Computer Technology

[Corran]

John, your story illustrates to me how so many of us have a story about our or a loved one's fascination with this (relatively) new technology. My conception for this series is to illustrate the "wonder" I felt when I was younger experiencing early home computers, programming, and eventually building my own systems.

I wonder how much it would resonate with younger viewers. My experience teaching students in their 20s, in a computer-based course no less, is that they had much, much less hands-on experience with computers, in terms of the insides and more technical things, which goes hand-in-hand with the rising popularity of Apple products IMO. On the other hand, talking to one of my cousins a couple of days ago, he is 18 and has built his own computer and thinking about majoring in Comp Sci.

Anyway, I need to continue to experiment with different ideas for this series and see what I can come up with. Still open to constructive comments and ideas.

[Jac@stafford.net]

Belated thank you, Corran. If I measured my age in computer-years I'd be at least 1,000 years old - the technology moves so quickly! I coded on DEC systems from the late Seventies to 2011. More lines of code than I can count. During the early years we were writing some stuff for the first time. With luck and fate some programs, functions became lib calls, includes. Today all the code I wrote in over thirty years might account for 1% of the library calls a coder uses each day today. (Big historical difference between programmers and coders. A huge paradigm shift. More power to the coders! )

[Tin Can]

I might have written about this before.

My first encounter with a 'computer was 1966. I was 15, an odd student in a new school. It had a computer club, not computer classes, simply an afterschool club for anybody interested. I and 5 others showed up. Alumni had donated a giant computer. I beleive it was a 50's relic. This thing took up 1/2 of a good sized room, floor to ceiling, wall to wall maybe 10 feet deep. I have been searching for a pic of anything like it. No luck.

I remember no large CRT's no big printer, no mag drives, but it was running lots of tubes, the room was hot, buzzing, dry. No real control panel. On the right side was the input for stacks of punch cards. Nobody explained how it worked. We were directed to punch cards with a mechanical device and input a simple math problem. 2 days later we were blessed to have our cards 'processed'. Whoopee it came up with the correct answer, which of course I knew 2 days before.

I lost interest, as it seemed slower at any calculation than a sharp human. I was 15.

I still think the problem with computers, teaching how to use them and make them better, is very few can make others understand the basics. My helpers in 80's were no better than my first computer club advisor. Make big concepts simple, piece at a time. It's all a matter of scale.

Now back to my image search...

[Corran]

Jac, thank you for sharing that. I have just realized that along with much of this outmoded technology, there is a wealth of knowledge and experience from people like you that is also being lost. I will have to ponder about if/how this could be included photographically.

Even I have vastly different experiences than those growing up now. Apologies if I have mentioned this before, but as an elementary student in a gifted course I learned basic programming using punch-cards on some old machine that took up most of a trailer.

I've been looking around on eBay to buy some additional material to photograph, but much of it is collectible and therefore expensive. Too expensive for me. I need to put out an ad on CL to simply borrow things - maybe there are some collectors in the Atlanta area.

Edit: What a funny thing Randy, to write about the same punch-card technology . I agree with you, on that last part. I have a long story about one of my teachers in a computer class...maybe for another day. Not a happy one.

[Tin Can]

Find the nerds, and offer them a print in exchange for a little time in their horde. They are everywhere, kinda like record collectors.

I remember big trailers full of records in the early 70's. I don't know how they held the weight.

Don't forget 35mm film projectors, they are also around. Another data storage device.

[Jac@stafford.net]

[...] I still think the problem with computers, teaching how to use them and make them better, is very few can make others understand the basics.

Many of the well employed coders today have no clue of the basics.
.

[Tin Can]

Many of the well employed coders today have no clue of the basics.
.

I know that and that's why they can't explain anything. LOL

[Jac@stafford.net]

I know that and that's why they can't explain anything. LOL

To add to despair, the majority do not know why they should care. Computer routines regardless of how widely used used rarely follow the principles of proof - even the so-called mathematical/statistical routines.

[faberryman]

I started programming with punch cards and tape in high school. I haven't programmed much since, except macros, the occasional script, and html/css for my website. I took physics with a slide rule and calculus with a pencil and paper. I haven't done much physics or calculus since. I leave that stuff to the professionals. I do, however, process film and print the same way as I did back then. It is simple and straightforward. Not everything needs to be complicated or automated.

[barnacle]

Many of the well employed coders today have no clue of the basics.
.

Can't argue there; most of them seem only to know how to link to abstraction layers on top of abstraction layers on top of abstraction layers. It's fast, but there's no reason to believe it will work; certainly many can't do the formal logic required to prove the correctness of their programs. But it's ok, you can always reboot...

(I'm one of the weird ones: I not only program in high level languages, I speak a dozen machine codes, and I can design the hardware too - in fact, I can and have designed and built computers from discrete logic (i.e. no processor chip). There are still some of us out there, but we're all retiring and/or expiring...)

Neil