[PLUG] Terabyte paper tape

[Tomas Kuchta]

You did not miss much.

The old tech sucked. I was (un) fortunate enough to experience it, both at
home and work.

About the only good thing about it was its simplicity and openness. Most of
the ancient computers came with awesome manuals for both HW and SW. It was
so easy to learn and understand. I guess, that the same could be said about
today's tech albeit at different abstraction level.

-Tomas

On Wed, Sep 22, 2021, 11:34 Atharva Lele <itsatharva at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Reading all of this is really so interesting to me! I was born in 1998 and
> I feel like I've missed out on so much!
>
> My first computer was an Intel Pentium 4 with 256MB RAM and 40GB HDD.
> Hopefully I'll get to at least tinker with some of the old tech!
>
> Regards,
> Atharva Lele
>
>
> On Tue, Sep 21, 2021 at 11:43 AM Daniel Ortiz <
> elamigodanielortiz at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > If it is desired or decided to try to replicate the experience of paper
> > tape coding then theoretically Google's teachable machine could be one
> > component used to accomplish that:
> > https://teachablemachine.withgoogle.com
> >
> > On Tue, Sep 21, 2021 at 11:02 AM Russell Senior <
> russell at personaltelco.net
> > >
> > wrote:
> >
> > > You can still get the clack-clack-ding-ding without the hardware:
> > >
> > >   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd5oomwEBb0
> > >
> > > but it's hard to replicate the smell of paper tape.
> > >
> > > On Tue, Sep 21, 2021 at 4:08 AM Keith Lofstrom <keithl at kl-ic.com>
> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > "My first computer" was a DEC PDP8 at Tektronix, which I
> > > > was allowed to use at age 16 in 1969.  The programming was
> > > > language was FOCAL.  No disk drive - I/O was an ASR-33
> > > > teletype, and a "high speed" 60 character-per-second paper
> > > > tape reader.
> > > >
> > > > I compare that to my new 80 gram, 1 Terabyte SATA3 solid
> > > > state drive.  A terabyte of paper tape would fill a cube
> > > > 20 meters on a side, weigh more than 10,000 metric tonnes,
> > > > and take 530 years to read.
> > > >
> > > > Not all was bad back then.  The lawns we kids were told
> > > > to get off of were larger.
> > > >
> > > > Keith
> > > >
> > > > --
> > > > Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com
> > >
> >
>