on 10-24-2008 3:21 PM Phil Schaffner spake the following: > On Fri, 2008-10-24 at 14:19 -0400, Ed Westphal wrote: >> Forgive my senility, but I'm continually amazed how many of us ole >> fossils are still around, and running Linux! Not to use up too much >> bandwidth, but the switch from Fortran 2 to 2D, for disk, was a big >> event way back when. Then Fortran 4 came around! Be still my old >> heart! > > WAY OT, but since the thread has already been hijacked, can't resist a > trip down memory lane... > > Ah yes, how fondly I remember running FORTRAN from punched tape on the > Data General Nova "minicomputer". At least it was not prone to dropping > the 80-column card deck and having to re-sort it. Then we got the 8" > hard-sector floppy drive. Luxury! Still had to boot it up with the > correct sequence of flips of the front panel switches, but actually had > somewhere to save output data as well as load programs - up to 256KB. > Did real-time data acquisition using an 8-bit A/D and ran fast Fourier > transforms to get frequency domain responses using ASCII graphics on a > printer. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_General_Nova > > Seem to remember an "old farts" thread on this list a while back, so I > guess "ole fossils" sounds a bit better. :-) > > Phil I remember numbering on the back of cards with a pencil as a backup when you dropped the deck. And of course you numbered by tens just in case you had to insert something. -- MailScanner is like deodorant... You hope everybody uses it, and you notice quickly if they don't!!!! -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 250 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature Url : http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20081024/091cfa14/signature.bin