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AGGGHHH the dark ages

 
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My new job involes maintaining the C (k&r) server, i hate writing C
it is like pulling teeth, come back eclipse i miss you
 
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But you can write C in Eclipse!
 
Wendy L Gibbons
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Jesper de Jong wrote:But you can write C in Eclipse!



I installed the plugin, and it made file seach crash eclipse every time I used it.
 
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you kids are spoiled today with your fancy IDEs and debuggers. In my day, all we had was printf(), and we LIKED it that way!!!
 
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Luxury! We used to have to debug for 48 hours at a stretch using nothing but a pencil and piece of string, while the project manager beat us round the head with electrical cable.
 
Wendy L Gibbons
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fred rosenberger wrote:you kids are spoiled today with your fancy IDEs and debuggers. In my day, all we had was printf(), and we LIKED it that way!!!



5 years ago I was happy with fprintf, actually we can debug in *whispers* visual studio
 
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I used to code in Assembler and we simply had no way to "display" stuff for debugging purposes since it was code for a phone switch (no concept of a console there). Anyway, maybe www.bloodshed.net might be an option to work with your C code... not sure?
 
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You whippersnappers with your fancy electronic brains! In my day, debugging meant chasing the termites out of the abaqus beads, and a megabyte was something a particularly obnoxious termite might do.
 
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Ernest Friedman-Hill wrote:You whippersnappers with your fancy electronic brains! In my day, debugging meant chasing the termites out of the abaqus beads, and a megabyte was something a particularly obnoxious termite might do.



Don't forget the [variant of the] classic line .... "when I was a young coder, I walked uphill, in the snow, both ways, to get to work".

Henry
 
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My first IDE:


There was no code completion.
 
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Bear Bibeault wrote: There was no code completion.



I remember typewriters in those days did not have it.
 
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My first IDE. You kids are so spoiled.

 
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Bear Bibeault wrote:My first IDE:
(pdp-11/40 image)
There was no code completion.



One of the things I liked about the pdp-11 was that the instruction set lent itself to octal notation, which you can input with one hand on the numeric keypad, as opposed to obnoxious-to-type hexadecimal.

; Add 42 (52 octal) to register 1
062701
000052

(I did have to use Google to remind myself that 06 was ADD, but I did remember that 27 is the auto-increment mode on the Program Counter..)
 
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Ryan McGuire wrote:

Bear Bibeault wrote:My first IDE:
(pdp-11/40 image)
There was no code completion.



One of the things I liked about the pdp-11 was that the instruction set lent itself to octal notation, which you can input with one hand on the numeric keypad, as opposed to obnoxious-to-type hexadecimal.

; Add 42 (52 octal) to register 1
062701
000052

(I did have to use Google to remind myself that 06 was ADD, but I did remember that 27 is the auto-increment mode on the Program Counter..)



are you reallly THAT OLD!!! haven't you died yet
 
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Yes, I'm that old. You entered the boot sequence via the front panel by entering the machine code instructions in binary via the toggles. I vividly remember when the first self-booting computers were considered a marvel.
 
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I remember my BASIC code was in little round holes on yellow paper tape which I had to roll with a little winder rather like a fishing reel.
I remember the TTY (Teletype) which had separate keys called LF for Line Feed and CR for Campbell Ritchie. We actually had to push CR then LF to get onto the next line.
 
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Wendy Gibbons wrote: . . . are you reallly THAT OLD!!! haven't you died yet

Have you been taking lessons from Janeice delVecchio?
 
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Wendy Gibbons wrote:haven't you died yet


Yeah, thanks for the good wishes.
 
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Bear Bibeault wrote:

Wendy Gibbons wrote:haven't you died yet


Yeah, thanks for the good wishes.


It's a bit like listening to war stories from my grandparents. Fascinating, listen to it for hours, and finding it hard to believe how different things were "back then".
 
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Koen Aerts wrote:

Bear Bibeault wrote:

Wendy Gibbons wrote:haven't you died yet


Yeah, thanks for the good wishes.


It's a bit like listening to war stories from my grandparents. Fascinating, listen to it for hours, and finding it hard to believe how different things were "back then".



Sit back you young whippersnapper and let me tell you about the System/360 that I worked on that had 16K of memory. Not megabytes, kilobytes. And the memory looked like this:



Those wires are the read/write lines. Ah, the good ol' days.
 
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that was "core memory" wasn't it (just checked and it was), it was taught in the history section of my course, and that was 85, along with bubble memory.
Could it be described as solid-state, therefore the newist in thing...
 
