History of Technology

[annabella1]

How has technology changed in your lifetime?
I was just looking at he old calculator on my desk here, and remembered when they brought in the first calculators on my first job. I was a Health Claims Adjuster and before we got the calculators we only had adding machines. They only added and subtracted. Most of the claims we processed involved percentages so we would have to do long division by hand and then check it on a dividing machine that the whole office shared. you would put in the first number and then what you wanted to divide it by and push a button and the top part would hop up and down about 5 minutes and then it would shoot out a printed piece of paper with your answer on it. :o ???
I remember the day they brought in the calculators. Everyone had a box on their desk when we came to work. We opened them and plugged in the calculators and were amazed. We didn't have to stand in line to divide anymore!
I can remember when the IBM selectric typewriter came out. Instead of individual keys it had that little ball that bounced around to type out your words. That was also incredible because you could change the ball for different fonts and make your work different. Kids nowadays don't even know what a typewriter is. Now we have computers and can choose so many options. What things have changed in your lifetime and how did you used to do it?

[edward_4576]

Ye gads, When I took typeing in high school IBM hadn't come out with selectrics yet. We did have a course in Keypuch operation. In school before you could use a calculator you had to be proficent with a slide ruler.

My first calculator was a Bomar Brain and cost $168. Basic four math functions and recipricols.

The first computer I programed was a four bit Altair (i think) that was progrmmed with toggle switches.

TV's still had vacum tubes in them and to fix electronic equipment you didn't need a magnifing glass to see what you were soldering.

[bee_pipes]

...did have a course in Keypuch operation...


Ah yes, the old IBM 029 keypunch. I miss the cards - they made handy note cards in the days before post-it...


...had to be proficent with a slide ruler...


I had a job once (1988 or so) where a bunch of young computer science grads worked under me. One of the other old dinosaurs brought in a slide rule for some reason - I think as a joke - and none of the new grads knew what it was, much less how to use it.

It's like showing a modern teenager a turntable and vinyl record and telling them to play it. They will get confused when they can't find the eject button to open the turntable.


...didn't need a magnifing glass to see what you were soldering....


You could still solder. Nowadays, with surface mount technology, I think you have to bake a circuit board in the oven.

Regards,
Pat

[Deberosa]

Oh my we are dating ourselves!!! Technology has certainly advanced at an alarming rate and has offered incredible opportunity to those who embraced it!

They never even suggested a technology career for me when I graduated from high school. I was a wiz with a slide rule - couldn't afford a calculator. I wanted to be a veterinarian but the counselors "strongly encouraged" me to go into something more "feminine". I started out in vet school but with no support I couldn't go on - I went into teaching, math. Then they stuck an Apple computer in my class and it was a whole new world for me!!! I moved to another school and became the "computer teacher" I had 4 TRS 80's on the counter on the side of the room. They saved their programs on attached cassette recorders. Students would have to take turns, they would have to spend 10 minutes downloading, 10 minutes programing and 10 minutes saving per class! That means they HAD to plan before writing code - gasp!!! Now kids just start slinging code first and ask questions (or fix bugs) later! I think those days made for better programmers. You had to optimize memory so no writing programs so big they took forever to load or needed an even bigger computer to run on or left open memory all over the place that drags down your computer after a while!!!! It's sloppy programming that makes our PC's slow today!!! It's sloppy programming that makes it impossible to use some "shopping carts" and such on the internet! Or have to download patch 384733 to some software!!!!

So while we may have advanced, I think we have also declined in alot of areas of technology. Our expectations are both lower (for quality) and higher (for quantity).

Oh, and don't get me started on the egotistical computer geeks who can't be happy fully utilizing the existing languages but invent yet another one of their own that really has only a portion of the functionality needed so you need another egotistical geeks language to accomdate for those weaknesses, etc. etc. etc. You get a hodgepodge of stuff that only the original geek that wrote it can figure out!!!! ANd then give it your own "cool" names for the same old stuff!!!

In the good old days you learned to maximize the platform you were working with. You knew the systems inside out and how to troubleshoot. Now you just pic a new language and write it over - maybe it will be better this time around. ;-)

I landed in a company who writes modern software the "old fashioned" way. It's very complex but not with new "gizmos" but rather with features and functionality and a well thought out structure that enables someone new to the system to find their way around quickly for coding purposes. It's evolved technology in well planned stages. I have found my home in technology. ;-)

Well, not much to do with self reliance, except it's the technnology career that allows me to work from home now so I can support this homestead until it can be more self supporting. I am glad I entered into it when I did because I think I gained valuable insight into what programming REALLY is - not this clicking on drop downs to build code. ;-)

An old fashioned geek. ;-)

[bee_pipes]

I always wondered what you did - sounded like software from the mention you made of work, here and there.

