oohhhh ooohhh I did I did!
I worked my way through college in medical records, and we had this archiving/medical transcriptionist machine type thing that used them. I don’t remember the brand though.
I’m 42, and my first ‘programming’ (making numbers flash on the attached Nixie tube display) was also on punchcards on a computer at a small university (my father worked there, so I was ~15). I quickly learned the value of numbering the cards, as even this simple program took 30-40 cards.
Also had the thrill of playing the old “Star Trek” text game during breaks from afternoon study hall. “Display” was a teletype, and we dialing into a “server” at the university (with a rotary phone) and pushed the handset into an acoustic-coupled modem. Yes, we were geeks; we’d save the printout from our games (yards and yards of smudgy text on recycled rolls of paper) and pour over them after school, amazed at this wonderful, futuristic technology.
My father had an Imsai 8080 at home, a hobbyist’s dream which allowed me to write my first real program, a game (of course) of “kill the rotating bit”: the output LEDs would flash in cycle and you had to flip an input switch at just the right moment to win. My dad would back things up (for a while) with a surplus paper tape reader/puncher he found at a flea market, but soon he began experimenting with an 8" floppy drive he picked up at a later computer show.
For my first “real” computer, my father bought me an OSI challenger with the 8K (woohoo!) extender. BASIC operating system, backup was via a separate cassette tape (I recall that as the programs were loaded they would literally type the code with line numbers into the O/S prompt), and the CRT was a b/w TV tuned to channel 3 (emanations were high enough that I could see a grainy but legible computer display on channel 3 in the family room ~100 feet away). For graphics fun, it was basically POKE and PEEK to the screen with creative use of the extended ASCII characters.
Nostalgia is a funny thing; I wouldn’t trade those memories for anything, but obviously the technology allows us to do far more, and I’m thankful we’re still not pushing numbered chads thru IBM cards. On the other hand, this may be the old fogey talking, but I don’t see the same hobbyist spirit I saw in the 70’s and early 80’s, the type of stuff that led, say Wozniac and Jobs to create the Apple. Going to computer shows today, there’s a lot more pre-packaged stuff that’s only marginally cheaper than CompUSA, and less of the interesting “junk” I’d paw over (a running joke with my dad is that he’s still looking for any old S100 bus boards at the annual computer show we visit together). A lot of that, of course, is because you had to make your own stuff, but today it’s so cheap to, say, buy an 8-port USB hub that there’s no practical reason to work/build hobbyist HW. IMHO, I think we’ve lost something there…
Cassette tape drive? How about 9 track tape reels? I think I still have one around somewhere that I took a lot of stuff from school on. I remember writing the damned thing with a raw block format with fixed length records so that I’d be able to get stuff off it on another system. Eventually, I did manage to use dd in a UNIX environment to recover the bytes (and massage everything from EBCDIC to ASCII, etc), after making the interesting discovery that UNIX couldn’t read the end-of-tape marker, so it was a good thing I knew how many blocks I had.
Paper tape - when I was in school, our department had a graphics lab involved in a couple projects that used topo maps. Data for said project was obtained by paying students $3/hr to digitize the maps. Civil Engineering had the digitizer - a bed the size of a card table that you put a map or diagram on, and ran around clicking on it with a mouse-like dingus to collect data. The rub was that the thing was hooked up to some primitive little TTL-logic computer programmed in BASIC through a model 33 teletype (only had memory enough to run pathetically small programs, too). The only way to transport data out of the damned thing was to use the teletype to punch paper tape. CE was absolutely adamant that THEIR digitizer was NOT going to be connected to anything else on campus, no matter how much Computer Science staff tried to talk them into it. Do you know how many two-foot wide reels of paper tape it takes to hold contour information for topo maps?
Any time I see output directed to “B” I assume that it is going to the card punch.
I think this is true. When I was a late teen and in my early 20’s I loved working on cars. The cars made from the 80’s on, cease being fun and today’s cars, I do not like to play with at all. Around 1992 I started building computers from scratch instead. I think I have built about 30 PC’s over the years for friends, family and myself. While I still do this, it has ceased to be fun and I cannot save enough money off a cheap Dell to justify it except when I want to upgrade my own PC to my exact spec. I have now largely switched over to woodworking. An ancient craft with modern tools and it takes care of my need to build and fix. In addition, my kids get some cool exclusive toys out of it.
yabob: I use to have to try all kinds of tricks taking data from a Customers MVS box, Converting from EBCDIC to ASCII on an AS400 with formatting to read on a Tandem mainframe.
Jim
Oh, I don’t know, I can’t see how hotrodding a Timex/Sinclair T1000 is anywhere as cool as doing something like this with a PC.
Drum_God
I can go you one better - I had the Sinclair ZX-81 (yep, before Timex bought the company - I got mine around 1981). It was cheaper to buy it in kit form and being the cheap frugal Yankee that I am, that’s what I did. I think it took about 6 hours of work to complete and when I plugged it in to the television (I had no monitor back then - very few folks did), it worked. The screen showed just one lonely cursor (was it a K with a square around it?) which meant it was working !! Anyway that was fun. Although it had a membrane keyboard, the manner in which the BASIC ROM was programmed simplified matters a great deal. If you knew how to use the SHIFT, COMMAND, FUNCTION, etc keys you could “type” these in with one keystroke. (Probably the precursor to the ALT, CTRL keys of today?) Let’s not forget that it had 1 K of memory built right in. That’s right, a whopping 1 K. Of course I sent away for the 16K upgrade which after hearing all the problems with that, I ended up hard-wiring it to the circuit board - a mere 64 solder joints - but well worth it).
