Computer History - A British View - Part 2 of 3

lol at 6:35

If these computers crash, how easy is it to 'unstick' them.

I find this documentary fascinating, I never experienced early computers as the first machine I ever owned was a 1980s Electronic font writer which was considered cutting edge at the time!

Geeze programing on paper. That sucks. Did they even use object oriented programing back then? I bet they use assemblers . They have to remember ever single command and key word omg. I am studying to become a programmer. I thankfull that VB 2008. FInd out what keyword your using before you type it.

The programming language at about 7 minutes in appears to be COBOL.

lol had 0 & 1 in a card. That must take for ever to do anything. Did these computer even have inerface?

@6:25... the subliminal messages before the bum!

All the long blue arrows pointing straight up with "YES" then the finger and short pink arrow pointing to the bum, with "NO"!

Well, it was 1969!

Yes, ASCII art ruled! I think that it was the September 1972 Playboy centerfold that became legend, because she was the first image to be "scanned" into a computer!

In Political Science we would use data sheet, then a card punch person would enter our data. Our small Liberal Arts college did not even have a ! reader - NDSU did!

I also remember paper tape on our High School teletype - there was no monitor, just the print out - if you wanted to print another copy of the output, you had to turn on the paper tape puncher, and it would give you a 3/4" wide roll of tape with holes punched in it. Then, to print another copy, you would run it through a tape reader

No, that was ASCII Art! We had a terminal in our High School in 1974 that connected to the University of Minnesota - and one of the directories was full of Playboy centerfolds done in ASCII - they were awesome! Up close, all you saw were the clumps of letters, but from 10' - there she was! The few of us who used the teletype planned to put the printout onto one of the pull down screens, but we decided that there were so few of us who knew how to run the machine, that we would get busted!

In 2006 I went back for my 30th reunion and they had remodeled the area in the main office where the teletype (along with the huge HOT Xerox machine that was next to it) used to be. The former Principal of the school gave us the tour and I confessed to hi that I had been among the first High School students to download porn!

The program was called "The MECC" (Minnesota Educational Computer Consortium) - actually in later years was a big reason that Apple Computers dominated school hardware..