I was one of those problem children - loved reading, hated school. Dropped out at 17, got a GED and joined the Marines. Got into computers after 3 years and found my niche. I was a tape ape on an IBM system 360 - a warehouse full of computer. I think, historically, they called them 2nd or 3rd generation computers - they used transistors and some chips - like 555 timers and opamps, instead of tubes. They still used magnetic core memory. Another shop down the road had a whopping meg of memory! I think we only had a quarter meg.

Anyway, that first computer job, I discovered nobody read the manuals. They were difficult to plod through, but you only had to read them once to know where everything was. Also learned and operated the peripheral systems that fed the beast - optical character scanner and microfiche output. That was my first encounter with minicomputers.

Next job was working with tactical computers. Got sent to the only shop that did software development in the Marines. The Marines was not considered a branch of the service with a lot of technical jobs - we were a pretty small community with a lot of specialized skills. They had a bunch of Dec computers - PDP 11/70's - used for development and testbed facilities. The dept of the Navy had it's own language - sort of a hybrid cross of pascal, cobol and fortran, because no one commercially available language could handle the stuff they wanted to do. I think they also wanter control of the compiler too. The applications were al concerned with message routing and out primary targets were a network of four 65k computers. Man, that code was compact. Because we didn't have much in the way of our own assets, we had to be able to talk to other branches of the service, gov't agencies and NATO. The systems tied in radar and track information for aircraft. Sometimes modules would need to be rewritten in assembler to free a few k to add new capabilities. The joke always was that someday we'd be writing code on the backplane. I was working as a sw librarian, making the builds and distribution systems. Back then there were no computer science majors - all the programmers were engineers and math majors. Before I left, PCs started showing up - 8088 based XTs, mostly, used as smart terminals. We tended to regard them as glorified video games and toys.

I got out after 10 years - the Marines sobered me up ;D and one day I woke up and said "what the hell am I doing here? Next job was a thing called the Jintaccs/Rainform Translation Unit, as a defense contractor. The target comuter was a MicroVax programmed in Pascal and C. Next job was on the Navy c3 network - anti submarine warfare op center, fleet high level terminal and a couple of others. Back to Navy language. At that time Ashton Tate was making good money on dBase II or III, but there was no real industrial based DB systems. We were writing our own stuff for the applications. Before I left that job, Oracle came out with their first or second release. PCs did not have a working windows system yet and we had to jump through all sorts of hoops for Oracle to get it to run on a 286 with a whopping meg of above board memory.

Kicked around for about 10 years at other odd, computer unrelated jobs, then hung out my own shingle and started writing programs for electronic medical claim submission - didn't realize that was a comming trend. Got hired by WebMD to work on one of their clearinghouses. Windows was out by then, doing well - Win 3.3, I think. I was writing in Clipper - a compileable, linkable version of AT's dBase. Very easy language to use and version 5 was very powerful. We were writing for batch processing - data in, crunch and chew, data(s) out. No user interface to worry about - the data is either right, or rejected. We used a network of 486 computers and could run circles around the other clearinghouses running on big iron mainframes. They laughed at us because it was PC based, but every time their code hosed up claims, we had to write utilities to fix their problems and claims would be routed through us to fix them. Nimble was the word we used to describe our ability to react to problems.

We looked at a couble of other languages to replace Clipper, but technology had moved on. Clipper died around 1990 - Nantucket sold out to some outfit that was looking to other segments of the market. You are right - modern languages are sloppy and bloated. It is also difficult to make the paradigm (?) shift from batch or procedural to object oriented programming. I did some work in Ada, one of the first OOPs, and hated the gross inefficiencies built into it. If I wanted a window, it was easier and more efficient to write one, rather than dragging all the bagage along with the window object. You use a bunch of objects, and the programmer basically becomes a glorified operater - learning how to operate the object, rather than writing code. The applications have a bunch of code in them that never gets used, require tremendous amounts of memory and storage, crash mysteriously in a multitasking environment, and it is the absolute devil to recreate the conditions that caused the crash.

When I retired I had a staff of 10 folks working under me. One old timer that predated me, and a bunch of kids. The kids were sort of resentful that we did not use one of the new, sexy languages. They tried using visual basic once - I dislike anything that tries to manage source code for me and won't let me get in to make simple tweaks.

You are right Deberosa. Hurry up and get things paid off. Earning a living sitting in front of a computer is not a good thing. Times are moving on and I no longer wish to play with this new generation of whiz-bang-visual programmers.

