a mess (don't drop them), and that IBM was very fussy. One comma out of place on one of your cards and you were in for a long night. Finding the error, correcting it and then getting back in line behind 20 other people to feed your cards back into the computer again. Then waiting until you were rejected again.
 
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I learned to program on a DEC-10 mainframe in the late '60s and it was every bit as fussy as Pecos describes the IBM 360 being, but I loved programming. I didn't get to move to a mini (VAX) until the mid '80s. My wife and I bought our first micro, an Apple IIe, for the kids in 1984 and that machine is still floating around here somewhere.

I vividly recall my introduction to the "graphical user interface" (Windows) in the mid '90s. Absolutely hated it! I was (and still largely am) a keyboard guy and felt that if the good Lord had meant for us to use a "mouse", he would have created us with three arms.
 

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