Last Thursday evening through to Friday morning this blog went dark for a few hours. This was due to a technical problem with the server that has now been resolved. I’ve been informed that the valve bases have been wiped, punch-cards have been straightened out and the magnetic tape heads have been cleaned and all now apparently appears to be working fine.
Sorry for the outage. Normal service is now resumed.
I assume that’s Watson and Crick standing there with a length of bi-nomial DNA they’ve just discovered ? (Can’t understand what took them so long — damn thing’s the size of a tapeworm………)
You missed out a parity error on the paper tape. I used to run those giant mainframes, punch cards, paper tape, mag tapes, and a teletype input console. 96k of memory and a whole 60mb EDS60 exchangeable disk drive the size of a washing machine. Comms running at 300 baud, that never worked. Massive line printers running at 1600 lines products minute with the sound output of a machine gun. Ah happy days at CEGB Bankside in 1974. But it MULTITASKED and spoiled me as I couldn’t stand mono-tasking PCs, my first major computer purchase being an Amiga 2000 that I’m still using after 28 years (online and networked too)
60MB that must have cost a fortune. I remember working in a print shop in the 90’s and being told that the firm had just bought a 30Mb removable drive which cost three grand but it saved a whole lot of aggro when transferring large files. I remember having to take 25 floppies from a graphic designer and the files having to be stiched together on a Mac