>> 1969 1st computer was a targeting computer for a Titan II ICBM ...
paper tape in octal code.
Another USAF guy!
1980, fresh out of tech school. I end up on a dinosaur: Univac 494,
punched cards and non-ANSI Cobol -- talk about a lot of typing! For a
year or so we had to submit our handwritten coding sheets to keypunch,
and then eventually they started making us key our own decks. 24-hour
turnaround on compiles was our "service level guarantee".
One system was inventory and the "database" was a pallet stacked with
card trays 4 feet high. We eventually converted it to magnetic storage
-- 7 reels of tape. Either way you'd always dread that 2AM phone call
from the operator, "uh, we got another read error on the input file..."
We had no disk drives, only a couple of drums, which were engineering
marvels themselves, used for temp storage.
Everything was octal. I started converting SPURT (assembler)
programs/routines. Got so immersed into octal that I'd sometimes forget
to switch back to decimal when I was in the "real" world. Balancing
your checkbook and say "what the hell is this '9' doing here? Oops!"
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