Ah, for me... Its the blinky lights! PDP 8s and 11s, Altair and IMSAI, BIT-483. After learning to punch in the OP codes in binary and *knowing* the locations of every jump destination you gained a certain knowledge of what happening in your programs. These machines were SLOW - you could get out and walk faster! You could actually see the profiling as the code looped - you could see the addresses where the machine was spending most of it's time. I know profilers and such are all well and good - but it's not the same. With modern machines speeds and multi-megabyte code space it would not be the same thing at all - even if you had lights. I am one of the folks that got paper cuts pulling paper tape through a PROKO reader. Yep, I got programs on paper tape as a distro media. The sure and certain knowledge that it would all go away when you turned off the power. Disk - What disk? The audio cassette tape backup was a godsend. Them were the days. To all the pups that bemoan the loss of the CLI and such. It's not supposed to be hard or obscure - that was just growing pains. I DO embrace advances in hardware, interfaces and tools. It just keeps getting better - every day is like Christmas! The frightful lack of efficiency on the other hand.... I used to do very useful work on a 4 MHz machine with 16K memory. Sigh... Mark Browne ----- Original Message ----- From: "James Spinti" <jspinti at dart.dartdist.com> To: <tclug-list at mn-linux.org> Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2001 8:20 AM Subject: RE: [TCLUG] old guy rants (was vi vs. emacs) | | Ahh.. The sound of a KSR33 Teletype machine-gunning text onto paper at |100cps (ALL UPPER CASE OF COURSE...) The smell of freshly-punched |oiled paper |tape scrolling out onto the floor. | | That's at least two sensory outputs missing from modern computing =:o) | Don't forget the boxes of punched cards that always seemed to have a typo in the middle of them. Or, once you got the typo's fixed, you would invariably drop the box and some of them would get out of order :( But, the worst was standing in line waiting for your job to run, only to get that one page print out that said you had a syntax error on the first card and nothing ran...ah yes, the "good old days" ;) _______________________________________________ Twin Cities Linux Users Group Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list