What old technologies do you remember?

so, I sit here at work decrying to teh heavens on the slowness of my computer in running a 5,000-live case through an actuarial software (it's been all of 3 minutes), and this thread actually reminded me that 25 years ago this same case would have taken all weekend on the mainframe my first employer had

This was how you found crap in the library before computers:

AWESOME!! Sadly, if computers ever broke down, I'd be one of the last people in my generation to be able to find things.

Sadly, I am old enough to remember ALL of the above. :blushing: :sad:

Yes, me too!

When I was in college, we used keypunch cards to program the computers. The hard drives were floor-to-ceiling models that had to be kept in a separate room where the room's temperature had to be constantly cool or the drives would overheat and shut down completely.

Umm, yes, well me too again, except that this was the way of my first fulltime job. I was a computer operator on an evening shift. We would run each evening's "batch" of processing from programs that were loaded to the mainframe computer off of card decks. New data was added to the system by inserting a HUGE stack of input cards into the middle of the program deck (the data cards were keyed by a pool of keypunch operators upstairs during the day). Lord forbid that we should drop a deck, because getting it back in order was a HUGE pain, and if done incorrectly would make the program blow up!

As far as the hard drives, yep, they were huge. We had a raised floor with special CAHU (cooling and heating units) that blew cold air under the floor and perfed tiles under/around the machines to cool them. Even further back than that I used to go to work with my dad occasionally on the weekends. In his data center not only did I play with the keypunch machines (I had memorized a simple program that would generate biorhythm charts on the wide greenbar paper... would type up my program cards and add data cards based on friends' names and birthdates!), I recall the huge, removable "cake cover" disk platters. They were stacks of hard disks contained inside plastic covers with twist locking handles... want to change data sets? Lock and lift out one stack and load another!


Good times, good times....

I remember using the "latest" technology when I typed up book reports on an electric typewriter after capturing notes on 3x5 cards at the library and hand writing the report. My typewriter was very advanced - complete with white correction tape that I thought was so much better than whiteout.

we still have one....it is outside in the garage in a large suitcase!!!!

WE had to use slide rules in high school still as calculators were just becoming available then. Had to ask my sweetie to type my essays on a manual typewriter unitl I finally was able to buy a $ 2000 MAcplus with a whopping 512 k internal memory, yep 512 K. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. WE had but 2 channels on TV and shows were only on for about 2 hours in the evening.

I remember using the "latest" technology when I typed up book reports on an electric typewriter after capturing notes on 3x5 cards at the library and hand writing the report. My typewriter was very advanced - complete with white correction tape that I thought was so much better than whiteout.

This is how I learned to type in high school...haha

:laugh: OMG, Westcoastphoe..I stil have my kids' Lite Brite! I suuure don;t miss stepping on those d#@! buggers, though!

i remember when the abacus first came out... my goodness, it was a revelation! you could add, simply by sliding markers along

Oh you people are such mere infants. No TV. When I was 3 we had one. When I went to college mine was one of the first to have a computer science lab and computers at that time we almost as big as an entire room. My mom's house stilll has a rotary phone. Last year I trhew out an 8 track tape machine. My typewriter in high school was a black manual that had no letters or numbers on it. Only the privileged got to use the IBM electric ones. We had slide rules. too but there were no calculators for us to use. Ah , yes, we had to be able to use an encyclopedia. Students these days look at you as if you have 2 heads when you even say the word.

Oh you people are such mere infants. No TV. When I was 3 we had one. When I went to college mine was one of the first to have a computer science lab and computers at that time we almost as big as an entire room. My mom's house stilll has a rotary phone. Last year I trhew out an 8 track tape machine. My typewriter in high school was a black manual that had no letters or numbers on it. Only the privileged got to use the IBM electric ones. We had slide rules. too but there were no calculators for us to use. Ah , yes, we had to be able to use an encyclopedia. Students these days look at you as if you have 2 heads when you even say the word.

I still have my slide rule and CRC book from high school Fond memories!

This was one of my favorite toys as a kid :happy:

Filofaxes, Sony Walkman, ZX-81

My first cell phone in 1990 was a big Motorola in a bag that was about a foot by 8 inches to accommodate the ginormous battery. They were called car phones back then.