Oh and saving the programs was fun. You used your own tape recorder. You had to set the levels just right so that the programs could be saved and later retrieved or uploaded as these kids say today.
Revenant Threshold are you wondering why I didn’t just save it to the ‘B’ drive? This computer didn’t even have an ‘A’ drive. It had no drive.
So much for my Grumpy Old Man posting. I’m sure someone will be in here later talking about their working with a Sperry Univac or maybe even someone who worked with the Antikithira Machine
What, nobody gonna claim that real programers toggle the bootstrap sequence into the front panel in hexidecimal?
Floppies, pah!
Drum memory, that’s the ticket!
Tris
My first computer, bought in 1982, was the Commodore VIC-20 with a vast 5K of RAM! I skipped the 64 and went right to the 128 before building my first 286 PC.
Oh, yeah, that wonderful cassette drive! We called it the “floppy stringy.” It saved data OK, but there was no FAT, so you had to make a note of the counter number where the data was recorded, so later if you wanted to load it, you had to fast forward to that number to find the data.
When I got the 128 I learned CP/M, which was helpful later when had to learn DOS, as the latter was not that much different, and it had a real 5.25" floppy disk, slightly better than the cassette tape. 
The 286 had a 10 MB HDD, which as somebody mentioned, everybody wondered why it was so huge, as it could never be filled up.
And as others have noted, with two A: and B: floppy drives, even when both were 5.25", was great if you knew a few DOS commands such as xcopy, etc.
I was a DOS phreak and held out as long as humanly possible, still using it for many things because it was quicker and easier than the stupid GUIs. Finally got Windows 1.0 which hated, but as the versions came and went, was forced into using it more and more as programs written for Win could not be accessed from DOS.
Ah well, progress, ain’t in wonderful? Now with all the bloatware, most tasks take far longer, use more keystrokes (or mouse clicks) to perform the most simple things, than ever was needed with DOS.
The thing was, all during the 80s decade and into the 90s, everybody who used computers was a fan of them and wanted to learn all they could. If you walked into a computer shop (very rare then), you always had long talks with the staff and any customers about the wonders of computers.
Now, only a small percentage of users are computer phreaks; for the rest, they are just a tool that most of them only tolerate because they are necessary.
If you’re on a PDP-11, you toggle it in in octal. When I was a grad student we had two machines, both 11/20s, one for teaching assembler, which had a ROM with the boot routine, and the other for research, which didn’t - so you had to toggle it in. But the disk on that machine was more interesting - it had a washing machine size disk drive, and all us grad students had our own disk packs. I don’t know how much it had, but I never ran out.
We had a 286 machine with a and b drives - the a was 3.5", and the b was 5.25". Very handy for moving our stuff from the old disks to new ones.
My first home computer was an Atari 800, which had “D1:”, “D2:”, etc. for the different drives (up to 4).
The idea of computers requiring drives to be identified with letters seems so quaint in this day and age…
Hah! Whippersnappers! My first programming was done on a Control Data Corp CDC 6400 – I think the “6400” meant that it had 64k RAM. All my code was written on punch cards.
All my textbooks at the time talked about 3 kinds of mass storage devices: disk, tape and drum. And paper tape input (although I never actually had the privilege of using paper tape).
I used 8" floppies on the IBM Series/1, circa 1982-1988.
If you had money, you could install a boot ROM board. This used a discrete diode matrix for the ROM and was “programmed” by taking a pair of diagonal cutters and snipping out the appropriate diodes.
Newbie. 
Try an LGP-21 with 4 k of rotating memory, accumulator based, paper tape only, no interrupts, and it didn’t even use ASCII (or EBCDIC). In fact it didn’t even use abcdef for hex characters 10 - 15.
You younguns. Such talk. My first computer was powered by a coal. I mean a windmill. Or a overshot waterwheel. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
We didn’t store bytes on floppies, but put each bit on a separate shelf, by the flour grinder. If the mice didn’t get to it first, we could store 9 bits to make a complete byte.
With parity.
I remember that computer…
My father got it as a gift. It had: the main console, a disk driver unit, two disk drives, a “speech emulator” unit and even a printer! We also had all kind of add-ons, even the fabulous "Extended Basic"module …
It even had some kind of advertisements, endorsed by none other than Bill Cosby (way before I actually knew who he was)
Not the ZX81!! I’m so jealous.
Remember that K: was also black on a white background. All other computers at the time were white characters on a black or green background. I thought that the black letters made the T/S seem more like a toy than a real computer. At school, we used a TeleType to phone (via acoustic coupler) into an HP mainframe in my school district’s admin building. There was even a chat function that we were forbidden to use. In college, my computer major roommate used an Apple II+ to communicate with a friend at another university. Little did I know that this was my first exposure to the internet.
I found that the membrane keyboard on the T/S made my fingers sore after a while. You really had to mash them down to get it to work. Now, I’m laying down on my couch, typing on a Dell laptop that is wirelessly connected to the internet. I have a hockey game on my 36" HD and listening to the game in 5.1 surround. It’s only been twenty years.
Gee, are you sure it wasn’t mules walking around in a circle attached to a central rotating shaft? Or maybe it was hamsters…nah hamsters arn’t that reliable now are they.
Humph. I had to grow my own dinosaurs and grind them to get my coal.