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Great. Now my IT career is being covered in history class. <sigh>

Yes, core memory was a huge advancement over relays or vacuum tubes, so it was high-tech stuff. Now your cellphone has far more computing power than that entire System/360 every dreamed of.
 
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During the interview for my first job out of school (Diagnostic Engineer), one of the hardware engineers I interviews with showed me a "hex card" of the latest memory that they'd developed. A "hex card" was about a foot wide and 1 1/2 feet long. They were all excited because they'd managed to fit 128K on the board. 128K! A phenomenal amount of memory in those days.
 
Wendy L Gibbons
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Jk Robbins wrote:Great. Now my IT career is being covered in history class. <sigh>

Yes, core memory was a huge advancement over relays or vacuum tubes, so it was high-tech stuff. Now your cellphone has far more computing power than that entire System/360 every dreamed of.


was being covered in a history module in 1987
 
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I actually found a picture of the board:



128K! All on that one board! Amazing! (Actually, it was at the time.)
 
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at college we had some removeable hard drives (winchesters), they were 12" diameter, came in stacks of 5 on had 30mb capacity. You needed a heavy lifting certificate to change them
 
J. Kevin Robbins
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Wendy Gibbons wrote:

Jk Robbins wrote:Great. Now my IT career is being covered in history class. <sigh>

Yes, core memory was a huge advancement over relays or vacuum tubes, so it was high-tech stuff. Now your cellphone has far more computing power than that entire System/360 every dreamed of.


was being covered in a history module in 1987



Thanks Wendy, I feel MUCH better now.
 
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I wonder what kids these days are being taught as history, hard drives less than 1GB, phones that only made phone calls
 
Ernest Friedman-Hill
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The first hard drive I bought with my own money was an external 20MB SCSI drive. The housing was considerably bigger than a Mac Mini.

I had it partitioned into two 10MB volumes; that way I could back up each half on one box of 800K floppies (if I avoided filling it up completely, of course.)

It sounded like a diesel Volkswagen.

It cost $500.
 
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Koen Aerts wrote:

Bear Bibeault wrote:

Wendy Gibbons wrote:haven't you died yet


Yeah, thanks for the good wishes.


It's a bit like listening to war stories from my grandparents. Fascinating, listen to it for hours, and finding it hard to believe how different things were "back then".

You kids don't appreciate what you have. Your hip grandparents already had jazz, swing (the music, not the GUI toolkit), airplanes and electric lights. Back in _my_ day, grandparents told stories about gas lights and plowing with mule-power.
 
Jesper de Jong
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Bear Bibeault wrote:There was no code completion.


But you did have syntax color highlighting! (Those colorful buttons).
 
Bear Bibeault
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Yes, pink and purple were very en vogue in the 70's!

As were ochre and orange:
 
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Excellent thread guys, mentioning that my first computer was a ZX spectrum really doesn't compete with some of the tales on here!
 
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As a kid, I owned (and could use) an abacus before I owned a calculator. Does that count?
 
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Ernest Friedman-Hill wrote:The first hard drive I bought with my own money was an external 20MB SCSI drive. ...It cost $500.


My father talks about the computer Bell Labs bought in the 60's (he was working there at the time as a grad student). they paid $2million U.S. for it. Half was for the computer, and half was for the 'bonus memory package'. For the extra million, they got 1MB of memory.

Think about that...$1 PER BYTE...in 1960's dollars.

An online converter says that would be about $7.20 per byte in today's dollars.
 
Wendy L Gibbons
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that explains the Y2K problem, i wouldn't pay $2 for 2 extra (useless) digits in a year
 
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fred rosenberger wrote:you kids are spoiled today with your fancy IDEs and debuggers. In my day, all we had was printf(), and we LIKED it that way!!!


Kids. In my day, you had cards. C had not been invented.
 
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Jk Robbins wrote:Sit back you young whippersnapper and let me tell you about the System/360 that I worked on that had 16K of memory. Not megabytes, kilobytes. And the memory looked like this:

Those wires are the read/write lines. Ah, the good ol' days.



Core memory. Invented by An Wang
It was way expensive. I worked at a company that in 1977 bought a DEC-20 system with 256KW of core memory. roughly 1.2 megabytes of core.
We are talking $400K for the memory alone.
 
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So all you old timers, what kind of applications did you write with all these wonderful machines? I mean surely web applications were out of the question (was the net even available then?)
 
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