What a Difference 50 Years Can Make!!

Could you imagine the look on his face if he were to see what computers actually have evolved into today? :mrgreen:

 

Sorry, it's cute but it's a hoax: http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/computer.asp

Clues:
1. Grammatical error in the caption.
2. The teletype is a DECwriter model from about 1970.
3. FORTRAN was first proposed in 1954 and not released until 1956.

 

Fooey! It would have been wonderful if it were for real.

In 1966, when I was in college, and computers were enormous and affordable only by institutions, a computer professor told us, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, that if you ordered two computers, one immediately, and another several months later, the second one would arrive sooner, and be cheaper and more powerful. Even then computer technology was progressing at a break-neck speed. Students were allowed to submit programs, in Fortran, on punch-cards, to be run at night on the mainframe, and a print-out could be picked up in the morning. I never succeeded in getting my program to compile. All I ever got were compiler errors.

By 1970, at another college, I got to play with a computer the size of a very large filing cabinet. It had 2K of memory (which was still, atavistically, called "core" memory, though I don't think they were using cores any more) and used a frustratingly-limited version of Basic, with a program length limit of either 100 or 200 lines, I forget which. I programmed it to play a brain-damaged version of blackjack, in which there were no suits and only 13 cards per deck.

Futurists always get it wrong. They never see the real breakthroughs. In the 50's they predicted intelligent household robots, but missed the mineaturization of electronics and computers. They predicted space travel to the planets and stars, but missed satellite communications. I guess that's why I liked the spoof at the start of this thread. It made my point so well.

 

ah, I remember those day of ForTran and RPG in high school... get it running you bet we did... First try correct... you got an A... 2nd = B... lots of punch cards... I even got to the point of reading the holes not what was printed over them... those darn writers made error... and I as not going to loose a grade on that machine...

COBOL was fun... BASIC was self taught... now it is JAVA, Rexx, XML, C,C++ ,WebSphere, etc boy we have come a long way in 10...20... 30 years...

GM Le Mans to Toyota Prius... a step in the right direction... back to the turkey...

Happy holidays to one and all.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(pjm877\";p=\"53162)</div>

Hey, you mean maybe the reason my program never ran was because the card puncher punched wrong??? Cool.

... except that, in my case, I bet it was me, trying to learn Fortran from a book as I wrote my program at the card-punch machine.