organassist wrote:My first programming job was as an Assembler programmer on an IBM 370 mainframe computer with only 256KB of memory.
I wrote code using a pencil and a coding sheet which I had to submit to the Punch Room to be keyed onto cards.
Most of you guys are just showing what newbies you are.
My first "personal computer" had 8K words (56 bits plus Hamming bits— I'll leave the byte conversion to the reader) of electrostatic display tube memory with a 10 microsecond read time and 20 microsecond write time (with warnings not to keep "reading" the same location too often since the bits would diminish and create errors) around 1000 dual triodes and delay lines, ran at roughly 1 MHz (it was "asynchronous" - meaning operations sent an "I'm done" signal, so there wasn't a clock as such), and consumed something on the order of 20KW of power. We did have 4 mostly unreliable tape drives, and data entry was 6-level paper tape keyed on a Friden Flexowriter. The vacuum tubes all had small lamps across the filament connections, so that if a filament went out the lamp would light. Anyone with a brain, while running a lengthy computation, would periodically walk between the racks to make sure none of the lamps were lit
It was an absolutely marvelous and in many ways groundbreaking machine. The light show on the console and electronics racks while it was running was out of this world. Sadly, it did not run Hauptwerk