From: Michael S. Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Thu Dec 07 2000 - 09:26:55 MST
That was only the previous version. I recall an earlier one when the
error message was "Ugh!", which eventually became "Faugh!", which
evolved into our modern scatology. Programs weren't written onto media,
they were built into the mechanism, so you needed a new computer for
each program you wanted to run. Because most investors demanded to see a
functioning example of your program AND a government patent before they
would invest in its development, and no governments would issue patents
without a functioning model that demonstrated itself to be better than
previous models, few applications were thus written, and the world
wallowed in misery and low levels of productivity for millenia.
"Michael M. Butler" wrote:
>
> 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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