From: lydick@SOL1.GPS.CALTECH.EDU (Speaker-to-Minerals)
Newsgroups: alt.callahans
Subject: Re: More old coot tests
Date: 26 Sep 1992 21:43:15 GMT
Organization: HST Wide Field/Planetary Camera
Reply-To: lydick@SOL1.GPS.CALTECH.EDU
NNTP-Posting-Host: sol1.gps.caltech.edu

In article <1992Sep21.145722.9493@nntp.uoregon.edu>, JBrandt@AAA.UOregon.EDU (Jay Brandt (Jason)) writes:
>Did you ever have 45 RPM Records, and a record player that -only- played
>that format?

No.  Does the fact that I had one that only played 78s count, though?

>Do you remember when a tape recording always meant using reel-to-reel
>tapes? (We still own Laurie's first RTR tape machine).

Yup.

>Do you remember when Michael Jackson was the five-year old kid brother of
>the guys in the Motown band _The Jackson Five_? (Yep, and I watched the
>original broadcast where he appeared for the first time).

Yes.


>Do you remember TV shows presented by a single corporate sponsor? (Yep. It
>used to be the standard for prime-time TV. That idea is actually pre-TV,
>and goes back to Radio shows).

Yep.  Bonanza was sponsored by Chevrolet.

>Do you remember watching on TV when the first man stepped on the moon,
>LIVE? Where were you?

I was in my parents' living room when Neil Armstrong proved that astronauts
don't have to be bright enough to memorize 12 words :-).  (He did get the other
11 right, though).

>Do you remember the launching of the first man into space? (Yes)

Nope.  I'm afraid I was just a bit too young to remember Gagarin's flight
(besides, it didn't get all that much media coverage in the U.S.).

>Do you remember bomb shelters? When it was common for plans to be available
>for home bomb shelters, designed to protect just your family? (Yep. We
>never had one, but just about every magazine had hints and tips on how to
>survive the unthinkable).

Yep.  And don't forget that one of the big justifications of the Interstate
Highway System was that there were going to be fallout shelters under every
interchange.

>Do you remember when personal computers were things you had to build from a
>kit? (My first one was an Altair 8800A, that a friend of mine and I shared.
>It had a whopping 4K of RAM, an ASR-33 Teletype for input and output, with
>a paper tape reader/punch and an acoustically coupled MODEM built into the
>teletype, and an external floppy disk drive. To start it, you had to enter
>a bootstrap program in Binary (machine language) by flipping toggle
>switches on the front panel. Then you could load a paper tape from your
>teletype to run the drivers for the diskette drive. After that you could
>load the eight-inch floppy disk with BASIC and the operating system.
>Software consisted of what you could write in BASIC or Machine Language!
>That was the way big computers worked at the time, too, except they also
>had magnetic tape drives the size of refrigerators, and hard disk drives
>the size of a large clothes washing machine.)

Well, that's a nice description of a modern computer, sonny.  Remember when
programming a computer meant moving the cables that connected your various
precision resistors and capacitors to the high-gain amplifiers?  And the output
device was usually a gauge?

>Do you remember when a removable media hard disk drive was something only a
>large corporation could afford?

Remember when the term "removable media" in the above sentence would've been
redundant?

>Do you remember having to use Holerith Punch Cards to enter your programs
>into a computer? (Yep).

Yeah.  I'm the guy who dragged the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences
at Caltech out of punch-card-dom, and introduced them to timesharing and line
editors.  Not too much longer, screen editors became available.

>I had three slide rules while in high school. At the time, we were required
>to buy at least one and learn to use it. I had a big one, a pocket-sized
>one, and a small circular slide rule with science tables that I kept in my
>calculator case, in case the batteries failed! 

I still keep on in the machine room of the computers I managed.  It's labelled
"Backup CPU."

>Which US TV network first offered Color TV broadcasts? (NBC) 

I believe that's the reason for their peacock logo.

>Do you remember when Transistor Radio's first became available? (Yep.)

Not especially, but it was definitely within my lifetime, since Shockley didn't
invent the transistor 'til about the time I was born.
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