Comment by Stratoscope | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Stratoscope | Hacker News Reader

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My first job was Night Operator at Transdata, a dial-up timesharing company in Phoenix, for the summer of 1969, earning $2/hour.

The fun part was that they turned off the timesharing service at night - but they didn't want to power down the Sigma 5 for fear that it might not start back up in the morning. There were occasional overnight batch jobs to run, but mostly I didn't have much to do.

I already knew BASIC, having punched programs on paper tape in high school to run on Transdata's service (which was how we got acquainted). I found a copy of the Algol-60 report at the office and thought it looked interesting, so I read it, tried out a bunch of programs, and learned Algol.

Then I found an assembly language and opcode reference for the Sigma 5, which was fascinating. There were plenty of blank cards to punch, so I learned machine language too.

I could have just sat back and done the night operator job and not much else, but man, there were such interesting things to fill in the rest of that time. And it's stayed interesting ever since.

Of course that was an unusual situation, and I suppose not one you could repeat now. After all, how often do you get a chance to have a whole computer all to yourself?

I was 8 years old in 1970. My dad was working for NCR in Waltham, Mass. He'd bring home a honkin' huge teletype and an acoustic coupler on the weekends. I taught myself BASIC and got hooked on Hamurabi [0], my first computer game vice.

How much paper did all of us go through back then?

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamurabi

A lot of paper!

Do you remember the first time you saw one of those newfangled "glass teletypes"? A terminal that printed out your typing and the mainframe's reply on a CRT instead of paper?

Was your first thought anything like mine: "How do I look back at what I was working on a few minutes ago? There's no roll of paper piled up behind the machine! How do I see my printouts?"

You know, I honestly can't recall my first glass teletype. I'm younger than you are so maybe it seemed like a natural evolution at the time.

I left the computer world in the late 70s when I discovered girls, music and partying. I came back to it the 80s when I learned about networked computers. Even through all of the intervening years, my coding still sucks. ; )

Yes, I used a video display terminal for the first time in a computer lab full of strange gear at MIT 40 years ago. The computer had to have its initial boot loader loaded from a strip of perforated paper tape. The terminal had characters "drawn" by the crt tube's electron beam. If there were a lot of characters on the screen the first few lines would start to fade before the e-beam was able to back to the top of the screen. By keeping the overhead room lights off, we could see almost a full 24 lines of 40 character. It seemed so advanced compared to the punch cards that I'd used for years before. Those were the days!

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