Old Enough To Remember?

I do remember the Instant chocolate containers, we use the other end of the spoons.
I do remember the Draft, very well. My brother ended up number 1. joined the Air Force and still ended up over in Thailand. I graduated in 74, missed it by that much. Did have friends that dropped out to serve. They were never the same. Suicide and drugs, one cleaned up and is getting old peacefully.
Don't remember what happened to my card though.
Those were the times then, I think every generation has them
 
Mophead said:
Fourtran and punch cards?
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Fortran - No, Punch cards - Yes - I could make an IBM 029 card punch sit up and dance! (remember you could program them also) ;)
I worked on converting the USMC IBM 1401 Autocoder to IBM 360 Cobol.
Had to support the JUMPS payroll system with Unit Record machines supplying the input.
The issue was we could not change the programs (written in Kansas City), all we could do is write programs to fix the bad data.
I wrote a manual for our shop on debugging IBM 360 memory dumps to figure out what went south.
 
You reminded me of one of my fondest memories of my time at the University of Waterloo. If you were lucky while taking a break in the Math building, you could hear the uncontrolled screams and wailing of some poor sod who just dropped a stack of cards.
I was lucky: I had access to the widget terminals with data storage on the university's mainframe.
 
JetRanger said:
You reminded me of one of my fondest memories of my time at the University of Waterloo. If you were lucky while taking a break in the Math building, you could hear the uncontrolled screams and wailing of some poor sod who just dropped a stack of cards.
I was lucky: I had access to the widget terminals with data storage on the university's mainframe.
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Interesting side note on punch cards -
In my workshop I have one of those old punch card cabinets - the ones that were really heavy duty and the drawers were double-rollered for the weight.
It has made me a mighty fine toolbox with lots of drawers for separating your tools into categories. ;)
 
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JetRanger said:
You reminded me of one of my fondest memories of my time at the University of Waterloo. If you were lucky while taking a break in the Math building, you could hear the uncontrolled screams and wailing of some poor sod who just dropped a stack of cards.
I was lucky: I had access to the widget terminals with data storage on the university's mainframe.
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talk about memories!
We learned COBOL and Fortran and had to program via punch cards. Started while at LSU in 1969, USAF after I ran out of money, then thru grad school. I remember early on in grad school, one student had a project on punch cards that filled two cardboard card boxes.....running across the quadrangle toward the computer room....in the rain...holding onto his books, two long card boxes, and his umbrella. Guess what? He dropped everything, fortunately onto the sidewalk at that instant and spilled/mixed up hundreds of punch cards. Hundreds of scrambled, wet punch cards. What a blessing when floppy discs became available shortly afterward.
You kids don't know what you missed.
 
Another interesting tidbit -
We were a 'split' shop - half of us were military and half were civilians (GS14s IIRC).
When the powers in charge figured out I could fix problems in the middle of the night a lot 'cheaper' than paying the GSs guess who got called? ;)
The trick was you had to make the changes via punched cards and you only got so many shots since you had to turn over the deck to operations.
I got very good at desk checking card decks and logic.
But I was one of the few Marines in my unit that got to 'sleep in' on occasion.
 
Oldbikefixr said:
talk about memories!
We learned COBOL and Fortran and had to program via punch cards. Started while at LSU in 1969, USAF after I ran out of money, then thru grad school. I remember early on in grad school, one student had a project on punch cards that filled two cardboard card boxes.....running across the quadrangle toward the computer room....in the rain...holding onto his books, two long card boxes, and his umbrella. Guess what? He dropped everything, fortunately onto the sidewalk at that instant and spilled/mixed up hundreds of punch cards. Hundreds of scrambled, wet punch cards. What a blessing when floppy discs became available shortly afterward.
You kids don't know what you missed.
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And my first civilian job (small Honeywell system) I had a card deck I called 'Sock Dryer'.
If I rode in on my bike and my socks got wet, I would hang them behind the fan blower motor on the back of the card reader.
I'd insert that deck and by the time it finished reading my socks would be dry. :biggrin:
 
Oldbikefixr said:
talk about memories!
We learned COBOL and Fortran and had to program via punch cards.
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Yup, good old FORTRAN & COBOL
That actually came in handy a few years later. I spent a year as a computer operator for Jarman Shoes. We had an IBM System 3 Model 10 which occupied most of the large room we had. It was blessed with a huge multiplatter hard drive: the cartridges had to weigh 30-40 pounds.
A small army of data entry operators entered all production, payroll, sales and inventory information (they owned several national retail store chains) into punch cards.
The IBM beast ran 24 hours a day & my shift ran 24 hours on alternate days. If the machine burped or farted in the middle of the night, were to call the programmers to fix the issue. The chief programmer was a nice older Texan gentleman who was unfortunately a severe alcoholic and who's speech was badly hampered. When sober, he had a smooth Texas drawl that would have put Matthew McConaughey to shame.
The two assistant programmers were two Chinese brothers... very smart & very pleasant but their English was terrible. Over the phone in the middle of the night they were all very difficult to understand with regards to addressing the issue. I and the other operator taught ourselves the programming language for our system so we were able to fix all but the most severe problems & all three programmers got a good night's sleep.
 
CDNolddude said:
I remember the Canadian air raid sirens being tested when I was a kid in the 50’s
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Nationwide test alarm of the 'civil defense signals' is still happening every October over here...

And in the countrysides all volunteer fire departments have them on their station houses, so those attending/on call can drop whatever they're doing and rush in...
 
CDNolddude said:
I remember the Canadian air raid sirens being tested when I was a kid in the 50’s
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I'm originally from a small farm town in Michigan that has an all volunteer fire department and 3 police officers.
In the middle of the town there is a siren like this that goes off when there's a fire (steady tone) or a tornado warning (alternating high and low tones) and at 6pm every evening except Sunday. It's a mechanical siren with a rotating horn and we lived about a block away from it.
 
JackinFL said:
I'm originally from a small farm town in Michigan that has an all volunteer fire department and 3 police officers.
In the middle of the town there is a siren like this that goes off when there's a fire (steady tone) or a tornado warning (alternating high and low tones) and at 6pm every evening except Sunday. It's a mechanical siren with a rotating horn and we lived about a block away from it.
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The small town in Northern Washington state that my Grandparents lived has a similar story with the exception of tornados. Everyday at noon the siren sounds or when there is a fire to alert the volunteer firemen.
 
Even back in the 70's when I was on a volunteer department, we had a pager system and a base unit at home which would give you the initial location and type of emergency. We also had the big mechanical siren on the roof of the firehouse carried over from the old days... mainly that served to alert the town that something was going on and to watch for our fire trucks about to go into action.... we had a weekly test of the system at a prescribed time, activated by remote dispatch and everything would go off, followed by a voice message. One of us would go to the station to acknowledge to dispatch test was successful.

We never got much at all into air raid or tornado warnings...
 
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