If computers have brought great changes in our lives, computing itself has changed. Fifty years ago, computers were owned only by the government, the military, universities, and large businesses. Computers were very large and required dedicated rooms that in turn had dedicated air-conditioning, because the heat that the computers generated was bad for the computers themselves and had to be removed. A modern computer—a laptop or desktop computer--that almost everyone in America can have, is many, many times more powerful than one of those old computers that filled a room.
I dealt with computers back before the day when it occurred to someone to hook up a TV screen to the computer. The computer's output (and sometimes input, as well) was to a TeleTypewriter, a big machine that—well, never mind, suffice it to say that this was a device that had been around for the purpose of receiving and printing out telegrams.
You'd write your program out, with a pen or pencil, on "IBM coding sheets." Then you'd have to sit down at a machine called a keypunch. You'd type in your program at this machine's keyboard. Every line of your program would result in the production of a punched card (called Hollerith cards or IBM cards).
A program of any complexity could be hundreds of punched cards. People writing and running programs would carry their stack of cards in a shoebox. (Don't even imagine what would happen if you dropped the box or spilled the cards!)
Then the stack of cards was fed into a "card reader." That finally got the program into the computer, and then the computer needed to be commanded to run it. For students such as I was, you had to wait your turn for your program to be run, and you'd get the printout of the program's output in a day or two!
Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein
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Brings back memories. I never used punch-cards, but my first "pocket" calculator cost $85 in 1974. My work required industrial-strength wordsmithing, as yours probably did, and I embraced word processing in the late 70s for the same reason a carpenter uses a power saw. In the early 80s I experimented with live chat at 300 bps, which is what CB radio might have been like on quaaludes.
ReplyDeleteI remember when I saw the first electronic calculators in a store, and they were $200. A couple years after that, as a grad student, I was using mechanical calculators in the Statistics Lab. Huge, slow, noisy machines.
ReplyDeleteI got my first computer in 1990, and it was an 8088 machine (probably already obsolete) and it ran DOS and had a monochrome monitor.
I also chatted online with that computer and BBSs. I had a 1200 bps external modem that looked like an AC adapter and plugged into the wall like one.