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Gosh - reminds me of my uncle’s computer. I was a TINY wee boy and I remember watching him use it. He let me type a few thing onto the keyboard a few times... so dad got us an Acorn Electron.

I reckon my car key fob is probably more powerful than that haha!

Basic
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Oooh, war stories! No one has mentioned punching cards by hand for their Jacquard looms yet

I used to get in to the "remember when" stories, and though I still have fond memories, I've decided I'm more thrilled by the fact that the phone in my pocket is more powerful than 95% of computers I've used over the years. For pities sake, the L1 cache is 32x than the total memory in my first home computer!

When I started in IBM in 1966 I fixed key punches, card sorters, collator, reproducers etc. My first personal computer was an IBM pc1 with. 256k ram, green monitor (no color) 5.25 floppy drive, no hard drive and 80cps matrix printer . It was about $5,000. I still have the invoice. That was with an employee discount.

Times have changed indeed.

However, I still have my Yamaha G7 grand piano. Fortunately a few thing stick around.

Back in my Apple II days, I wouldn't even dreamed of 256K of RAM. That is so much it would have seemed decadent! I remember working on a way (through memory overlays) to get an extra 16K to overlay high memory on the 6502 processor - an 8 bit processor, which back then I could write machine code for and type into the computer without writing it doesn't. That was ok since Apple never gave us an editor! 🤣

Sinclair QL. I had one, and the mini tapes were indeed quite strange. It all worked OK (except for the occasional hiccup) but the tape inside those little boxes must have been pretty narrow and I suspect that long-term robustness would have been a problem. I can't recall what happened to mine - probably the novelty wore off...

My earliest was an Atari ST with 1 meg of ram with built-in 3 and a half drive and midi ports. That was around 1985. I probably got nearly two decades out of that machine.

You're kidding! You used an 8MHz machine until the 2000's? Impressive! No one need worry about you and G.A.S. 👍

I started my computing 'career' on an ICL (remember them anybody?) 1904A mainframe with, if I remember correctly, a massive 64k of memory.

At one stage had to write a routine for reading non-standard tapes - fun stuff like finding the 'tape mark' (I think it was called), reading the header and so on, controlling how it was read etc. It was written in PLAN, an assembler language, the ICL1904A used 24bit words, not 32, and the words were split into 6 bit characters. Great stuff!
Oh, and punched cards, paper tape - real class. There was a 'pool of key-punch' operators to 'type' stuff onto punched cards and of course we had our own hand-operated card-punch....

We watched 'The Billion Dollar Brain' again recently - that brought back memories!

My childhood self would have been very disappointed to find out that Space:1999 lied to me.

It seems I'm not the only one...

This is what I ended up using in 1999 instead...



Not nearly as impressive to my childhood self.

Mine was in Inspiron, but the case looked similar.

My childhood self was not so disappointed that 1984 turned out to be an OK year, despite anything Apple had to say about it...

In a minute somebody is going to mention Homer Simpson's 8 Track Player...

DOH!

I will have the last laugh though. That box of Beta-Max Video Tapes I've got in the attic? They'll be worth a fortune one day... just wait and see!

(BTW, don't mention "vinyl")

I used IBM Punch Cards in school at Penn State. These are a form of storage (memory).

Cool history of these punch cards... the idea/design came from the year 1801 where France Joseph Marie Jacquard (I dated his sister) designed a loom where weaving patterns were controlled by wooden blocks (rectangles) punched with holes. I actually saw one of these old looms, still in use in India weaving silk.

I also ate dirt sandwiches and walked to school, barefeet, uphill both ways.

Peace
Bruce in Philly

You can see the cards drapped over the top of the loom... they are all attached in a long "rope" of flat cards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Marie_Jacquard
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/hollerith.html Hollerith adapted these cards for computing.

We only **dreamed** of eating dirt!

How we wished for a school!

While I've seen punch cards I've never actually used them. 8" and 5.25" floppies and tape was the point where I came in.

I've always thought that a punch card like design would be cool for a notepad of some kind, though. One of those "Memorandum from Joe Blow" type of printed notes. (Some folks here have a "Chopin Liszt" notepad, as an example.) But I've never seen one or managed to come up with a sufficiently clever design that incorporates a punch card that would be worth having printed.

My aunt worked for GM at the Lordstown plant (now closed) in data processing. She used to make origami sculptures from the used cards. Christmas trees and such. She was also famous in our family for making doll furniture from her cartons of Marlboro cigarettes. She is dead now.

Peace
Bruce in Philly

When I was at my first Air force Assignment in Utah, I had to program a radar jamming pod using switches. Later they camp up with a tape with holes punched in it. And they then also installed an HP computer with 64k of memory I think it was a Z80 processor, it used a cassette tape and two 5 1/2 inch floppy drives. This computer would read the measurements taken by test equipment and tell the technician to adjust a resistor up, down or okay. The problem with the computer system was it couldn't handle a noisy value that jumped up or down. Where as the engineers that designed the system stated that if the signal was within a specified range it was good to go. So the test station was basically junk since it couldn't pass any equipment. It took almost 3 years before they figured out a solution.

My first digital camera (Mavica FD91) used a floppy. Cutting edge!!