Time for another Linux thread

[contadino]

I switched from Ubuntu to Mint to Manjaro over the last 10 years. Always seem to have Centos on my servers, but now have 5 Linux machines in the house. No windows or macs for years.

Oh and I have docker containers with maybe 6 or 7 other flavours of Linux.

 

[ColinJ]

Pah, new fangled rubbish. Install a proper operating system.
View attachment 470192

Pah, rigid 'floppies' - my 1st and 2nd computers used audio cassettes for storage! My 3rd computer used 'proper' 5.25" floppies. My 4th computer came with a new-fangled 3.5" 'floppy' drive but I splashed out on a 100 MB hard drive which cost as much as the computer. My 5th computer was 'the beast' - it had twin 3.5" floppies, a CD drive, a small hard drive, 8 MB RAM, a slow 486 processor, VGA graphics, a 14" crt monitor and it cost... £2,000!!!

My 5-year old phone has several GB of RAM, 96 GB total storage, a quickish processor, and full-HD graphics. I picked it up for about £80 on eBay... How quickly technology marches on!

 

[contadino]

When I first started work, a few of these turned up the same week. IIRC, they were 10Mb each.

...and I'm not really that old. Such an exciting time to be alive.

 

[Ming the Merciless]

Nah RISC OS is where it's at. Assembler and interrupts is the way to go.

 

[bladderhead]

there's always someone tougher or madder.

Well, I never tried LFS. I did build a custom kernel though. Gawd knows what for.

 

[bladderhead]

I used to work in a data centre that used disk packs like the one in the contadino picture. And mag tape. The printers were as big as upright pianos and were always going wrong.

 

[Proto]

When I quit work in December I left a reel of punched paper tape on my desk. Regret it now, would’ve been a nice conversation starter.
“Anyone care to guess what this is?”
My kids howled with laughter when I showed them my British Thornton slide rule. I didn’t bother showing them my book of Log Tables.

 

[ColinJ]

When I quit work in December I left a reel of punched paper tape on my desk. Regret it now, would’ve been a nice conversation starter.
“Anyone care to guess what this is?”
My kids howled with laughter when I showed them my British Thornton slide rule. I didn’t bother showing them my book of Log Tables.

Ha ha - yes! I had a slide rule but usually used log tables at school.

Electronic Calculators were starting to become available but they were stupidly expensive (many weeks average wage!) and were banned in exams.

My first experience with computers was with our school programming club. It was the proud owner of a card punch. We wrote short Algol programs on paper and then took turns to punch them onto cards. Sort the cards into stacks and keep them that way with rubber bands. One evening a week we would be driven over to Warwick University computer Centre to hand our cards over for them to run our programs in our tiny timeshare. Typically, we would have to do this several times before all the bugs had been eradicated. Then we would discover what the sum of the integers from 1 to 100 actually was!

 

[bladderhead]

We used cards and tape where I worked. My father worked for Nat West bank, who were the most technologically advanced of the 4 high street banks. So my parents were some of the first people to get cash-dispenser cards. I opened my first bank account and got one too. It was a plastic punched card. One day in my technical college computer science class we were talking about some related thing and I showed it to them. They were impressed. It was the first one any of them had ever seen.

 

[mybike]

I worked in the first BT packet switching site. We had two systems, one from the USA using Pr1me computers and the other the European system used a computer from the French company SESA. The Pr1me system used entirely magnetic tape but the SESA system used punch cards to load the customer data. As the system grew, loading customer data became less fun. Then, one day, someone dropped the tray of cards.

 

[Poacher]

I worked in the first BT packet switching site. We had two systems, one from the USA using Pr1me computers and the other the European system used a computer from the French company SESA. The Pr1me system used entirely magnetic tape but the SESA system used punch cards to load the customer data. As the system grew, loading customer data became less fun. Then, one day, someone dropped the tray of cards.

...which were, of course, sequentially numbered in columns 73-80 for ease of sorting in case of such a mishap, yes?

 

[mybike]

...which were, of course, sequentially numbered in columns 73-80 for ease of sorting in case of such a mishap, yes?

I recall there was a diagonal line drawn across the edges of the pack, but no, they weren't numbered. The guy who dropped them spent a while sorting them.

 

[swee'pea99]

I worked in the first BT packet switching site. We had two systems, one from the USA using Pr1me computers and the other the European system used a computer from the French company SESA. The Pr1me system used entirely magnetic tape but the SESA system used punch cards to load the customer data. As the system grew, loading customer data became less fun. Then, one day, someone dropped the tray of cards.

Thank God someone came up with a practical, economical solution: