"Ahem A Rivet's Shot"  wrote in message
news:20200102170101.2f968aa3615b07006c5442d6@eircom.net...
> On Thu, 2 Jan 2020 13:51:58 -0000
> "NY"  wrote:
>
>> It's scary to think that there was a time when ZIP discs were the best
>> portable format
>
> Heck when I started learning programming paper tape was the best
> portable format, when I started working at it 8 inch floppies were.
> Compared to them ZIP drives were wonderful.

My first introduction to programming (in BASIC) was on a summer course for
schoolchildren at ICL's Beaumont training centre near Old Windsor in the
long hot summer of 1976. We had to program by writing one character in each
box of a "coding sheet" which was then transcribed to paper tape by an
operator, taken by road to a computer centre somewhere near Heathrow (I
remember us being taken there one evening), and the results were returned as
fanfold listing paper the following day. I remember another day we went to
an ICL site which had a huge computer hall with orange "wardrobes", tape
drives and "spin drier" removable disc drives; it was only about 15 years
later when I started working for ICL that I discovered that it was "the
goldfish bowl" at the BRA01 site in Bracknell; my desk in my last role at
ICL was looking through the wired glass into the machine hall, though it had
had its last mainframe removed a good few years earlier.

After the ICL course, my parents wangled for me to use a mini computer at a
teacher-training college near where we lived. The BASIC interpreter was
loaded from a very long roll of paper tape - usually by a reader that sensed
light passing through the holes or obstructed by them, but occasionally by a
mechanical "row of needles" reader if the fast reader was broken. It took
about 45 minutes to load the interpreter using the mechanical reader.

By the time I was using the Research Machines 380Z at my next school, we had
progressed to audio tape. It wasn't until I got my own micro (a Transam
Wren) that I saw my first 5 1/4" floppy - 180 KB, I think: half the 360 KB
of the later IBM PC floppy format on the same disk.

I decided that I could afford the upgrade from 16 KB (!) to 256 KB of RAM,
but I couldn't afford the upgrade from 2 floppies to 1 floppy and a 5 MB
hard drive. That was in 1981: I remember driving into central London to
collect it not many months after I passed my driving test, and with only a
paper map to guide me and not a satnav, of course.

The advances of technology in those 40-odd years have been staggering, but
then they were just as staggering in going from the first computers used at
Bletchley Park to the computers of the mid-70s.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05