[nzlug] favourite distro

[Patrick Connolly]

Somewhere about Sat, 12-Jan-2008 at 12:17AM +1300 (give or take),
Simon Bridge wrote:


|> 
|> Now, if someone will mention punched cards or using a telephony board to
|> arbitrarily rewire their analog components, we'll be done ;)

I could do that.  I used a PDP10 machine with punch cards and the
Fortran IV language (maybe it could do others).  If we were quick,
we'd get one of the machines with the keyboard that punched the cards
and typed what letter the holes corresponded to along the top.  If we
weren't so quick, we'd have to look up a table to find what holes to
punch to produce the letter we required.  Cards were piled up with a
separating card to indicate different jobs with the machine run every
3 hours (IIRC).  If there was a bug in your program, you'd have to
wait another 3 hours before you'd get a chance to try again.
Printouts were done on continuous paper using a barrel printer so
lines weren't very straight.

Much more fun was the analogue machine (can't remember its name) that
used several hundred vacuum tube amplifiers which took up as much
space as a reasonable size house.  Each amplifier had a knob and a
digital readout to show its setting.  Didn't have any blinking lights,
but otherwise it was just like a spaceship control panel.  Great for
differential equations, but no use as a word processor or anything
else much.

(That was after we moved out of shoebox on side motorway.)

-- 
   ___     Patrick Connolly      
 {~._.~}   
 _( Y )_          Good judgment comes from experience 
(:_~*~_:)         Experience comes from bad judgment    
 (_)-(_)