Yo DB
john.ku...@sympatico.ca
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081127.whawking1127/BNStory/National/home?cid=al_gam_mostview
Bill Penrose
<john.kulczy...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
> Hawking will be just up the road from me.http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081127.whawking1...
And to think when I was a student at McMaster, we used to tell
Waterloo jokes. So imagine my surprise when I blunder across Waterloo
Fortran during my post-doc work and find it a huge improvement over
the IBM version. They've come a long way in a short time with some
wise planning and a lot of money.
DB
(Don't forget to get Hawking to say 'Sister Suzie sews shirts for
shell-shocked sailors' six times fast.)
john.ku...@sympatico.ca
Were those jokes about UW or Waterloo Lutheran ( now called Wilfred
Laurier )?
Bill Penrose
<john.kulczy...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
> > (Don't forget to get Hawking to say 'Sister Suzie sews shirts for
> > shell-shocked sailors' six times fast.)
>
> Were those jokes about UW or Waterloo Lutheran ( now called Wilfred
> Laurier )?
I don't remember. They were so long ago, I get them confused with
Cathar jokes.
Our official rival was Guelph, but there was some to spread around to
the 'smaller' colleges.
boots
>On Nov 27, 6:38 pm, "Koolchi...@smurfsareus.xxx"
><john.kulczy...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
>> Hawking will be just up the road from me.http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081127.whawking1...
>
>And to think when I was a student at McMaster, we used to tell
>Waterloo jokes. So imagine my surprise when I blunder across Waterloo
>Fortran during my post-doc work and find it a huge improvement over
>the IBM version. They've come a long way in a short time with some
>wise planning and a lot of money.
What are you talking about, Bill? Waterloo Fortran was introduced in
the early 1970s and it was better than IBM's version from the go.
--
Don't read this crap... oops, too late!
[superstitious heathen grade 8]
john.ku...@sympatico.ca
I was using Waterloo Fortran in '77, on an IBM 380<?>. The Economics
department was all excited because they were going to get their own
PDP11, and I think they were going to run Pascal on it along with
SPSS.
Sounds like ancient history.
john.ku...@sympatico.ca
Shoot I forgot the joke!
"Have you seen Pascal running?" (Econ Student)
"Yes I have!" (Computer nerd)
"Well whivh wahy did he go?" (Econ Student)
john.ku...@sympatico.ca
Itchy trigger finger this morning.
"Have you seen Pascal running?"
"Yes I have!" (Computer nerd)
"Well which way did he go?"
Bill Penrose
> Bill Penrose <dangerousb...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >On Nov 27, 6:38 pm, "Koolchi...@smurfsareus.xxx"
> ><john.kulczy...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
> >> Hawking will be just up the road from me.http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081127.whawking1...
>
> >And to think when I was a student at McMaster, we used to tell
> >Waterloo jokes. So imagine my surprise when I blunder across Waterloo
> >Fortran during my post-doc work and find it a huge improvement over
> >the IBM version. They've come a long way in a short time with some
> >wise planning and a lot of money.
>
> What are you talking about, Bill? Waterloo Fortran was introduced in
> the early 1970s and it was better than IBM's version from the go.
Yep. I was at McMaster 1961-65 and returned in 1969. I first
encountered WF at U of Toronto in 70-72. It was still in use when I
went to work at Argonne in 1980.
DB
boots
We were using WATFOR from punched cards running on an IBM 1620 before,
or around, 1970. "Ancient"? Hey, watch that, I'm only "old" so far.
boots
Bill Penrose
If you can remember WATFOR, you're old. If you can remember punched
cards, you're ancient.
DB
Towse
> If you can remember punched cards, you're ancient.
exCUSE me?
--
Sal
Ye olde swarm of links: thousands of links for writers, researchers and
the terminally curious <http://writers.internet-resources.com>
Bill Penrose
> Ye olde swarm of links: thousands of links for writers, researchers and
> the terminally curious <http://writers.internet-resources.com>
Time's winge'd chariot, and all that.
