I'm never disappointed when I see that particular font in a title. The sound effects here are way over the top glorious. The future was way cooler then... Thanks for saving it and sharing it!
I earned my BS in ComSci WAY back in 1980. I wrote lots of IBM S/360 assembler (and also COBOL and FORTRAN) programs on 80-column punched cards in the late 70s. They ran on the school's IBM S/360 Model 50, with 512 KB of magnetic core memory. it was a fairly limited and older machine even then, but I learned a LOT about computing on it. The school also had a BASIC HP 2000 (IIRC) time-sharing machine that we used via async 9600 bps terminals. It was much more enjoyable to use because you could just type your lines on the screen, list them out, edit and reorder them, etc. without having to deal with a bunch of punched cards that could be, heaven forbid, DROPPED AND SCATTERED! I'm still in the business, and I'll probably finally retire in a 2 or 3 more years. I've worked with MANY different kinds of computers and operating systems. These days I write a lot of Java code in Eclipse on a nice M1 Macbook Pro with 16GB memory, a very fast 512 GB SSD, and nice big color screens, all connected to the internet via a very fast wi-fi connection. My laptop, as well as my iPhone 13 Pro, each have FAR more computing power than all 5 of the IBM mainframes that were used to control the Apollo moon shots. How very FAR we have come just in my career. It's frankly mind-boggling, and I've been amazed for well over four DECADES in this ever-changing business of information technology!
I had a very similar experience in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Wrote Fortran and IBM 360 assembler language for Electronic Engineering classes. Also assembler on SEL 800 series with 24 bit word width, had to enter bootstrap code with binary switches to read 2 pass assembly code punched tape from teletype ASR-33. Later on worked with Data General NOVA minicomputer, HP 2100 minicomputer & DEC PDP-8 & -11. It was a major revolution when we got hard disk drives and CRT terminals to write and save/load code. I later got to design and program microcomputer systems with 8080 and 6800 microprocessors. When the IBM PC came out in mid 1980's then computer programming and controls really took off.
@@WJV9 NICE! Back in college I wrote a cross-assembler for the Motorola 6809... in S/360 Assembler! That was crazy, and it required two boxes of 80-column cards for the source code! It output 6-bit BDC machine code on 80-column cards that could be taken to a weird machine that could read the cards and write the contents to a paper tape, that could be taken to the 6809 machine and the instructions read in from it. Later on at IBM, I worked with the Series/1 minicomputer. It competed with the DEC PDPs. It was a nice EIA 19" rack-mounted 16-bit machine with separate sets of 8 registers for each of the 4 hardware interrupt levels. We had lots of adapter cards for it: analog I/O, digital I/O, the Programmable Communications Subsystems, async, bisync, SDLC, and later on even a S/370 channel adapter to hook it up to a mainframe. Those were fun times, and I wrote some Series/1 Assembler back then. The group I was in even wrote our own OS for it, since the OSs from the lab - RPS and EDX - weren't really suitable for what we were trying to develop. I don't think any customer was ever able to put RPS into production... it took HOURS to do a Sysgen of it. RPS was a disaster that never worked... like trying to run MVS on a 16-bit 360 KIPS machine with 64K of RAM and a 9.6 MB hard drive. It was LAUGHABLE!
I have the very first IBM 360 operators console that UPS installed in St. Charles Illinois, as well as some punch cards. I think it's a great historical period for my Father who also wrote the program to allow UPS to track the paychecks to employees at that time. As UPS grew, so did the responsibilities with senior staff. Dad retired at 50% pay when offered to him and became wealthy when UPS's stock split and then had an IPO, which tripled the value of the stock. What brown did for my father's family and so many others, they still ask, What can Brown do for You?
That's pretty cool I have a 360 green card and many manuals. I still have many greenbar listings. I use to have boxes of punched cards. My mom used them them to write a memo of what was on her VHS tapes. She liked how they fit in the sleeve of the tape. Today I can run MVS on my Linux desktop
Stan, where do you keep this wonderful monstrosity? Does it fit in your basement (I hope?) You and Curious Marc are in a VERY small club, having IBM 360 operators console in your home! Awesome!
Insane that St. Charles keeps popping up in my Internet browsing. Grew up there, moved there in 1977 when I was just a kid. Where was this massive UPS facility?
these videos are incredibly powerful to me....especially since I'm trying to get my girls away from TikTok at least passingly familiar with the way tech used to be.
The irony of watching this film is doing so with my computer that is more powerful than the people of that time could ever imagine and through the internet, which they most likely had no idea that would even be possible. I'm sure they would be proud to know that all their hard work is put to use so I can watch youtube videos.
