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24 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:

Pfft amateurs.

My birth year is closer to the start of World War 2 than the current year. By a significant margin, I might add. That means my birth is more "history" than World War 2 was when I was a kid.

This. My father was a WWII vet. All of his friends were WWII vets. I grew up hearing stories of them all fighting the pedants. Because when I was in grade school the war had only ended three decades previous.

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11 minutes ago, p1t1o said:

I'm "AOL has sent us another 280 hours of free internet on a floppy disc" years old

If we're counting age in floppies, I'm "Why buy a 2-sided floppy when you can cut a notch on the other side of a 1-sided floppy and use both sides?" years old.

If just storage systems, I'm "Listen to this cassette it's the program I'm writing." years old.

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4 hours ago, p1t1o said:

@5thHorseman

There are TWO sided floppies? What hyper-space-1999-from-the-future technology is this?

Im also "return of the jedi" years old

All it took was using a hole punch in the right location to make a single sided 5.25 or 7.5 floppy disc into a double sided disc. :) Did a lot of that.

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pdp8i_fp_mask.gif

 

The first computer I programmed was one of these.

The initial part of the bootstrapping process was to input a series of binary coded octal instructions on the rocker switches seen above.  The computer could then load the operating system from paper punch tape via an optical reader.

Those were the days.


Happy landings!

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59 minutes ago, Geonovast said:

Roughly the same amount time has passed (~25 years) between the launch of Apollo 13 and the movie, as has passed has between the movie's release and present day.

Finally, someone terrifies me. ;)

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When I had my first "computer science" class at school, we saved out programs on small reels of punched paper tape. Kept the things in little round tins.

The "computer" we had was a terminal, roughly the size of a washing machine (most of it was just a support for the terminal bit on top) connected by a Wargames style, phone handset modem to the local college, at which there was the actual computer.

After a year of using that we took a bold move into the future with an Apple II.

Edited by purpleivan
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There's only one alternative to getting older. I don't recommend it.

My first home computer was an Atari 400. In high school we used Commodore PETs, and a teletype terminal that consumed vast quantities of paper. My first car used gasoline with lead (yes, the poison) added so it would run smoother.

640px-Atari-400-Comp.jpg

768px-Commodore_2001_Series-IMG_0448b.jp

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On 3/26/2020 at 12:00 AM, TheSaint said:

This. My father was a WWII vet. All of his friends were WWII vets. I grew up hearing stories of them all fighting the pedants. Because when I was in grade school the war had only ended three decades previous.

While my closest WWII vet relative is my late great- grandpa. Holy cow.

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