You know you've gotten old when...

[JimS]

... when you can remember programming on punch cards...  and memory was a pile of wires strung through a bigger pile of little iron donuts.

[JimS]

Good old core memory, AKA LOLRAM (Little Old Lady Random, not Laugh Out Loud). You know, it wasn't particularly slow, either.

I actually installed a machine like that back When Dinosaurs Walked the Earth (tm) . The B6700 mainframe used magnetic core memory. A whopping 6MB... It came as modules of 32k x 20bits. Two boards sandwiched together - like the A1000 & WCS daughterboard on steroids. One had the memory cores and the other the electronics. All for the low low price of $32,000. ;-) I managed to repair one in the field, but they didn't approve of it. Fun Stuff..

[JimS]

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
    - Thomas Watson (1874-1956), Chairman of IBM, 1943

[JimS]

You know you've gotten old when...

You remember flipping the switches on one of these:

I had a homebrew version of the Altair... I got so bored with flipping switches that I went out and and bought an Atari 800.  I sometimes wish I'd sprung the $666.66 to buy the Apple 1 when I had the chance...  I heard one sold on ebay for $30,000