And today's "stupid award" goes to....

i graduated in 78. still fortran and punchcards.

 

And the only option for running a FORTRAN program was a mainframe that read the punched cards? The college I went to had the punched cards for COBOL programs, but that was more a matter of weeding out the field. If you survived the COBOL experience, you 'graduated' to real computers (PDP, VAX, or the CDC), where you logged on from a CRT. There was a text editor (TECO if memory serves) that could also be used for editing term papers and the like....

 

In '66 when I was in college, I don't believe CRTs existed for computers, and I don't think there was anything smaller than the mainframe, though I will not swear that fortran was the only language it knew. I strongly suspect that my iPod Touch has about a thousand times more computing power than that mainframe.

In around 1971, when I took some classes at a different college, there were computers the size of large filing cabinets that could be programmed in Basic from a teletype terminal, and you saved your program on punched paper tape. We were limited to 100 lines of code. Or maybe it was 200. It would still be a few years before I owned a typewriter, and there were still no word processors. I got access to the computer by saying I wanted to "experiment" with computer-generated poetry, which meant giving it a list of words and having it string them together at random. But mostly I wrote a blackjack program. The poetry program produced no worthwhile poetry, but at least it ran, as did the blackjack program.

From about 1970 to 1973 I bootlegged an education of sorts by sitting in on classes without registering. I don't know if the administration failed to notice me, or if they tolerated me because my step-father was a teacher there. It was his own alma mater and he once said of the place "I thought I was going to college to learn to think. Instead I was being taught to teach by teachers who could neither think nor teach."

 

1966 was definitely punch card time. Punch cards were the state-of-the art at the time. How things have changed since then....

It has been a while, but If memory serves, the BASIC program size limitation was a function of memory size (4K, 16K, 32K, etc. bytes). The 100 or 200 lines of code is really an approximation of how large a program you could produce and be able to fit within the size limit. DEC developed an extension of DEC BASIC that would swap programs in and out of memory, so the limit was not a hard and fast limit. But then BASIC became obsolete and DEC went the way of the dodo bird....

 

Might there have been a 2K? Somehow, 2K sticks in my mind. But that part is extremely vague. I thought they imposed an absolute line limit, but I could easily have been mistaken about that. I was entirely self-taught. I read a book and sat at the machine. I had no instructor either for fortran or for basic. Or, for that matter, for C much later when I learned it on my Kaypro 2X and took it with me to DOS and Unix.

 

Fixed that for you. I miss the Alpha 21264, but alas some of their archetecture lived on in AMD's Athlon.

 

I see your drowned iPhone and raise you a 'Riding my bike into a stiff headwind I had my head down, missed the slight curve in the bike path, went off into the grass and straight into a sign post. Thankfully my head missed the post and my left shoulder took the brunt of the impact. Man, did I feel stupid.' Bike seems to be alright, so it's all good.

Thomas - with a nice big bruise and some cuts on his shoulder

 

DEC went south way before they were acquired by Compaq. They basically failed at making the move to the PC. IBM ran rings around them. DEC had amazing technology; they just couldn't make the transition to a shifting market. At their peak, they had something like 60% to 75% of the minicomputer market. Their approach to the PC challenge was to try to shrink their minicomputers to PC size. Along the way they missed the part about it being the software. The IBM PC had something like 50 different word processing applications that ran on it at the peak of the word processing market. DEC had only one - which was developed by DEC....

 

Possibly. It would depend on the capacity of the CPU to address memory that the interpreter was running on. With an early CPU, 2Kb then would seem like 2Tb today.

 

I'd give good odds on an iPhone drying out. Especially with the alcohol trick. (Use high-concentration alcohol, not the diluted stuff.) The old trick for lab glassware was water > alcohol > ether, but that was 50 years ago when painters washed their hands in turpentine.

But back to the iPhone. There are no mechanical switches; assembly is all surface-mount and the surface tension of water probably prevented any from getting under the ball-grid arrays, and IIRC, the battery isn't user-replaceable, so it's probably soldered in. If that's true, there's no connector there to worry about. The only somewhat vulnerable points are in the charging/audio/USB port.

Once the touch panel dries out enough, It'll probably work.

 

Actually, your estimate is pretty good. The iPod Touch (3rd gen) has up to 64 GB of Flash and 256MB of RAM in a 32-bit 600 MHz processor. The processor has 1200 MIPS (millions of instructions per second, one way to measure computing power). The IBM S/360 was state of the art in 1966, and might have 256KB of main storage and basically had an 8-bit processor, and ran from .03 MIPS to 1.7 MIPS (they had a wide range of products) and held up to 8MB in its Large Core Storage.

So comparing MIPS, the iPod Touch is 700x to 40,000x faster than state of the art university computing power in 1966. Comparing memory, it has 8000 times the long-term memory and 1000 times the RAM.

BASIC never went obsolete. It was adopted by Apple as their primary programming language in their successful Apple // series, then went on to Visual Basic with Microsoft, and I would say influenced the development of Java, another interpreted language.

Things never really die, they just get re-used. They also rarely get invented from scratch. Some people are surprised I used internet chat across states in 1991 (the 'talk' command in Unix), which later was better known with AOL IM, and is used in today's facebook, among others. The 1980's news groups are today's chat rooms. Pretty much every video game my son plays today can trace its ancestry to video games we had on the Apple //e and ][+ back in the very early 80's. (Along with games on Amiga, Atari, etc.) The shooting games, chasing games: Pong became Asteroids, Space Invaders; Lunar Lander leads into flight simulators; Lode Runner, Ultima, Castle Wolfenstein have long pedigrees, a little later Frogger, Pac-Man, etc. start up. Galactic Empires and Oregon Trail were basically Sim City for 1982. They put better graphics on them, but the concepts were all there 20+ years ago. First-person shooting games was probably the biggest step made since then. Oohkay, I'm really off-topic now.

 

Ohh, now I feel better. I was taking my unicycle over to the start of the parade route on July 4th, decided to ride it for a bit since that's faster than walking. Got on and was looking at the wheel to make sure it had enough air in it. Looked up and saw I was heading straight for a panel van and I was still leaning forward (can't turn easily like that). I was able to get off in time without looking like a total fool to the onlookers or smacking the van, but it was close.

 

Would you rather do that ? . . . or go out to a Japanese restaurant, thinking you're gulping down a big ball of guacamole next to the California Roll, only to realize as it's passing into your food tube that it's actually wasabi. Of course I'm only speaking hypothetically, because that would REALLY be stupid. Um . . . you got any water handy?

.

 

I think they didn't do such a good job transitioning to the server market with the hardware they had, even though they were STUPID fast.

The hardware may be theoretically faster, but there's still a LOT of (oftentimes critical) infrastructure still running on old IBM mainframes. In fact, I know a few people who worked for a company that basically made software that translated text-based prompt applications and made them web-enabled. It was basically done by running a layer on top of the text-based prompt and having the web application "push the right keys at the right time."
Also: It isn't just raw speed that determines a machine's capacity.