I cheerfully concede full ownership of the topic to the Master, and humbly accept the teachings! (How does Don KNOW all this stuff?!)
"You have to know these things when you're King..." (Monty Python and the Holy Grail)
Easy now! Don't talk like that too much, or we will need to add a few gigabytes of space for Don's head 
Well, when you consider that I first used a computer nearly 40 years ago, it's easier to understand how I might know so much about the topic. I've seen machines with a "removable hard drive" that was twelve inches in diameter, never mind the 5.25" floppy disks and the 3.5" floppy disks.
In fact, the first computer I saw in action wasn't actually a computer - it was a terminal device for connecting to mainframe computers over the phone lines. The Texas Instruments "Silent 700" used thermal paper as an output device and connected to computers using an acoustic coupler - two cups into which you'd jam the handset of an old-school landline phone; one for the speaker and one for the microphone. My father was an electrician, but his experience level was more like that of an electrical engineer and he had some experience with early "microcomputers." He was asked to testify before the US Congress about a computer he co-designed, the "Fuel Computer," back in the late 1970s. The Fuel Computer was designed hot on the heels of the Oil Crises of the 1970s and was the first computerized control unit for an oil-burning furnace in a home or an apartment building, allowing one to use up to 25% less oil for heating their dwelling and producing hot water.
The first computer I used was at school, in fifth grade - A Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I. It used a cassette drive to load software - it looks like a 70s dictaphone-style tape recorder and used high-bias audio tapes for storage, with audio cables for connection to the machine. The machine used BASIC as its programming language (before the age of graphical user interfaces and operating systems, you literally had to program your own computer). It had a whopping 64 kilobytes of memory and it took 30 MINUTES to load a 64-Kb program. To put that in perspective, 64 Kb equals 0.0625 megabytes (Mb) or 0.00006103515625 gigabytes (Gb) - a typical smart phone today will have between 16 and 64 Gb of memory, while the typical computer might have 256 to 1,024 Gb of storage. (So when the Internet is slow, perhaps that might put things in perspective for you!) That 64-Gb phone has 1,048,576 times the amount of memory the entire computer I was using had!
I remember one program that I found in a computer magazine - it was called "Frightful Flight." I read the code - it was all nonsense instructions that had no logic to them and would only crash when the computer ran it, but I programmed it in anyway, character-for-character exactly as it appeared in the magazine. Things got really strange when I read the final instructions - save the program to a tape, disconnect the cables to the recorder, rewind the tape and play it. My jaw nearly hit the floor when I heard a really bad but recognizable rendition of "Flight of the Bumblebee" playing out of the tape deck's speaker! Some crazy programmer learned which commands used which audio frequencies when saved to the cassette, found the ones that corresponded to musical notes and "programmed" a song using a computer that had no audio capabilities and a black-and-white screen!
I could go on and on about this, but really - we're so far off-topic, we're not even on the same planet anymore...
(Read 6704 times)
