Comments on: Bare Metal Programming

By: Dominic Delmolino

Dominic Delmolino — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 13:50:49 +0000

My high-school had that exact same model — during my school years I used to help out with the school’s “IT” department and one of my first lessons was how to start up that machine :-)

By: Michael Fontana

Michael Fontana — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 21:22:57 +0000

I don’t think I can top Rob’s story since he had real-world experience, however, in 1977, while attending college at the State University of New York in Albany, we had to create our own assembly language doing much the same thing on a then-ancient Univac-6 computer built about 20 years previously. We then had to write a computer program using this language, and could choose from several projects. Mine was a celsius-to-farenheit temperature conversion. I think it took over 1000 punched cards to get the job done.

Our instructor was certain this experience would help us in the business world, but it never really did. By the time I started working, punch-cards were nearly gone. I think I used them for about four weeks, but I met a lot of then old-timers who refused to use CRT terminals or workstations.

By: joel garry

joel garry — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 00:52:49 +0000

My first computer had dual 8″ floppies. A bit smaller than this one, but similar model: http://www.physics.purdue.edu/~jones105/pdp-11/