| 25 years ago I was running computer aided design software on PDP-11's. They kept us in dark, cold computer rooms. The rooms were dark so we could actually see the CRT's, and the PDP-11's sat in there right with us, so the entire room was air conditioned to keep the machines cold. We had a keyboard, a set of 7 knobs that translated and rotated the wireframe models and zoomed in/out. We didn't have a mouse, we had a "light pen" that you poked at the screen with to select lines from the wireframe model. That was the latest, hottest stuff available at the big Aerospace Companies at the time.
Four or five workstations ran off of each PDP-11 and all day long you would hear the groans go up from different parts of the room when the PDP-11's took their turns crashing, losing all the work that four or five people had done for the last hour or two. My shoulder still aches in bad weather from poking that damn light pen into the screen hundreds of times a day. Those were the days, weren't they? |
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 cabanaDepartment of AdjustmentsAssistant
join:2000-07-07
New York, NY
AT&T Southeast
56k Lookout! (broa..
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 NwkEWRSpare Me the Marxist B.S.Premium
join:2002-04-10
Newark, NJ | Isn't that a late 70s album? I could swear that Lionel had gotten rid of the 'fro by '82 and was sporting Jerry curls then. |
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 mrchrisOut and aroundPremium
join:2002-10-01
North Babylon, NY | reply to mikenolan7
I was only 7.5-8 months old  |
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| reply to mikenolan7
I was lucky and did all of my work on a IBM 3081 and soon after the the Vax 6500, 6600 and finally the Vax Alpha. The stupid IBM double density drives also had a nasty tendency to crash the platters during batch processing and we would be done two to three days at a time. Talk about a pain in the ass.
I still have all of my great Commodore stuff ranging from the SX-64 to the Amiga 500. Even have an old super Pet with the dual disk drives. |
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| reply to mikenolan7
I was lucky and did all of my work on a IBM 3081 and soon after the the Vax 6500, 6600 and finally the Vax Alpha. The stupid IBM double density drives also had a nasty tendency to crash the platers during batch processing and we would be done two to three days at a time. Talk about a pain in the ass.
I still have all of my great Commodore stuff ranging from the SX-64 to the Amiga 500. Even have an old super Pet with the dual disk drives. |
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