[Tfug] Thumb drive sizes vere6u7u

[Bexley Hall]

Hi Angus,

On 12/5/2012 8:38 PM, Angus Scott-Fleming wrote:
>>> DECwriters - what year was that?
>>
>> 70's.
>
> Thou art showing thy age, oh ancient one.

<grin>  I also remember the "station identification"
commercials in which the NBC peacock's "feathers"
started spreading in B&W and *finished* (a second or
so later) "in color".

Or, "blacks" and "whites" drinking fountains.  Fluoroscopes
in shoe stores.  "Personal" bomb shelters.  Kennedy's (et al.)
assassination.  Saturn V's (you have no idea how *big* they
were unless you've stood by the VAB at Canaveral!).

And, of course, I have a "vaccination mark" (I was
surprised to realize that not *everyone* has one!)

> I got my first login-and-password in September, 1970,

I started off with a dialup to a DG Nova (?).  Then, punching
cards on an IBM 1103 (?).  Then, bigger mainframes (though
still "batch").  Getting an interactive terminal to a *big*
machine was later (MULTICS probably being the largest of these)

> upon matriculation to a college where Time Share computing
> was invented and the college president was
> one of the original authors of BASIC (to his eternal shame).
>
> See http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DartmouthBasic ....
>
> See also "Bringing Up BASIC"
>      http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/basic.php
>
> Anyone else here remember coding in BASIC or QB?

Sure!  Then FORTRAN (WATFIV, RATFOR, etc.).  Then Algol.  Pascal.
PL/1.  LISP.  C, etc.

To its defense, BASIC is a great *little* language (before
all the bastardized extensions came along).  For years I
would use it as a "programmable calculator" -- e.g., to
calculate the values of resistors to use in a ladder
network.  Much easier than doing the same thing in C, for
example.

Years ago, I had written a *really* tiny interpreter that
ran *in* (literally) a Z7180 (16KB ROM, 512B RAM) which
let me throw together quick "dog and pony" protoypes for
clients without having to build entire systems, etc.

And, I know of several products that use some bastardization
of BASIC as a scripting language.

--don