I read someplace that 3 iPhones have more compute power than existed on Earth in 1968. I don't know if that's literally true, but the spirit of it certainly is.
I wrote my 1st computer program in machine language in November 1963. IBM 1620. I wrote the loader app that ran when I pressed the button labeled IPL (short for Initial Program Load) to cause the computer to read one 80 column card into core starting at memory location 1 and transfer execution control to that location. I punched the instructions myself on an IBM 024 keypunch machine. Sheer joy! I loved it. Still at it with two 60 year anniversaries coming up. You see, I married my wife on the 2nd day that very same month. JFK was shot that month too. 2 wonderful things. A 3rd thing I also will never forget, as sad as the other 2 were joyful.
@@lajosszel This was a classroom assighment The specs were to create and run a program with input, process and output. And to provide documentation describing what it did. My little program read another card, punched that card, typed it on the computer console typewriter and printed it 100 times on the "high speed" line printer. Quotes because high speed was 100 lines per minute. Everything worked the 1st time and I was shocked. My instructor was pretty surprised too I think. But then my instructor counted lines printed and there were only 99. He still gave me a A, while explaining that coding and testing were inseparable and equally important. And that eliminating bug's was as hard as writing the initial application. I never forgot those lessons. However, I've completely forgotten the data I put on the 2nd card. Sigh... 🤔
I have a jaw dropping story 🙂 In a big distribution center they had some stone age IBM computer that provided serial ports to item list printers but the hard drive crashed. I replaced the hard drive and was going to start the motor to the IML 8" floppy but it was already running. The motor was nearly red hot and the floppy was transparent, no magnetic layer left. I had to clean the drive and use the spare floppy but it failed to open the console, someone has moved it to another port without updating the spare floppy. Panic was near, I had to dial a friend who work for IBM and he told me that there is only one person alive that know this stuff. I got his mobile number and he answered from his boat, he was fishing. I told the story and he asked me to follow the cable and tell him the port. Then he started to give me the op codes for patching the IML floppy from memory, I entered it on the switch board and the machine started so the operator could roll back the current status. Things like that don't happen any more.
"(...)You see, I married my wife on the 2nd day that very same month. JFK was shot that month too. 2 wonderful things. (...)" someone could missunderstand that. or maybe i do?
@@rodgerdodger2008 I envy you. Those times you coul really instruct the machine, speak its language literally. And the prof was really a prof, not someone between two jobs giving lessons he learned the night before, programming with softwares looking like flight simulators. But I don't complain it just came out. Cheers man!
Oh wow. This was the year I first went to university and wrote my first computer program (find the roots of a quadratic equation, in FORTRAN). I remember our lecturer - ex Navy - telling us not to complain if it was hard - "because when I started it was all 0s and 1s".
Gosh, I remember programming the quadratic root finder on the TI-83 (in TI-BASIC). Teacher said the same things "At least you don't have to code it in assembly!" (Which is still more user-friendly than machine language!)
I praise all those mechanical and electromechanical engineers. They knew their job, they knew their devices and knew how to build new ones. There was no black box before their eyes like today. They used to connect passive pieces to make an active device. Today we play lego and ask ourselves: what is inside this?
I programmed computers in the 60x, 70s and 80s. Quite apart from the electronics they were marvels os electro-mechanical engineering and fascinating to watch. Magnetic tape drives were amazing with their servo chambers to allow rapid stop/start which gave the spools their characteristic twitching, like they were alive.
Some drives handled spools sealed with a clip ring. The spool was mounted and the drive opened the ring then threaded the tape through the path to the bottom spool, all done with photo cells and jets of compressed air. The operator only had to mount the spool, close door and hit the Load button.
@@geoff37s38 _they were not all vacuum columns some were rollers on spring loaded levers._ I think those were the "cheapies," like Pertek (sp?) had the spring-loaded tension arms. Kennedy and DG had the vacuum columns, and those were better; plus they didn't stretch the magnetic tape.
I remember reading about all this stuff back around 1970. It was only the next year that the microprocessor became available and started the microcomputer revolution. We knew that something awesome was ahead, but none of us could properly envision it.
I have done the same thing, I bought a mail course in Fortran, Cobol and Assembler for the mainframes 1972 but it took over 2 weeks to get back the errors from the compilers and by that time I had forgot what I was thinking. I skipped that course and started to read about Unix instead but it took over 10 years before I got my hands on a terminal to a Unix system. I was working with hardware so I was able to build my own computer using scrap I got from work. But as you say, who understood the coming future where 128 KB memory evolved to 128GB on a home pc ?
