From: Michael M. Butler (butler@comp-lib.org)
Date: Wed Dec 06 2000 - 23:07:07 MST
Spike: you're remembering it better than it was. As I recall, the error
message was "?".
And we had to trundle the card decks uphill both ways. And the chain
printers, don't talk to me about them--I still have the scars on my
back.
Spike Jones wrote:
>
> > Harvey Newstrom, <mail@HarveyNewstrom.com>, writes:
> > > Many of us old-timers were espousing that very thing on this very
> > > list back in 1989!
> >
> > Is this one of those stories like how we had to compose our list messages
> > on punch cards and deliver them to each other by carrier pigeon sent
> > through driving snow? Hal
>
> Carrier pigeon? Luxury! Why I remember when we had to chisel
> ASCII code into granite punch cards. The floppies each had a capacity of
> one bit. And they crashed half the time. The error message was:
> "Data unreadable. Was it a 0 or a 1?" Since the clock rate on the
> computers was one cycle per minute, each floppy took about an hour to
> read, and of course it took 8 of em per character. The hard disks
> were the size of tabletop and they didnt actually have a motor, you
> had to wind em up. Then you had to move the read head by hand to
> the place on the disk where you thought the data was. The keyboards
> in those days had only two keys, a 1 and a 0. Programming was
> tedious. We got better. spike
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