Computing in the Stone Age

My first computer programming experience was in a high-school math class about 1970. We got an Olivetti Underwood Programma 101 desktop calculator. It was the size of a large typewriter (kids, ask your grandparents what that is) and could store and read program instructions (a little over 100, as I recall) on a magnetic card. In addition to the usual add/subtract/multiply/divide instructions, it had a square root key! I wrote a program to solve quadratic equations, which was probably my first useful program of any type.

When I started college, there were no computer classes! I enrolled in the very first one offered at Cypress College, which introduced me to actual programming, albeit in a fairly rudimentary form of BASIC. Forget graphics, colors, sounds, multi-media — this was purely text input and output, usually done on a noisy, slow ASR 33 Teletype, though eventually we got cool TI Silent 700 terminals, which printed at a blazing 30 characters/second on thermal paper. I remember being enthralled at our instructor dialing up a timesharing service in Maryland, connecting his suitcase-sized “portable” terminal with built-in modem acoustic coupler, and playing blackjack with the distant computer. I was hooked.

Later, at Cal State Fullerton, we had CRT terminals, and worked mostly on a DEC PDP-11/70 running RSTS/E timesharing. I spent a lot of time as a “lab rat”, hanging out with the other computer nerds in the lab, and doing tutoring. I got recommended by an instructor for a job at Hunt-Wesson Foods, and the rest is history. My time with RSTS/E was a huge help when I got hired at IDEA Systems (later bought by Union Bank) to work on their 11/70. This machine really had a colorful console like the one below (but no mini-skirted beauties, just nerdy guys). It required a raised-floor, refrigerated room with a dedicated 50kVa motor/generator to provide clean power, and supported about 50 clients (title/escrow companies). The computer was upgraded to a whopping 2 MB of RAM memory, and had a pair of dishwasher-sized 300 MB hard drives, which we backed up daily on about a dozen big reels of magnetic tape. By comparison, my aging smart phone has 2000 times the memory and God knows how many thousands of times the computing power. And you could put all the data storable on about 1350 of those multi-platter hard drives on a $50 micro-SD card the size of a little fingernail. Times have changed.