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Things your kids will never know - old school tech!

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Darwin:
I hear, you, Zaine. I'm frequently amazed from the perspective of realizing that many things I think of as being relatively recent innovations were available back then. Car phones, for example.

J-Mac:
Does anyone remember the brick phone. I remember my first mobile phone / car phone it was bigger then a brick and just as heavy.
-Davidtheo (November 03, 2008, 03:48 AM)
--- End quote ---

Yup!  I purchased two Ultra Classics from Southern Bell in 1992. Our house literally came down around - and on - us during Hurricane Andrew. After getting our children up to PA for medical attention (our local hospitals were also down), my wife and I still worked and lived at, believe it or not, the nuclear power plant where I worked, and that was the only way to keep in touch during some unbelievable craziness.



Compared to todays mobile devices those things were large and heavy - but they were also lifesavers!

Jim

Davidtheo:
My first Phone looked a lot like this one, and no one would call me course it cost to much to phone it. haha

dwbrant:

OK - since this is DonationCoder, how about ridiculously obsolete computer languages that you spent time learning but will never use again? For me:


* Assemblers: Z80, 6502, IBM 370, PDP-11
* APL (here and here)
* SNOBOL
* TIF (not graphics but a DB platform for IBM mainframes, kinda analogous to Access. I can't even find a web page for it)
* FORTRAN
* Rexx - scripting language for IBM mainframes and OS/2. Pretty cool, actually, anticipating some of the features of today's dynamic languages. Here, here, and here. Internally, IBM had a visual tool for building client-server apps in Rexx, internally called "Red October" iirc, that could have been a VB-killer, but they never released it -- letting it die just like OS/2-CWuestefeld (October 22, 2008, 10:12 AM)
--- End quote ---

Ouch!  I use ReXX daily in my mainframe automation job (OPS/MVS).  If I wasn't so lazy, I would use it on the PC too. 

And IBM did release "Red October", AKA Object Rexx.  The IDE is ok for an IDE made in 1998.

dwbrant:
I wonder if anyone else here remembers the ITT SPE (International Telephone and Telegraph Stored Program Element)?

It was a specialized computer designed in the mid-50's and built in the early 1960s, used to facilitate communications between the USAF Headquarters, Strategic Air Command and the numerous missile bases throughout the United States.  It had 64k of core memory -- when the thing was decommissioned in 1989, I got to see the core memory; little iron circles -- "cores" -- with a copper wire running through them.  The command console itself was around 14 feet long, and there was no such thing as a "keyboard" -- we used PBIs (Push Button Indicators) to enter commands in octal, then pressed a button labeled "GO" at the end of the row of PBIs to make the machine process the command.  There was a very large, loud line printer which kept an audit log of commands entered.

It used reel tape drives which were so tall that we had to stand on stepladders to mount a tape.

It used rows and rows of drum storage; this was a predecessor to disk drives -- magnetic storage where the magnetic surface was on a drum which rotated around, and the heads moved up and down over the rotating surface.

It used patch panels, much like old-style telephone switchboards, to translate between actual hardware and "logical" hardware.

It filled a room that was easily twice the size of a US football field.

And man it was loud.

Ironically, when it was decommissioned in 1989, the system that took its job over was an IBM series-1 customized and called "SACDIN" ... which was itself created in 1977. ;D

I will have to post a few photos I have of the console when I have the chance to dig them up.

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