I remember mercury delay lines as computer memory. Can you?
DB
Towse
I don't remember that, but his nibs, who was node three on ARPANET,
does. He also remembers Magnasee from back when, which I never used. He
don't do much of that no more neither. Dinosaurs still walk the earth.
--
Sal
boots
boots
>Bill Penrose wrote:
>
>> If you can remember punched cards, you're ancient.
>
>exCUSE me?
"Well hello Old girl!"
<g>
boots
Really? I don't remember those at all. Why, you must be older than
dinosaurs, uncle Bill! <g>
Bill Penrose
> Really? I don't remember those at all. Why, you must be older than
> dinosaurs, uncle Bill! <g>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_delay_line_memory
Data were stored as a string of acoustic pulses in a tube of mercury.
That was when computers had as much as 4K of working memory.
DB
$Zero
4K.
that's fricken' hilarious.
in my pocket, at this very moment, is a ridiculously thin digital
camera memory chip which is no larger than a quarter, albeit
rectangular in its area usage.
4 gigabytes.
yep.
and i went for the cheaper one.
for $100, i could have gotten many more gigabytes in the same-sized
chip.
which, at those prices, makes you wonder how they can afford to pay
their workers extra to fill those bigger gigabytes in there.
heh.
-$Zero...
why, when i was growing up, it took about a week to get a
roll of pictures developed. and it cost me nearly a whole
week's worth of paper route money to do so.
http://groups.google.com/group/misc.writing/msg/cac5a4ccaf6bc9c4
Bill Penrose
> ...in my pocket, at this very moment, is a ridiculously thin digital
> camera memory chip which is no larger than a quarter, albeit
> rectangular in its area usage.
Consider that 4 G will store everything you wrote and will write, and
still have 4 gigs left over.
Some things have advanced so far in the past 60 years, it's hard to
wrap my brain around it.
When I started summer work in a University lab in the summer of 1963,
I was given hundreds of error calculations to do, involving square
roots and long division. I worked by hand until I discovered the
presence of a mechanical calculator in the Theoretical Physics
department. It was about the size of a cash register. I punched in
numbers and hit a key, and an electric motor turned all the gears and
clanked and buzzed. It would even do roots. When it stopped, I wrote
down the number that appeared in the little row of windows. Each
calculation took 30 minutes by hand and three minutes by calculator.
It was a friggin miracle.
In 1964, they moved an early IBM 360 into the Engineering building, in
a room with a display window and a little tiny window like a Dairy
Queen where you handed through your stack of Hollerith cards and got
back your printed output a day later. A friend of mine was an IBM
service engineer. He used an AM radio to listen to the 500 kilohertz
clock of the computer. He could tell by the sound whether the computer
was executing its test routines or had hit a fault.
By 1970, we had access to the U of Toronto medical school's own
computer via Teletype. This was a big deal because you could feed it
punched paper tape from some of our instruments, and never have to
transcribe your data by hand, or sit at a card punch. You could store
your results on more punched tape. I did error calculations similar to
those I'd done seven years later, but now it took no longer to do than
waiting for the Teletype to do its thing.
In 1973, in Newfoundland and flush with research money, we bought a
programmable desk calculator made by Wang. We could write and store
complex programs on a little magnetic card.
In 1974, I got a four banger hand calculator.
In 1980, at Argonne, IL, I was back to punched cards again, but in
1982, we got those Texas Instruments portable teletypes. This was
another miracle because I could take it home at night and work there
over the phone line, or punch tape to read in the next day.
By 1984, we were using microcomputers for instrument development. They
were pre-IBM models with 8 inch floppy disks. But they were miraculous
in their speed and capability.
After that, things got faster as the PCs appeared everywhere. I bought
my first personal computer, a PC Jr, around 1986 with the royalties
from a book -- on designed computerized instruments!
DB
Towse
In 1979-80 his nibs and I paid $1200 for a 5MB external drive for our
Apple II+. Big honking box, it was. We were thrilled to dickens to have
that much storage.
--
Sal