One for the Old School geeks

[MarkD]

I can recall the thermal-paper fax machines. I hated the feel of that stuff and any time I got a fax would immediately photo-copy it onto plain paper.

In college I dialed into the school computer with a acoustic coupler running at 300 baud.

[TheArmsman]

When I went into the Marine Corps back in '81, had to learn how to read ticker tape, and use Q & Z signals.

ZIG/ZUG

[JustinR]

To show the age of that humor, the first question would be "Who the hell is Cameron Diaz?"
And where, once again, the answer "ancient technology" would suffice to explain.

Well that just makes me feel old. However it might have been my BIL commenting yesterday on the grey hair I'm getting actually.

My first computer experiences were with an Apple II and IIgs. Then we got my Grandparent's Leading Edge MS-DOS computer. My father has previously mentioned punch cards from when he was in college...

[MarkD]

My father has previously mentioned punch cards from when he was in college...

I USED punch cards during my freshman year in college. Damn, I feel almost as old as when a bartender told me I'm a couple years younger than her father.

[Aesop]

When I first worked at Big Aerospace Company, they had us using a fax machine that had a chamber with a rotating cylinder. You put the sheet of paper in and this sensor would gradually track from one end of the cylinder to the other, reading or printing the image on the paper. Sort of like an Edison phonograph with the wax cylinders. And this was in 1983!
As a coworker said once, "We just make high-tech stuff -- we don't use it."

Drum scanners are still used extensively in the imaging and press industry.

But probably not first-editions of that equipment.

I passed my statistics lab for poli sci as an upperclassman by designing a political survey, and coding the responses myself onto punch cards.
(Notably, most surveys of and before that time were limited to the 80 columns of possible responses on a standard IBM card.)
Long before Apple was invented in a garage, a high school lunch period was playing "Hammurabi" and "Lunar lander" after feeding lovingly handled punch tape into the reader to upload the entire program, which was essentially video games for blind people.
OTOH, as my first computer was a C64, I had a 25" color monitor decades before you could buy one elsewhere as computer hardware, because it used a broadcast TV screen for the purpose.

The hard part was keeping the oxen walking around in circles to generate power for the TV in the years before steam engines, as I remind my college freshman niece.

[308Mike]

I remember running a BBS (WWIV), and how ZModem was the best for uploading and downloading GIF files, and a 49k file was considered moderate size! I thought my 16.8 modem was pretty hot while most everyone else was running 14.4!! Remember when windy days could drop your connections?

[skb12172]

My first was a TI 99/4A in elementary school.

[PawPaw]

Punch cards? The very first computer programming course I took was to learn Fortran in college. (Spetember '71?) The local college didn't have a computer of any type on-site, so we'd put our programs on punch cards and send them to Baton Rouge to be run on the computer at LSU. Then, a week later, we'd get our printouts, then we'd debug, and send the cards again. Rinse, lather, repeat. It took some guys all semester to write and debug one program.

[Weetabix]

I just barely missed some of that. My dad coded on punch cards, and we were always happy when he'd bring us a card with our names punched on it.

In school, we'd code and submit the coded file to the IT guys to run the programs. I don't think they translated to punch cards.

Although, some of the programs I use still (e.g. HEC1) run batch files where the input is coded one line per "card" with fields in each card. They just took the old code and replaced cards with lines in an input file.

I also regularly use a circular slide rule for calculating gravity flow in pipes. Mine is from the NCPI, but I don't think they make them any more.

[Lokidude]

I feel like such a kid... I know the sound of a modem handshake just fine, remember getting on Prodigy as a kid, because there really was no internet as we know it. I had a Bernoulli box, and remember getting laughed at for installing a 500mb HDD and a 4x CD rom drive, because who the hell needed all that space and speed?

Never used punch cards or tape drives. I learned to code in C++, Basic, and I think a little COBOL. I could also do HTML by hand, and did, for a long time.