Conversely, I didn't dabble much with cassettes. The business for which I coded, very briefly used a cassette deck to load BASIC into the Altair, but switched to 8" hard-sectored floppy drives (being a business, it had "infinite financial resources" compared to my meager means, for some value of "infinite") very quickly: fiddling with the level settings and waiting eight minutes to load BASIC (after enterring the cassette bootloader by hand from the front panel) was not practical.

I DID once write a loader for that same Altair 8800 that used a TI Silent 700 with dual digital cassette heads that recorded at 5120 bps (IIRC) on digital cassettes (or high quality cassettes with a hole punched at the right spot in the leader :-) ).

I guess the punched card thing was more of a mainframe/mini-computer thing. When I started my undergraduate degree in 1979 most programming at the university was still done on punched cards and run "batch". We did have a row of ten DecWriters, and an express CRT terminal, but there were more punch card machines available. When accounts were issued, they were in the form of orange "control" punched card (80 column) "ACCOUNT command" cards. More mainframe CRT terminals were added over time, and were covetted because they were 1) faster than the DecWriters at 1200 bps over current-loop interfaces, and 2) didn't suffer the inconvenience of having to constantly go get scrap paper (and ensure that someone didn't comandeer your DecWriter!). The downside was that they displayed 24 rows of 80 colums text. So, having got a clean compile, one of the first things one would do was request a printout from the mainframe printers.

What I would do was code on the terminals, and at the end of the term, or when I was running out of my very small disk space allotment, get special permission to have my programs punched on cards for posterity. I got "mag tape" privileges about 1980/81 but realize that the recording density was 1600 bpi (later 6250) and the longest tape real was 2400 feet, so about five megabytes on a long tape (later 22.5 MB, but the 6250 bpi tapes were "finicky"). Only recently did I get rid of about 100 pounds of punched cards.

Actually, to be accurate, I got the Honours degree in 82 and followed it up with a Master of Computer Science degree in 84. Had just a video monitor and 300 BPS Hayes "Smartmodem" at home to connect to the university Cyber 7600 and later 835 mainframes.

HP2000 timesharing computer system with remote access via teletype at 110bps and an accoustic model. I can still remember the smell of teletype ribbons and paper in the high school computer room.

Why? To be able to get the computer to compute stuff for me. Initial programs were to print trig/log tables so i wouldn't have to buy them. I was already a science geek, computing orbital parameters for fun, and adding logs was easier than multiplication.

I was 13 years old. It was 1974.

The next year the high school got a 300 bps DecWriter. OMG! That was "fast". We got a card reader and optical scan 40 column cards, so we could "program" outside of the computer room. At some point we got a 1200 bps portable thermal paper TI terminal.

By 1975 or 76, I was hacking on an Altair at a local business, writing accounting software for them in Basic.

My first computer that I actually owned was a 6809-based system running Flex around 1984. A PC clone came shortly after that. By this time I was well on my way toward an Honours Computer Science degree.

If we send the Beeb's in Zuck's place I think we could make everyone happy. Iran gets a white boy they can prosecute or just hold without cause for a really long time and the US no longer has to put up with his illegal actions or that noise he purports to call music. Considering there's a petition before the White House to have him deported back to the Canada anyway, I vote we offer this as an alternative.

Quotes like this that make me miss the defunct Forum 2000. This sounds like a great quote from The Cube SOMAD.

I agree with the GP though. I recall a guy I used to work with who used hyperbole a lot. I recall that he once referred to a so-called "fiasco" which, upon deeper inspection, translated to him trying to schedule a conference call where he couldn't get the other people to agree on a time. Once I figured out his hyperbolic tendency, I could safely moderate the "disasters" he was warning of. I shudder to think what would happen if his emails are ever discovered for a lawsuit.

As a former H1-B holder, and current lawful permanent resident ("Green Card"), here long enough to become a citizen (> five years), H1-B DO NOT work cheaper.

At least, it is ILLEGAL to pay them less than 95% of the prevailing wage in the local area (as determined by the State Dept. of Labor). Furthermore, the employer has to bear the brunt of non-immigrant related legal paperwork and the cost of sending them home at the end of their visa. H1-Bs actually cost employers MORE than citizen workers.

While it is true that contracting firms and employers themselves will often lie regarding wages, this is criminal, and strongly opposed by legal H1-B workers as much as it is opposed by citizens.

Quoting another post to get past the damn filter.

Then once you figured that out you could learn about variables, figure out how to write to the screen RAM, and eventually figure out sprites. And then once you figured out that interpreted BASIC at 1 MHz wasn't fast enough to do a decent arcade game, you'd move on to assembly. I'd wager a majority of the people programming today learned in an environment like this. Edsger Dijkstra and other academic computer scientists hated BASIC, which they thought taught bad habits and caused brain damage, but they were wrong. It was this kind of hacker culture that created the flourishing IT industry we have today, not the dead-end bureaucracy represented by Thatcherite Britain.

How to make the lineprinter rip the paper:

              PROGRAM FOO(INPUT, OUTPUT)
10 PRINT 20
20 FORMAT(133H+---- .... ----)
              GOTO 10
              STOP
              END

Stupid formatting doesn't work, but you get the idea.

1979-1980. Punched cards. CDC 7600. If one was lucky one could get time on one of the Decwriters and work interactively. Getting paper before someone stole your seat was another story. Pair programming became popular for that reason.

On the flip side of the coin, jamming cellphone signals would eliminate some texting and driving so presumably it could have also saved some lives.

Subway's Sriracha is adulterated with mayo. Not exactly great for the diet. Idiots: they have mayo. If people wanted both, they could ASK for both. But, no.....

Interesting you say that... because for various medical reasons many parents don't want they're kids to have particular vaccines. Funny how we want to tar and feather them for refusing a vaccine over fears of a complication down the road that may or may not have evidence to back it up... yet its okay for them to skip the vaccines for other reasons.

So... the "anti-vax'ers" the article mentions... they're only a small subset of the population, right? Last I checked, according to the CDC they only account for less than .2 percent of the population. I understand the numbers are growing, but they're still a small subset. So if the other 99.8% of people are getting their vaccinations then this really only affects the non-vax'ers, right? In other words, they're getting exactly what they understand they'll get by not being vaccinated. So how is this a huge problem again? I'm confused. Granted, no one wants to see anyone, especially children, die unnecessarily when a vaccination could have kept them alive. But those who reject the vax's over fears of autism, etc understand that if they do get it, they're facing a different risk and they're basically playing the odds. In most cases, whether its measles or chicken pox, they get it, they get over it, and they'll never get it again and their immune systems are the better for it. In rare cases, they or their children will die. But they believe the odds of them dying from measles or pox is less than the odds of having a bad outcome from the vax and getting something like autism. Its all about risks the anti vax'ers are willing to take (and to take for their children). But being such a small subset of the population.. I'm not sure how this is a problem for the rest of us that are already vaccinated and can't get it anyway...

I've never had this problem. And since data is data is bits is bits... if this was an issue, you would think BR movies would have the same issue? I've been backing up to BR for about 3 years now and have had to go back to older media for restores and never had an issue. Like all media, your environment can affect them. I wouldn't let them get too hot or too cold, no direct sunlight, etc...

Oh, and for what its worth... yes, you can do rsync on Windows. I'm not assuming he has Mac, Linux, or UNIX. I've been doing rsync on the PC for years with cygwin... these days there are many more options and ports of rsync for Windows... even 64bit versions, etc. But my scripts are written around cygwin and expected variables and such, so I still do it the *old school* way. :) Just wanted to point this out though as inevitably someone will cry about rsync and Windows...