John wrote:
Jean-David Beyer wrote:

unix lower case freaks back then because they could be.


That could be true. Ken and Dennis had a Western Electric ASR37 teletype as
the "console" of the PDP-7 (I think it was) on which they developed the
first version of the UNIX Operating System. Since their ASR37 had a "stunt
box," they could type in lower case if they wanted to.

I passed on the opportunity to get into computers then because the
industry that offered it used Hollerith cards,

Actually, the punched cards were on their last legs then. In the world of
batch processing, vendors were supplying machines that went direct from
keyboard to tape (which was used as input to the mainframe machines of the
day). General Electric and others were offering dial-up time-sharing
services already where you _could_ use punched paper tape as input or
output, but this was seldom used. It was about that time that the BASIC
OS-Language came out.

tape,

That is still used to this day, though as a percentage, perhaps less than in
its heyday.

hand-wired logic boards,

Do you mean the plug-boards used to program machines like the 407 printer,
the 602 calculating punch and such? They were almost gone by 1960.

machine sorters...

Gee, I thought card sorting machines were pretty neat. You could do a lot
with them. I do not miss them, though.

but I did learn about some awesome tricks
with sort/merges done on multiple tape spools. "Cascading Sort" was the
one that is impressive to this day. Had I known of the PDP then rather
than in 1978 when I managed two PDP 11/70s after becoming exhausted from
photography...

Unix is a stroke of genius. PICK is another, but I digress. I am a
photographer again, not a computer weenie.


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