Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Pond Boss business

Dave - I had to search for a 1401 to remind me when they were used. Does this bring back memories? About 1959,



Hope this is not fanning the flames of a recovering addict!

PFF, Yep; that's an IBM 086, 2000 card per minute sorter on the left. The cover on the impact printer was to cut down on noise. This has to be a lot more recent model because 4K wouldn't support tape and drum drives.

There's a 386 out now??

WOW! My "real" job now is in public health so I automatically look at variances from the norms. It seems like a disproportional number of posters here were early computer nerds. Do you think there is some previously unknown link between computer nerdism and pond bossism?

P.S. FWIW Just looking at a punch card still gives me the jeebies. It reminds me of 2 hour waits to see if a simple program ran, card readers jamming, dropping an index card file box containing lots of unnumbered cards comprising a program not yet ran and now in some random order. That said, I still fondly remember the trash 80s, vic 20s, and top of the line Commodore 64s though. Sadly, I didn�t get rich on the PC revolution. Almost bought a bunch of Microsoft, Cisco Systems, etc. stock way back when; but bought a new pickup truck, big disk (used behind a tractor in farming), and bunch of cattle instead� Suffice to say, if I had actually done what I almost did, I would have been a millionaire several times over. In retrospect, it is amazing my picture isn�t in the dictionary beside the word stupid! I wonder what we�ll be saying we were stupid about 20 years ago in another 20 years?

Back to topic, I�d also be interested in a CD with all back Pond Boss articles.

I don't know, let's ask all the pond bosses who never surf the net and see what they think.

I remember 8" floppy drives hooked up to CPM systems.
I remember going to the business school computer center at 0800 to use keypunch machines, free because at that hour all the business majors were in class or hung over (or both).
I remember Byte magazine before it became "I Love Apple Monthly."
I remember PC Magazine when Jerry Pournelle was the worst (not the best) columnist.
I remember when Dvorak was a keyboard, not a writer.

"I remember 8" floppy drives hooked up to CPM systems.
I remember going to the business school computer center at 0800 to use keypunch machines, free because at that hour all the business majors were in class or hung over (or both).
I remember Byte magazine before it became "I Love Apple Monthly."
I remember PC Magazine when Jerry Pournelle was the worst (not the best) columnist.
I remember when Dvorak was a keyboard, not a writer."


I have no recollection of that, Senator.

Theo, I remember some of that stuff. I do remember wandering by the computer lab, about 11 or so at a gentlemanly time of day, and finding it full of slipstickers that had been there since it opened.

We Business majors were pretty sure they just couldn't get a date and decided to go in early and hog the keypunch.

Hey, I expect you know the Hollerith system.

I remember tapping out 1's & 0's on a wax string & tin cans.
The 0's were hard to make.

Hey Ric, that's why you take Engineers snipe hunting. They'll believe anything you tell them as long as you convince them that there really is a formula involved.

Whoever hollerith the loudetht geth to run their punchcardth firtht?

Who remembers the old teletype machines with paper tape?

My first personal computer was an Apple I minus. No floating point language, casette tape for storage, rf converter to tv as the monitor.

I still have the Apple I minus. I could not bear to toss it.

Frank

Quit posting so fast! My Atari takes a full two hours to download each individual post.

Congratulations to Bob and all the PB members! Whats next on the achievement list Bob??

Bruce,
FWIW, I find that ending my Pong game helps to speed up the downloads

My MITS Altair 8800 takes a day to download a sentence. It needs a operator to read the lights and write down the letters. :p

I think we are on to something. What if we left 2005 on the web and all of the 2006 posts. Then we sold CD's with all of the previous posts. A person could buy the CD with just the posts and for more money, the CD with the posts and copies of previous magazines.

This will be for a first time CD. After than, a person can buy one year at a time. That year will be deleated and the only way to get all of this previous info is to buy the CD.

I use the term "we" because we all want to see Pond Boss and this forum continue to offer this wonderful info us all.

Yea for Norm, I was hoping someone would get this thread back on track. I would like to have all the back issues of the magazine. To buy them would be 14 years @ 46.75 (Texas rate) = 654.50 That is a little pricey for me, but if you could put 1992-2000 on one CD for $100 and 2001-2005 on another I would order both today! The "ask the boss" CD with all posts on it, up to the day you organize and burn it, would be better. That way we could use the search feature on the user computer to find and organize information easier. That would save you some bandwidth with us not searching your website. The website search feature does not work very well anyway. There is another $100 = $300 from me alone! Or I would go for a premium membership with access to back issues!

Bob has some tough choices to make and I will support them gladly.

I would pay more for the mag. , more for a premium subscription and pay for a CD with back issues of the mag. I have doubts about a process of deleting posts/threads with substantive info from the forum. Just think about the great posts over the last year. Under a deletion process they would be gone in a couple of years. If so then we will no doubt have to answer those questions again and will have lost to the public all that original info /links/experience. To keep it would require both CD's and their interaction/functioning with the forum. I don't know how that would work. You could not link a new question to the old deleted answer. Would someone with the the CD find the info copy it and add it to the answer. Then you would be back where you started. While the search function has problems it is a lot better than nothing which is what you would have if the info is gone. Also once the initial post is deleted ,then several year updates to ongoing pond trials/experiments would become a problem with the initial post missing.

One of the often repeated comments is about the wealth of info here. Not just the people but the results of those peoples' prior work being accessible to the public and our ability to tie it to the current questioners situation. The first step of many viewers is to look for info and only later ask questions. If the data is gone what will they do - leave the site or ask a question. There are many who read but never post and some of them get the mag. as well. Where does that leave the forum as to its ability to help people with info and act as a source of growth for the mag. and the advertisers.

Eric

I agree with your comments. I would pay more to keep the web site as is without banner ads.

BTW congratulations on being selected as a new moderator. You are a great choice!

Frank

Frank :

Thanks you are to kind. If I slip up let me know !! I don't profess to have the answers to Bob's choices (not a web site expert) but will help however I can to make the entire package work together for all of us. This is an incredible resource/data base that can not be replicated anywhere else (both the people and info).

Did anyone ever get a firm figure on how much space it would take for the entire forum? I saw earlier estimate of 200-300 MB.

The outfit that hosts my personal web pages offers 1 Gigabyte for $97/year and 3 Gigabyte for $161 per year. Lusk PM me if you want more info.

Frank

That 1401 looks familiar. I was programming it (we had 16K) as late as 1670.

FB

That might have been 1970, not 1670

FB

1670 would be closer to Blaise Pascal's Steam Computer.

Bing, I expect you used the later model that had IOCS.