Getting Rid of Dell Bloatware. 1830

I started my programming days on the old 80-column punch-card terminals. Our electronics dept managed to scrounge up enough broken terminals to piece one together for our own use rather than have to walk way over to a seperate building that had all the other terminals. The only problem was with the drum that fit into the terminal, that among other things, typed the characters across the top of the card. For some reason, the characters that our terminal typed across the top of the card weren't the right ones that should have corresponded to the holes in the card. The cahacters across the top of the card would come out in pure gibberish.

This came in handy when someone else was having troubles with their program, and wanted to borrow your cards to see how you did it. I'd give them my stack of cards for all the good it did them when they went to read the typing at the top. Early form of encryption I guess you could call it.

It was also hard to switch from trying on a card-punch terminal where you had to bang the keys, then get up and go use an electric typewriter. Then get used to gently pressing the keys on the typerwriter, then going back to the card-punch terminal and type away then wonder why nothing was getting punched.

In my early days I had to load programs into an early DEC PDP-8 I believe that had a high-speed papert tape reader. You started by manually toggling in a small boot-strap program using switches on the front panel. That would alow the tape reader to be able to read in the first small tape. That would then allow you to read in the next tape that I think had a basic OS of sorts on it, which would then let you read in the next tape that had the actual program on it.

The problem was, this paper tape was a fan-fold style tape that you had to insert in the reader on one side, feed it through the sprocket, across the head, and onto another sprocket.

'IF' all went well, you hit the 'run' button and the tape reader would start reading the tape, and the tape was supposed to fold itself into the output tray. Usually as the tape was flying through the reader, it wouldn't fold properly and it would just start spilling out all over the floor while you look on in panic. In my case it was in the middle of an buttembly plant, and the tape lying on the floor was ready for someone in a high-lo to run over it.

When you were done, you had to quickly (before someone stepped on it) pick the tape up off the floor and re-fold it.

Two years later, somebody finally saw it happen again and asked me....

"why don't you just hit the 'Halt' button, fold the tape back up and put it back in the output tray, the hit the 'Resume' button...

Yep, the paper would shoot out several feet before it would even start to fall towards the floor.

Yep. Had a couple of core memory circuit boards for early DEC computers tucked away at home for quite a few years.