w00t!!

[Refalm]

l33t l4ngu4ge i5 l4m3 d00d...

Normal English will do just fine...

[Calum]

or normal dutch!  

[WaWAR_FA]

1939 was the Atanasoff-Berry in iowa

manchester mark1 was in england in 1948

[Sleeping Dog]

While cleaning out the basement, I found a Commodore 64 with a 5 1/4 disk drive AND a casette tape drive (WOW).  I will send it to you for $2,746.32 if you will also pay the shipping and handling.  You could either experiment with it to see if it will run some version of Linux, or you could take it to the folks on "Antiques Roadshow" and see what the Sothby people might assume that it would bring at auction.  By the way, it would also make an attractive doorstop.

Does the fun never stop?

Sleeping Dog

[Master of Reality]

I have two commodore 64s in my basement right now. It wouldnt be worth anything on the antique roadshow because so many of them were made. You can run LUnix on C64, it is based on windows... AH HA HA HA HA HA HA, yeah right!!! seriously, its on Unix (of course)

[Sleeping Dog]

PS

There is still some "argument" as to what was truly the first "computer" as we now think of the word.  There was a gay guy who worked for British intelligence during WWII named Turing (sp) who developed a machine for cracking the German Enigma code.  The brilliant little queen killed himself a few years later after getting popped on a morals charge by the Bobbies.

There was also ENIAC, which was developed during WWII on money from Uncle Sam.  Its original purpose was to electronically calculate the trajectory of land based and naval artillery shells more rapidly than the mechanical calculators could do it,....thus increasing accuracy and rate of fire.  It never went on line during that war because the war was over before they really got it to work right.

I had the distinct pleasure (?) in 1968 of taking a pioneer class at my high school called "Computer Programming"  We learned a language called ITTRAN (father of FORTRAN).  It ran on a vacuum tube computer that occupied the entire basement of a high-rise bank building (nearly an acre).  The machine had the equiv. of 64 meg of RAM.  All programs had to be quadruple checked by 4 different people before we could run them because, if anything put it in a loop (like factoring the square root of 2) they would have to shut it down to stop it.  A shut-down meant that the techs had to go through the entire system and visually/manually check every vacuum tube in the system on restart.

I would be willing to bet three Oreos that there is still some brilliant old SOB out there who could trim enough fat off of Linux to make it run on that thing.   Only problem is.....that old computer has probably now been recycled into at least 60 Chevy's that have already made it to the junkyard.

Keep the Fourth

Sleeping Dog

[Master of Reality]

64 MEGS is tons of room for unix. LUnix runs on a C64 with only 64K of memory.

[Sleeping Dog]

Baby Doll..........

I think that those folks heated the entire building building (30 floors) with that thing during the winter months.

We were just little high school students, but when we left that place, we glowed in the dark.

SD

[Sleeping Dog]

By the way....I meant 64 K.

I have not used the "K" in so long that I have forgotten where it is.

Sleeping Dog

[voidmain]

quote:Originally posted by Sleeping Dog:

I had the distinct pleasure (?) in 1968 of taking a pioneer class at my high school called "Computer Programming"  We learned a language called ITTRAN (father of FORTRAN).

That's interesting.  Do you know where I can find out more info on this?  I programmed professionally on mainframes using FORTRAN 66 and 77.  I thought FORTRAN 1 was orginally developed from scratch in the mid 50's.

[ July 01, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]

[Sleeping Dog]

When we took the class in 1968, they were shuffling all of their data from the vacuum tube computer to a new IBM mainframe on an upper floor that used a tape drive system with an air brake (WOW).  That is why we could get "Time" on their computer late at night.

I doubt if much documentation about the class exists at my high school because back then, few people had heard of or even cared about computers.

The bank has changed ownership at least four times that I know of in the last 34 years and I doubt that anyone there remembers the old machine, much less, cares or would want to admit it.  However, I will ask around.  There may be some old fart in a nursing home somewhere who would love to talk about it.  If so, I will take a video cam with me.  Historical stuff like this should not be lost forever.

Sleeping Dog

[voidmain]

Yeah, I programmed FORTRAN on the IBM 3090.  It was water cooled, we had over 100,000 9-track 1/2" tapes.  A huge room full of disk drives.  The drives were oil filled and I believe held around 360MB of data, but the cabinets were about 6 feet tall by 2 feet wide by about 4 feet deep.  But, the thing could process some data!

I was more interested in the language that you said you used.  I had never heard of it and like I said, I had heard FORTRAN was developed from scratch, not derived from another language.

[Sleeping Dog]

Considering the time frame and the very few people who were really working on this stuff back then, ITTRAN may have been mutually exclusive to a manufactuer.  You have made me want to set the Wayback Machine and detail this experience in more detail.

My most vivid memory of the "commputer tech's" there at the time was that they looked like they had been crawling around under my car. (nasty)

Most of the commands were FORTRAN'ish but there were some stop codes that were a bit quirky.  Hey....that was a long time ago on a planet far, far away.

I will still try to investigate the past.  You have tweaked my curiosity about what they tried to teach to us.

SD

[lazygamer]

Sleeping Dog, you took this shit in High school?! Geez some people here are old, im still just off the skateboard. Although im too heavy to use a skateboard correctly. That's for those tiny guys.  

Oh and Linux on C64? If you got one hanging around then go put Newcomer on it. www.newcomer.hu  

[WaWAR_FA]

what about babbage?

he had a pre-computer back in like 1884.