OT: Increasingly unrealistic old IT stories WAS Re: OT Home Highway, is it worth it?

["Mark Harrison" <Mark.Harrison@xxxxxxx>]

Stone tablets, eh? Hark at "Mr. Digital"...

When I was first a programmer, the code was a series of instructions
given by the priesthood to the assembled masses, and carried out in
physical labour in the fields of Sumeria. I remember those who talked
about the introduction of "solid-stone" memory, but if
word-of-mouth
replication was good enough for the high priest, it was good enough for
me!

Results within a day - pah - we didn't know if our planting algorithms
had worked until winter!

Mark Harrison
Head of Systems, eKingfisher


-----Original Message-----
From: Andy Laurence [mailto:andylaurence@xxxxxxx]
Sent: 24 January 2002 15:32
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ukha_d] Re: OT Home Highway, is it worth it?


> > PAH!
> >
> > I remember building a 6800? at school... we had to
>
> Luxury.
>
> We worked on a 8085, we used to dream about 6800's. we
> has a hex keypad and 4 7 seg displays. if you keyed
> your code in wrong you got nothing, and had to switch
> it off and start again. Punched tape !

PAH!  We had a 3840 where we had to inscribe markings on stone tablets
which
had to be stacked in the correct order.  IT Support was a dangerous
occupation back then.  If you dropped a tablet you could end your career
if
it landed on your feet.  The annoying thing was waiting for the marzipan
to
react with the endotropisco, and the sun to burn the display into the
ground.  It could be a day before you realised it had crashed.

Andy
--
PC-Based Multimedia System
http://www.andylaurence.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/pcbmms



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