[kwlug-disc] what the rest of us were doing..

[Bob Jonkman]

One of the first computers I ever used was a PDP-10 at UWO, to which I 
connected from our high school library with a 110 baud modem.  It was 
for the library's online catalog for the school's Canadian Studies 
program, and I volunteered to do data entry so I'd get access to the 
computer and do other things...

The main text editor was SOS, or Son Of Stopgap, which was based on 
Stopgap, an editor to bridge the gap between the simple-to-useless line 
editor LINED and the highly capable but impossible to use TECO.  One of 
the "features" of SOS was the mode for text entry, different from the 
mode for editing. The toggle was the ALTMODE key, mapped on our terminal 
with the ~ key. I was constantly toggling between entry and edit mode, 
so it might have looked like I was leaning on the ALTMODE key.

For years after that I thought the ~ character was actually called an 
Altmode, learning it was a "Twiddle" much later, to go with * Splat and 
! Bang and # Hash...

--Bob.


On 2022-08-05 17:28, CrankyOldBugger wrote:
> For a brief time, before I discovered computers, I was working in the
> Engineering building at UWO.  They had some system there for water or
> electrical management that had a strange keyboard:  it was a basic computer
> keyboard but it had an "ack" key that the operator more or less leaned on
> all day.  Does anyone know what sort of system that might have been?
> 
> 
> On Fri, Aug 5, 2022 at 4:56 PM Francisco Dominguez <fxdoming at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
>>
>> I had the privilege to work with some people at bell-northern- research
>> (BNR/Northern Electric/ Nortel) back in the late 80’s / early 90’s
>>
>> Many were retiring at 60 / 65… so the stories they had of how they built
>> phone switches, computing networks, and developed with protel (precursor to
>> C / pascal) were amazing to hear…
>>
>> 370’s I think were still in use when I started there… used x-edit and
>> cocos-mail on the vm/Cms
>> We were ‘cutting edge’!
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Francisco
>> fxdoming at gmail.com
>>
>> On Aug 5, 2022, at 3:53 PM, Jon Thiele <jthiele at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> 
>> First it was Honeywell Level 6 ===> System/370 ===> System/36 ===>  AS/400
>> ===> z/OS or whatever it's called now...
>>
>>
>> <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail> Virus-free.
>> www.avast.com
>> <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail>
>> <#m_3527013968576272217_DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2>
>>
>> On Fri, Aug 5, 2022 at 3:32 PM CrankyOldBugger <crankyoldbugger at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Those early AS/400's were the best computers ever built..  rock solid;
>>> they run forever.  At least, they run until a certain unnamed operator
>>> accidentally tripped over the power cord one day...  They drop pretty fast
>>> then!
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Aug 5, 2022 at 3:29 PM Jason Eckert <jason.eckert at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> That was such a reliable platform. The last day of my co-op at Microsoft
>>>> (early 90s) there was a talk in the amphitheatre, and I remember Bill Gates
>>>> telling everyone that IBM was in financial trouble and they were
>>>> considering buying just the AS/400 division (at the time, Microsoft had a
>>>> LOT of AS/400 systems running pretty much all the company operations).
>>>>
>>>> On Fri, Aug 5, 2022 at 1:56 PM CrankyOldBugger <
>>>> crankyoldbugger at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I enjoyed hearing some of the older guys in this group go on about
>>>>> systems and programs they used back in the day.. For the rest of us old
>>>>> farts, we ran IBM.  Here's a fun video of the AS/400 plant in Rochester (I
>>>>> used to work on System/38 and AS/400 beasties)
>>>>>
>>>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m53H0pO2FD4
>>>>>
>>>>>
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>>>>>
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> 
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-- 
Bob Jonkman <bjonkman at sobac.com>          Phone: +1-519-635-9413
SOBAC Microcomputer Services             http://sobac.com/sobac/
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