WTF - now I feel old :(

[motorollin]

Of course they don't know what floppies are, just like I didn't know until told a few years ago about punchcards, and have no idea how computers were programmed before that. In a couple more decades the 10-20 year old age group will have no idea what CDs are. I don't find this particularly depressing (though I will be sad when CDs stop being produced as I prefer to buy my music in a physical medium).

Actually there was a recent series on British TV called "Back in Time - The High Street". They got a whole load of modern day shopkeepers and recreated high streets from various periods in history. When they got to the 70s, they added a record shop. One younger guy who had never seen a vinyl record actually said that it was nice to buy the music in physical form rather than a download. So maybe there's hope yet

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moto

[motorollin]

FYI.

Before punchcards computers needed to be programmed manually if my info is correct though. Often the programmers would assemble their programs themselves into a binary word stream. Operators then manually programmed the word stream into the computer: physical settings switches to one or zero for each bit in the word and some kind of enter button to transfer the word to memory. I'm using the term word here as at that time there was no standard yet for the size of words.
I have not used these myself. The oldest I used was a mainframe with a room full of terminals connected to it.

greets,
Staf.

Thanks Staf! Why the switch to punchcards if we already had the option of storing data in memory?

[motorollin]

They liked to turn off the computers occasionally.

Oh of course :lol:

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moto