[dba-Tech] What got you interested in technology? IT's rich andfamous share their memories

Rocky Smolin rockysmolin at bchacc.com
Fri Nov 18 13:03:04 CST 2011


 
My first box?  IBM 7090 - rotating drum memory.  Behind a glass wall - punch
the cards, turn in the cards, return the next day to find out where you left
out a comma.  Punch the cards, turn in the cards.  Return the next day to
find out where you left out the /.

I was hooked.

Next machine IBM 1620. With hard drives!!! :)

R

-----Original Message-----
From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Jim Lawrence
Sent: Friday, November 18, 2011 10:38 AM
To: 'Discussion of Hardware and Software issues'
Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] What got you interested in technology? IT's rich
andfamous share their memories

I first got involved with a Commodore64 computer. The main chip was a 6510
MOS CPU not to be confused with a 6502 as it had four registers in the BIOS
that were none volatile. A programmer could actually use a total of 128K...a
massive amount of memory. 

For us geeks we would cycle through the base 64K and copy the entire OS up
into the secondary memory storage area, seed the non-volatile registers and
then reboot. The 64K would be repopulated but the system would reset through
the register and run the system from the hidden RAM. 

The 1541 disk-drive had a huge storage capacity (160K). With a little bit of
soldering, these drives could be stacked as the IO channels could be set
from 8 to 12. The most units that I ever attached together was 3. (A toggle
switch could be setup to top of the drive to hot-swap IO channels.

The biggest thrill I ever got was when I assembler coded a driver which
could stop and start the floppy drive and position the heads on any location
on the floppy surface. That was the beginning of a hard coded fixed length
database that could access any record within one second. Eventually, I hand
coded, in assembler, a video store program.

That application took months of work and it was all done so I could get free
movies for us and the kids. I learned how to code search routines, sorting
routines and build data compression algorithms (very important when you have
little storage capacity). 

After that, I learned my lesson and never programmed another app in
assembler. 

A company in Britain, quite independantly, build a database along similar
lines called SuperBase...absolutely brilliant and in its time was
unsurpassed in performance. The company survived into the Windows age but
has disappeared as it had no advertisement budget.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superbase_database)

Jim      

-----Original Message-----
From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Arthur Fuller
Sent: Friday, November 18, 2011 5:12 AM
To: Discussion of Hardware and Software issues
Subject: [dba-Tech] What got you interested in technology? IT's rich and
famous share their memories

Luminaries Vint Cerf, Michael Dell, Stephen Elop (Nokia), William Gibson,
Noel Sharkey (Professor of AI and Robotics at the University of Sheffield),
Richard Stallman and others reminisce about their early computing
experiences:

http://www.silicon.com/technology/hardware/2011/11/16/what-got-you-intereste
d-in-technology-its-rich-and-famous-share-their-memories-39748104/

--
Arthur
Cell: 647.710.1314

Thirty spokes converge on a hub
but it's the emptiness
that makes a wheel work
   -- from the Daodejing
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