Hi everyone I'm Zuon.

My first introduction to computers was the old punch card system, my first computer was a few years later. It was a Radio Shack TRS80, it had no monitor or hard drive but it did have an amazing 16k RAM. Yes you read that right 16k! I got an old TV and a cassette recorder and away I went.

I progressed through BASIC and MS-DOS, Windows and finally Linux. I used Windows for quite awhile because of the software I was running. Plus I got a free copy of Win 7 from Microsoft.

Now I am on Debian and loving every minute of it!

Just starting Linux From Scratch.

Glad to be here!

See you in the forums!

I remember when the university I attended had a computer. One. It had its own building. Dropping one's card deck was a major disaster. Sorting matters.

I taught myself programming on a Commodore VIC-20 in 1980. Moved to x86 programming in C and assembly 3 years later and made a living off computers for the next 15 years. Left the IT world in 2000 and became an Accountant as I was tired of the computer world in general. I'm just a lazy user now...

I remember punch cards, though they were before I started using computers.

I had a buddy once who accomplished the impossible--when he was in grad school, he got a refund on his computer time. He'd written a program on punch cards and it continually refused to run.

After a while, he got frustrated, declaring that "There's nothing wrong with my program." He raised such a stink that the university computer department investigated and discovered that there was an undocumented requirement in their computer to do some sort of check every X number of minutes and his program was set to do it only every 2X number of minutes.

They refunded the charge against his funding.

He was a genius. He was also really really weird. He dropped me because I ignored his overtures for what in those days was called "wife-swapping."

hello all, i'm old newbie ( and very lazy user, haha..)

i start learning linux in 2003. because of my work place that using win***, my linux system just for studying.

in my free time in home, i like using linux live CD/DVD from my collection (old one).

now, after so long, i'm working in new place that using xubuntu 14.04, maybe i'm just like Zuon, starting linux from scratch. and, maybe far below NGIB, very lazy user.

thank's for your time to read my reply.

see you all next time !

Once had to work with a computer where you had to load a "bootstrap" from paper TAPE before it would recognise the 8" floppy disk.

I remember the guys on my college newspaper outputting paper tapes and sending them to the printer.

Punch cards? TRS-80? BASIC and MS-DOS? You're telling my life's story, Zuon. Next you'll be mentioning PDP-11/70s and Vax machines. Right? ;-)

Never used anything that old, I used Windows 95, before that a strange computer I don't remember except for a the old school games it came with, I think it was a radio shack or commadore 64!

It was a long time ago now...college 1982 (??) we had to write our code on 80 column sheets and then pass the sheets to clerks who would transfer our code onto punched cards. Also from memory if you made a mistake you got several sheets of 132 column paper with your code so you could locate the errors and get the relevant cards punched again.

jbuckley: many fond memories of the vax computer which was my introduction to industry and with which I stayed for a long time. I supported a system from home for a while and still have an HP Itanium in my office. I handed over the last Vax 2 years ago.I was quite amused to note that the only possible keyboard connection was for a VT100 keyboard.

Timl, oh, I grok. Ever work on a Vax Alpha? Pretty cool stuff - I even got to the point where I could do "machine code" on them, but that's a long lost memory. I certainly do remember the VT100 keyboards!

I can't say that it was better or more efficient than what we have now. But I can't quite believe that more than a very few are really competent with the development environments (the IEDs) we have now. They're just too idiosyncratic.

Oh, you may be interested. The PDPs were DEC's predecessors to the VAXes. MCL was the language we familiarized ourselves with back then. It wasn't bad. Between TCL, MCL and DOS, we were able to make the machines do the scientific/algorithmic programming that we needed. Everything else just seemed like it was made to transmit graphics faster. Not very interesting.

I remember card readers and paper tapes, but one of the strangest things I ever encountered was a totally pneumatic CNC machine, made by Moog as I recall.

It was completely unsupported at the time (~1980), but ran a critical process within an aerospace manufacturer for whom I provided other services, so they asked if I would take a crack at it. At the time I had not seen it and did not know that it had no electronic components, I was simply told it was "digital" and read instructions from paper tape similar to other CNC equipment. So I flew to the site and walked in with my usual confidence, "ahem"...

Even when the people on site tried to demonstrate the problem they were having I had not yet realized that it was fully pneumatic, I just thought the thing was really noisy with odd controls and no lights!

When I began to access the internals I found not a single wire - but bundles of small air lines!

The 8 bit paper tape reader, which was amazingly fast considering, worked by clamping a few inches of tape in such a way that it would block or pass air flow through a bundle of 64 tubes (8 ascii characters), which would control various actuators in a numerically controlled manner. Even the tape advance motor was pneumatic - there was literally not a single electronic component involved!

Amazingly enough, after some stunned silence, I was able to figure out the problem and make it work! In the end it really was just a digital machine - but very strange!

UPDATE - I had not thought of that old machine in years, but a quick look turned up a few references! Here is a history which mentions something like it by the 5th paragraph. It literally was a pneumatic computer, capable of numeric computations. As this article mentions, for its time it was quite ingenious, I suppose!

Ahh the good old days!

I remember a time when I fantasized about all the computers in world being able to "talk" with each other. Little did I know what was to come!

I also remember being mentioned in the "Computer Paper" as the "nicest and most helpful" BBS operator in Calgary.


Have a great day everyone!

I'm sure if you mention FIDO, OPUSBBS and your FOSSIL layer nobody will know what you're on about

Almost the first thing I did when I got my first computer was sign up with some local BBSs. The communications aspect of computing has always interested me and one of my co-workers had talked a lot about BBSs in his area.

One thing I miss from the BBS days is "taglines." You could have library of them and choose an appropriate one for each individual individual message. They were a lot more fun than "signatures."

For a while, I even got my employer to allow me to run a PCBoard BBS on OS/2 for communication amongst different offices of my department (we were spread out all over the country). Somewhere, I still have my sixteen OS/2 installing floppies.