---

Z(1) = Y + W(1)

A #Fortran Statement in this #Vintage #computing input device.

The famous “punched cards”, which each cold hold 80 characters or one line of programming instructions or data for processing.

I learned this language, and created my assignments in decks of those cards.

Back in November, when I was starting in mastodon, we had a delightful thread about it, which included this image. @k11m1 — see it here

#QotoJournal #History #Technology #Programming

May 17, 2020, 8:32 PM

---

New Year's day, and all is quiet in the land. :–)

Time to catch up, and I remembered an idea for a blog post a few days ago. We were having some discussions (which turned a bit heated), but later things calmed down.

Chatting in a Mastodon network thread, I mentioned the situation reminded me a lot of my days in the BBS world; where I started in computers, dial-up modems, and the network I was soon participating in – called FidoNet. The conversation went as follows:

---

Reaching out, Connecting.

A modem was the only available way to reach out and connect to other computer systems in the early 90's. They were not cheap, but the allure of finding out what was out there was enticing. You saved, until you could get one.

My first modem was an US Robotics Courier 2400 bps, internal model. Purchased it in a company liquidation sale, new in a sealed box.

I had to learn VERY quickly of all the intricacies of IRQs, Com port addresses and default assigned IRQs, Jumper settings to change those.