Regards,
Pat

[Deberosa]

Yeah, I started out with Basic on the Apple and TRS 80, then punch cards for grade maintenance for Denver Public schools (they pulled me out of the classroom one Friday afternoon because the guy that did it had a heart attack and I was the only one capable of doing the work they new of that was also "Non-Political", it was a very political position and they didn't want to give up some kind of power. ;-)

When I was there they were converting to Mapper on UNISYS and I got the training the other guy would have gotten. I was better than their "regular" programmers, surprise surprise and I picked it up fast. I soon was writing custom applications in Mapper for "De-segregation" for Gifted and Talented, bussing, etc for that district - yuck - so went to Cherry Creek Schools after a stint in Private industry and there I learned AdaBase Natural, then on to Child Welfare system in Colorado in same platform but migrated to Oracle. Then on to implement the current software I am working on as the customer in Washington. Held out for a work from home job with the vendor. So all big iron, huge system kind of software work. All being in the right place and grabbing the opportunities when I could. And alot of long hours taking the jobs the guys wouldn't want to touch!

[edward_4576]

Crystal radios................... ;D

[annabella1]

beepipes,
I laughed when I read about you "reading the manuals" Here at work we have a camera security system. I am the only one here who knows how to run it. One of the big shots asked how I learned to operate it so well. My boss who doesn't know a thing, answered for me. He said, he knew that I worked at other sites that used this type of equipment and that I was very experienced. Later we got in a discussion about the equipment and I said yes, I had training, I took 45 minutes and read the manual.

[cubcadet]

If this thread is still being read, I`ll throw in my 2 centavos. In the early `70`s, my dad worked for a computer outfit called EBS, out of California, but we lived in West Caldwell, NJ, at the time. Dad would bring me to work sometimes and would put me to work in a large air conitioned room de-collating printouts, on a machine which took the top copy apart from a sheet of carbon paper and under that, a `carbon copy`, and the top copy, carbon paper, and bottom copy apart They each would all go in a separate box. The carbon paper would go in the garbage. Those rooms had big computers lining the walls, they all looked like Lost in Space props, in retrospect. My dad`s job was to load boxes of punch cards into a delivery van and drive to JFK Airport, where those boxes were flown a over, I guess, to other mainframes. Information flowed much slower in them days. The most memorable thing I remember was a guy my dad said flew all the way from California to clean and service the computers, which, I seem to remember made alot of noise and generated alot of heat. They undoubtedly had alot of moving parts. That was why the room was air conditioned. But what is most surprising to me at the time was that guy made over $600.00 an hour doing what he did. It occurs to me now that that company was somehow connected with the aerospace industry, or the military, to be able to pay 6 bills an hour to a guy who basically was a vacuum cleaner operator.

[annabella1]

speaking of carbon copies my uncle Raymond had a guy come into the newspaper where he worked with an idea for a machine that made photographic copies. He was looking for investors. My Uncle said "why would anyone pay so much money for a machine when they could use carbon paper for less than a penny apiece." It was the company that was to become Xerox. My dad worked with the FAA with those big computers that filled many rooms with the keypunch cards and huge reels of magnetic recording tape. When there was the energy crisis in the early 70's the government mandated that the thermostats be set at 68 in the wintertime to cut back on the heating oil. The problem was that the computers put off so much heat that if the thermostats were set at 68 the air conditioners would come on. It made an even greater waste of fuel.

[cubcadet]

Very cool info annabella1,
I used to go with my dad to JFK airport. For a young teenager in my town, it was a treat.
I remember the reels of tape going around and around on those machines. I remember the piles of carbon paper in the garbage. How my hands would get covered with black carbon from that stuff. No wonder those machines had to get cleaned so often.

[Cutter]

Remember in High School when you had to learn to use a slide rule. And to think they used them to go to the moon. When was the last time you saw anyone use one?

[cubcadet]

Hey ,Cutter
High school was the last time when I saw a slide rule about 1976. We had computers in school, but I personally never even saw them. They had them in a special room and you had to be in a special computer class to even use them. I only started using a pc in about `03.

[dryflyshaman]

hmm, plastic shotgun shells so ya didnt have to be quite so careful about the damp gettin to em.

better bearings and metals so you didnt have to tear down a chainsaw every night and rebuild it for the next day's work.

a pickup truck with an automatic transmission(holy smokes!)

electric sausage grinder so us kids didnt have to stand there for HOURS grinding up meats for sausage.

ditto electric ice cream makers.

individually wrapped cheese slices!

texas instruments ti-something(omg this was awesome! no more slide rules!)

the ruger 10-22! a automatic(semi) rifle for kids with a CLIP, just like the army men!(yeah, we called everything a clip back then) course i didnt have one, but i knew dey existed and that kept me frothed up pretty good. best i had was a winchester model 190 loaned from a brother in law.

ZEBCO reels! im pretty sure they was around already, but to have the dad go out and actually buy him an me each an 808 and a 404 was da bomb! bye bye cane poles and those ole backlashing shakespeares!(now i consider my cane flyrods to be da bomb, funny how some things you go back!)