On 12/19/2013 10:30 AM, Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Wed, 18 Dec 2013 22:59:04 -0600, The Daring Dufas
wrote:

When I was in college you could spot a nerd because he had a
pocket protector and a rectangular box of punch cards under one
arm. Pocket calculators came out later, cost around $400.00 and had
nerds drooling over them. I was out of college when I saw my first
HP calculator but I still had boxes of punch cards. ^_^

Yeah, that was the theory but it didn't quite work at Cal Poly
Pomona in the late 1960's. Among other divisions, Cal Poly had an
engineering skool and an ABM (agricultural business management)
skool. One would assume that the engineering students carried slide
rules and punched cards, and the ABM students looked like TV cowboys.
Nope. The engineering students wanted to look like cowboys and wore
boots, jeans, flannel, but not the hat. The ABM students wore suits,
ties, hats, and carried briefcases. There was also a skool of
environmental design, which true to the stereotype, everyone looked
like hippies. I tried to make sense of it at the time, and gave up.

Incidentally, it took me about 10 years to work my way through all
the punched card decks I had accumulated and used mostly as scratch
paper. I didn't make the same mistake with paper tape, which I
converted to floppy and burned the tapes.

My first calculator was an analog computer that I built into a brief
case. There were several 10 turn pots to input the numbers, and a
big mirrored meter to read the output. Basically, an electronic
implementation of a slide rule.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/scruz.general/Egv8cT2-JGY/SNVk9zi1ULQJ

When I graduated from college, I could throw everything I owned
into my pickup truck and drive off into the sunset (and actually did
that a few times). If I tried that today, it would take at least two
large moving vans and a project manager.

He who dies with the most toys, wins.


Here in Alabamastan we actually have a state college, The University of
Auburn, which is both the premier agricultural and engineering school. I
traveled to Auburn one year to visit some friends and drove past "The
Swine Research Unit". The smell could gag a maggot but the pigs were
happy. In the mid 1960's at The University of Alabama, I started playing
with and learning a tiny bit of Basic and Fortran in order to play with
the Univac which was on its way out and the new IBM 360/50 RAX system
which was replacing it. Kids these days have no idea how user friendly
computers are now compared to what I started playing with like the
analog computer at my school but I really believe computers were more
fun all those years ago. Now they're tools, not so exclusive anymore and
any kids gaming computer has much more computing power than what was
considered a super computer at one time. ^_^

TDD