Getting Rid of Dell Bloatware. 1828

I never owned a 386 but I had a 286 - can't remember details about it.

Much of this talk brings back some really old memories. Lets' see if some of you are old enough to recall some of the following:

I started my Data Processing career in 1962 at the age of 21 (that makes me 65 now). In those days the business was called "Data Processing", not IT. I took a self-paid course to get this career started. We were taught how to wire control panels for IBM Accounting machines (402s, 403s, 407s), Card Sorters, Collators, Interpreters, Caculators. These were called unit record machines because they processed unit records, more commonly known as 80-column punch cards. When I completed my course I was hired as a "machine operator" for a small insurance company. My salary back then was $240 per month. I thought this was great!

I won't bore you with my life story but I must tell you a few things about this insurance company's first computer. I'm talking Mainframe computers here, not PCs - these came much later.

I stayed with this company for some time because there was promise of getting involved with computers down the road. They sent me and a couple of other guys to IBM to learn computer programming in buttembler Language. ( I say guys - in those days most if not all programmers were men - I don't recall females having any interest in this field). The computer arrived in 1968. It was an IBM 360. Model 20. The Central Processing Unit had 16K of memory - that's 16000 bytes!! Actually it wasn't called memory or RAM in those days. If memory (no pun intended) serves me right it was called Storage or more specifically "Core Storage". You may recall that a byte consists of 8 or 9 bits. Each bit in storage is represented by a donut-shaped core with two wires running through it - one horizontal and one vertical. When current is pbutted through the wires, the core became magnetized or demagnetized - in other words ON or OFF. Our computer had no disk drives - we had 4 magnetic tape drives. Programs had to be compiled into "machine language". This was an agonizingly slow process because much information needed to compile a program was found on one or more of the tapes - searching for information on tape is slow.

Man we've come a long way since then.

Clark

Yes, I remember this and the "Press Play on Tape" thing.