[nflug] You qualify as a Dinosaur if ...

Robert Meyer meyer_rm at yahoo.com
Thu Apr 19 09:00:35 EDT 2007


Hey, COOL!  I started on Erie BOCES computers, too.  APL was the first language I learned.  Got pretty good at it, too.  Learned all of the atomic vectors (character set) and wrote a 3D chase game on that hard copy terminal.  We had 300 baud, I think.  An old DECWriter III.  Acoustic coupler on the desk.  Those were the days.  Then I went to college and they wanted us to do FORTRAN on cards.  One working card punch and 60 students in the course...  Notoriously poor typists, all...  The only time you could work was 2AM...sometimes.  Three day turnaround on jobs...  Yeah, I didn't last long at that school...  Nowadays, if it doesn't come with a full GUI and context sensitive helps, it sucks and can't be used...  I've watched companies try to write whole application sets in VB 'cuz it's "easy".

I'm going to crawl back under my rock with C, vi and make...

Cheers!

Bob

----- Original Message ----
From: Len Thornton <len at lenthornton.com>
To: nflug at nflug.org
Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2007 5:02:54 PM
Subject: Re: [nflug] You qualify as a Dinosaur if ...

Okay, have to chime in here.

BASIC and APL on a 110 baud printer terminal connected to Erie BOCES is where it all began for me.  

Then it was writing tank games on 24x80 character TRS-80s.  Home was a VIC-20.  

And, like many others, I spent many a night camped out at Ridge Lea campus submitting my FORTRAN decks and debugging.  The Cyber 370 was all we had.  Later, some DEC PDP-11's were added to the department and we used YACC (Yet Another Compiler Compiler).  That was fun...  

Kids today don't realize how easy they have it.

Len Thornton
Info Service Support





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