@@birrextio6544 128 GB is more of a professional workstation spec than the home pc. 16 GB is standard nowadays and 32 GB for the power home user. Anything above 32 GB and you are into something very demanding like super hi res video editing, several virtualised OS:s running etc...
@@Magnus_Loov You are right but the first home computers had 8,16,32 and up to 64 KB Ram so it's still million times more. I had friends that made up to 1MB address space using bank switching but they only got 128 KB dues to costs and limited MB slots.
@@gregorymalchuk272 The company I worked for was making prototypes and products in small series and I was working with testing. Some cards was discarded as junk and I picked the good parts from them. Well, the only thing they was useful for was tests and education, I learned the op codes and wrote simple things that made them boot and flash some lights and so on. I'm not sure about what years but I guess I was using a simple 4-bits CPU 1972-1974. Then it was not my choice what to use, it depended on what we was producing, so I ended up with a 6808 cpu, flex 2 DOS, 4 floppies 1MB each, 56KB Ram 2 Serial ports and a modem where club members could dial in and exchange files or I could connect a printer. It got upgraded to 6809 flex9 DOS later and stylograph word processor and, URRRK! a basic compiler made by Bill Gates. OK, not everything was stuff I got for free, I had to buy the box, power supply, wordprocessor, basic compiler, flex2, flex9 and a few other things.
Absolutely amazing! You do learn something new every day! I only got into computers around 80-81 being born in the early 70s, I missed the golden age of programming. On a side note, This educational film reminds me of a great 70s Sci-fi underrated gem called Colossus: The Forbin Project. Simply amazing how much has changed in 50-60 years!
I'd hardly consider the vintage of this to be the golden age of programming, if the vintage is what you were referring to. The techniques are still very much the same today in the embedded world. Instead of punch cards or toggle switches, we use DMA, which removes feeding physical cards from the process, but from the perspective of abstraction, it's conceptually nearly identical when it comes to the concept of loading instructions into memory. And, in the "Time Sharing" concept at 7:52 is not conceptually all that different from what the industry is doing a lot of in the "cloud services" realm. The one thing that was exceptionally well understood back in the 1970s that has been mostly lost today in the industry are concepts in system performance and management practices that were absolutely necessary to survive back then, and it's unfortunately made the industry nearly unbearable to the real hardcore engineers. The IBM of today is an absolute joke compared to the IBM of the 1970s, those guys really understood the human factors and productivity aspects that professional business users could benefit from; the green screen was less fatiguing on users who had to stare at the computer all day, function keys and macros simplified repetitive tasks. This SGI commercial from 1985 cites important studies from 10 years prior that modern IT management could benefit from: ruclips.net/video/9EEY87HAHzk/видео.html
The "golden age of programming" ??? What ??? To me the golden age was more in the end of 80's and 90's, while you had, at the same time, power and control over your machine, and could do fantastic things like COMPUTER GRAPHICS, in "real time"...
@@garryiglesias4074 i'm glad you said "to me" thing is you could only do those things in the 80's and 90's after the underlying code was written and built upon and combined with faster more capable processors, all those things you mention were possible in the 60's and 70's, it was just way more expensive and found in research labs, not on the common desktop or even the average office, so for others the golden age was working towards making it possible for people like you to have your own golden age.. one persons golden age bootstraps anothers
there's a few videos about colossus on youtube .. also others regarding analogue computers in the 40's50's etc , . you might like this one .... the germans in ww2 had some of thier air defence flak guns controlled by a central analogue computer, great clip how it affected allied bombing here ruclips.net/video/1MsRNauv7rM/видео.html
Colossus: The Forbin Project is one of my favorite films. the guy from the young and the restless starred in it. very scary and foreshadowing of contemporary artificial intelligence
My father used those cards when he was programming for the railroad in Alaska in the 60's. I remember him telling me how long it took to enter all the punch cards. Now Quantum computers are coming into the picture. Pretty cool watching the progress increase exponentially.
In 1980 my typing teacher told us that someday we'd write on word processors which were small computers. Wow, he sounded smart! Then he said the computers had a "chip" in them that did everything. Uh, they have lots of chips in them but OK. Then he said if the computer broke, they'd just "open the chip" and "repair" it. UH, I tried to explain to him that integrated circuits were microscopic and couldn't be repaired when they fail. He said I had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. 42 years later I'm still pissed at him for knowing something that he didn't.
My Z80s and 6502s used to break down all the time. Such a hassle 'cause I never payed for the extended warranty. The repair guys would come over with their tiny little wrenches and have those puppies humming again within an hour or two. Quality work, but those those repair bills added up. Those were the days.
