Thread: Am I that old ?

The australian made Microbee was popular during the early 80's, it used the Z80 cpu which was very versatile and fun to programming it for many applications.
Now talking about old any of you remember the IBM 2025 processing unit?
That was on the circa 1968 with the model 95.
I remember it because my brother learned to programing on it.

Was that one that sorted cards and was programmed by plugging wires on a panel? Maybe that was only a card sorter though.
My real programming days started in 1970 (I learnt some Fortran at uni the previous year) on an IBM 360/30 mainframe that had 32KB of ram, 16KB of which was occupied by the operating system so some fancy footwork was required if a program exceeded 16KB. There were several card processing and sorting machines from a previous era still being used, along with hand-operated card punches that the programmers used to make program changes that required up to 3 buttons to be pressed simultaneously for each character. A little different to my current programming activities.

The 2025 was belong to the 360 family from the early 1965?
The 360/30 model was older and yes both from the punch cards generation.
Perhaps we can call them the "Flintstone" computer compared with the power of a decent today's server

I remember being amazed to be able to see the matrix of ferrite cores with 3 wires running through each one - 1 core per bit, 9 per byte being 8 data bits and 1 parity bit. I also recall the time I fixed the console typewriter with an elastic band because the return mechanism had broken which brought the whole computer to a halt. We got extra test time that day because the payroll job was then able to be completed in time.

Graeme, I do not remember when Cobol was introduced.
Was it with the 360 or the 370 family?

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I learnt COBOL on the 360/30 and it must have been around for many years judging by the application systems in use. An emulator program was used to run an old payroll system on the 360 that was written for a 1440 Autocoder but I never knew anything about the 1440 machine.

Originally Posted by Graeme

I learnt COBOL on the 360/30 and it must have been around for many years judging by the application systems in use. An emulator program was used to run an old payroll system on the 360 that was written for a 1440 Autocoder but I never knew anything about the 1440 machine.

The 1440 generation was very old.
IBM introduced the 1401 in Uruguay in 1962 and on these machines for the first time data from the rural census was entered.
During the mid 1960's the best way to start learning computer programing was to work for an IBM client who was able to recommend its staff to IBM to learn programing and operation of the machines.
I do not know if here in Oz this was the case or a easy way to be a programer without go to the Uni.
Bugger! when I star remember this things I realize that we the baby boomers start become a bit old!!!