Time progression and historical data storage

[Codraroll]

On 12/7/2019 at 12:51 AM, Ultimate Steve said:

You know if the delays continue at this rate I may graduate high school before I see SpaceX, Boeing, or Blue Origin launch anyone into space. It's great that we have a NET date finally, but wow, 2020...

"January 4, 2020" sounds so far off. But it's in less than four weeks. 

Strange to think that by the end of this month, we'll be closer to the 2050s than the 1980s...

[Wjolcz]

9 hours ago, Codraroll said:

Strange to think that by the end of this month, we'll be closer to the 2050s than the 1980s...

Being closer to the 2050 is waaaaay cooler than being closer to the 1980, if you ask me. I want to see the future!

How much faster will they be able to build the Mk3, do you think? I'm guessing a little bit faster than Mk1. Powered flight around the end of spring 2020?

[linuxgurugamer]

11 hours ago, Codraroll said:

"January 4, 2020" sounds so far off. But it's in less than four weeks. 

Strange to think that by the end of this month, we'll be closer to the 2050s than the 1980s...

Well, (and I'm about to date myself), when I was in school in a very early intro to computers (high school), one of the assignments was to write a program which would take a birth  date and print out the expected retirement date.  Suffice to say if I were to do that, I'd be retiring sometime in the not so near (but not far) future

[tater]

 

3 hours ago, linuxgurugamer said:

Well, (and I'm about to date myself), when I was in school in a very early intro to computers (high school), one of the assignments was to write a program which would take a birth  date and print out the expected retirement date.  Suffice to say if I were to do that, I'd be retiring sometime in the not so near (but not far) future

LOL, my first programs were saved on paper tape (least I was post punch-cards!). Very soon thereafter, on cassette tape.

[mikegarrison]

1 hour ago, tater said:

LOL, my first programs were saved on paper tape (least I was post punch-cards!). Very soon thereafter, on cassette tape.

Paper tape?

My first programs were saved on cassette tape. Very soon after on 5-inch floppy disk. I don't think I worked on a computer that saved to a hard disk until I got to college.

[Jacke]

15 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

Paper tape?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_tape

And the first floppy disk format was 8 inches.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#History

[tater]

15 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

Paper tape?

My first programs were saved on cassette tape. Very soon after on 5-inch floppy disk. I don't think I worked on a computer that saved to a hard disk until I got to college.

My high school had an old PDP-11 with TTYs (Yellow, paper tape (we'd liberate the holes as confetti).

TTY was like this:

Spoiler

There was a single maybe a TRS-80 there that year as well, but the upperclassmen got to play with it most. That was in 9th grade, the next year they dumped the old PDP, and made a computer room with a couple dozen trash-80s.

[StrandedonEarth]

Fascinating. I saved my first programs to 5.25” floppies, while I remember loading programs from cassette into a Commodore Pet and an Apple II at different times. 

Maybe Elon can turn all his scrap stainless into stainless steel punch cards to store the Starship blueprints for posterity...

[tater]

Playing Star Trek (Enterprise was E, klingons were K, photons were *, etc) was tough on the TTY, every move was more paper, lol.

[magnemoe]

2 hours ago, Jacke said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_tape

And the first floppy disk format was 8 inches.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#History

Remember punched tape at a teletypewriter at my fathers office as an kid. 
Only saw 8" floppies once at university there it was used on an CP/M computer running some lab equipment, it was way obsolete but the equipment worked and was expensive, it was planned to replace the integrated computer with an PC. 

[Jacke]

2 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Remember punched tape at a teletypewriter at my fathers office as an kid. 
Only saw 8" floppies once at university there it was used on an CP/M computer running some lab equipment, it was way obsolete but the equipment worked and was expensive, it was planned to replace the integrated computer with an PC. 

Most I did was get a blank roll of paper tape and never used it.  No idea what happened to it.

I did use 8" floppies once on a stand-alone computer, might have been something like the CP/M one you mentioned.  I do remember that the files contained file metadata at their very start, which was the only time I used a crazy format like that.

Missed the reference to punch cards.  I used the IBM 80-column format cards a lot in my early days.  Still have a deck of them somewhere with a Pascal program on it.  Fortunately, the code is also typed across the top of the cards by the late model keypunch machine I used, so once I find the deck, I should be able to recover it.

But this is all rather off-topic with respect to SpaceX.

[Geonovast]

This discussion has been split off from an unrelated thread.

Carry on.

[kerbiloid]

So.
My very first own space program was on punch cards, on Fortran IV.
It was an attempt to port those calculator games to the mainframe where I was as a student.
They allowed us to use the punch card typer because it was not already used by anybody else.
A little later they allowed us to use the keyboard and display.

Later I got ZX Spectrum. The life got simpler.

Edited December 10, 2019 by kerbiloid

[TheSaint]

My friend got his Commodore 64 a couple years before I got mine, and he only had a cassette tape drive. So when we wanted to play a game on his computer, we would literally start the game loading from cassette, then walk down the hill from his house to the corner with the main drag, where the 7-11 and the video arcade were, buy some junk food and drop a few quarters into some games, and then walk back to his house. It was usually finished loading by then.