The useful computer then was the IBM Series, the 360. Fortran, or Cobol, typing each line onto a paper card on a big steel typewriter punch machine, then take the cards up to the window for the batch operator to place on the machine stack reader. It was this way till 1980. Or use a tele-terminal with the phone handset inserted into rubber speaker and microphone pits, at 300 baud. The Apple II had just come out with 64 k bytes of RAM, and first a 40 character wide screen, then 80. My Apple II was better, with 128 k RAM. No hard drive, one 5.25 inch floppy drive. Basic was installed in the Apple II as an afterthought, in ROM, because marketers wanted the computer to be able to do useful work immediately when turned on, without having to load anything. To understand this time, the book is:
Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder (about 1981), Which covers the development of the microcode and hardware for the revolutionary VAX computer by Digital Equipment Corp in Maynard Massachusetts, which was the IBM slayer. Wang also was founded about this time in Lowell Massachusetts. Both went extinct.
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25019120? ago
The useful computer then was the IBM Series, the 360. Fortran, or Cobol, typing each line onto a paper card on a big steel typewriter punch machine, then take the cards up to the window for the batch operator to place on the machine stack reader. It was this way till 1980. Or use a tele-terminal with the phone handset inserted into rubber speaker and microphone pits, at 300 baud. The Apple II had just come out with 64 k bytes of RAM, and first a 40 character wide screen, then 80. My Apple II was better, with 128 k RAM. No hard drive, one 5.25 inch floppy drive. Basic was installed in the Apple II as an afterthought, in ROM, because marketers wanted the computer to be able to do useful work immediately when turned on, without having to load anything. To understand this time, the book is:
Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder (about 1981), Which covers the development of the microcode and hardware for the revolutionary VAX computer by Digital Equipment Corp in Maynard Massachusetts, which was the IBM slayer. Wang also was founded about this time in Lowell Massachusetts. Both went extinct.