Boy, to think in fifty years we went from "many people can use the computer at the same time in a method called 'timesharing'" to "I need my own computer as well as a phone I can carry in my pocket that has more computing power than that mainframe."
Man, Those were the days back in the Late 1960's where at our technical electronic school allowed us to program on an IBM 1401 system. We learned to use the O26 key punch machines and sorters, had the big magnetic tape drives, and had one very large hard disk. At a later date, got to program on a faster IBM 360, but that was a 2 semester programming course. Quite a jump back in time compared to what we have now with home computers sitting on our desks.
Wow! My first computer was a Commodore 64 back in '81, I was 5. Now I train Tier 1 agents the in's and out's of troubleshooting multi-building networks for a NOC. Thanks for the Commodore, Grandma! If you'd only known how much you would change the life of that little boy. I've gone from cartridges and cassette tapes to 5 1/4" floppy drives to 3.5" drives to CDs...DVDs...and now a tiny little thumb drive that holds an unbelievable amount of information. I hope I'm around for a while yet, I'm curious to see what the future holds.
I can remember early 80's loading up a program and asking my more experienced co worker what does it do? He always had the same answer, read the program. After not too long I was reading and writing programs.
Hey, IBM! Good news! By 2015 everybody will carry a computer in their pocket that far exceeds the 360 line of machines. The bad news: not a single one of those computers will carry your brand name.
@@nicolacasali8304 Just realised that is was of course R2 D2 who made the funny noises. But since C3 PO was fluent in 6000000 forms of communication I expect that he could make funny noises too!
I absolutely love this channel!!! It's not just fun to watch, but it is archiving media that would be long gone if it weren't for you tube and special channels like Periscope. If I ever run into something worthwhile I will definitely try these people!!
Amazing what progress has been made in the last 52 years! When this film was made, it was showing cutting edge technology. It had a certain wow factor because it was showing very futuristic machines in action 😮 Technology that must have seemed quite incredible at the time 🤯 Watching this film in 2022, it still has that wow factor but it's for completely different reasons 😮 Now it has that wow factor because I'm looking at "antique" computer hardware in action 🤯 This is stuff that I've only read about! Very few examples of this computer hardware actually still exist. And these days equipment like this would be something shown on display at a computer history museum. Quite fascinating! And something that I've never actually seen in use in my lifetime 🤷♂️
My first year of college compsci was the last year my school was using keypunch machines. Those things were built like tanks and were so satisfying yet frustrating to use!
My first college computer course in 1971 used IBM punch cards. We wrote our programs on punch cards, submitted them and waited days for a printout of the results. It was a Fred Flintstone operation compared to today.
Something that I will always miss are all those sounds that all those machines generated, magnetic tapes, printer heads, magnetic disks and all those midi sounds was like being on another planet, now you enter a computer room and you only hear airplane turbines 😂
I came into computers at the age of 7 with one of the first Microcomputers. TRS-80 Model 1, I owned Atari computers into the 80's until I bought a 486. First minicomputer I used was at college was a Digital PDP 11/44. First job with computers was an IBM System 38. How times have changed. I now do Help Desk and Desktop support for a company.
I remember going on a field trip in the 1st grade to the Science Center at Flushing Meadow's in Queens, NY Circa 1973. They printed our names on punch cards. I kept mine for many years and used it as a bookmark. I don't know if my mother still has it, but I will have to look for it one day.
Interesting to see a Fedco card at 9:58. Even without the film credits, that helps potentially place it in southern California in the late 20th century at the very least (and more likely in the middle of it.) Fedco used to staple your bags closed when checking out. The one we used to go to (Van Nuys) felt dated even when we went there, and the building itself had been added to several times; the entrance had a desk with people who could answer questions, and who occasionally glanced up to check for a membership card as people entered the store. Ah, but that's all NON-computer memory. In any case, I'm happy to see films like this have been preserved. Thank you, Periscope!
@@josephgaviota A toaster? Interesting...why particularly do you recall that? Was it one of your first personal purchases? Or perhaps it was it a gift? I bought a GE Great Awakening clock radio, and the double-album Supertramp: Paris there (probably some other stuff, but those two I clearly recall from 1982 and 1980, respectively.) Still have the LPs, and the box for the clockradio. Remember how the toys were out "on the patio?" Or that little18" ramp you had to go down from the entry foyer to the store proper? Good times; thanks for sending up a flare.
Wow this brought back some college day memories in the mid 80s. I recall in my freshman year using punch cards to write a short 80 line program (yuk) - one time I saw a staff member drop a whole box of hundreds of punched cards - I'm sure he had fun sorting those out! The pen and CRT interface seems advanced for 1970 though.
Depending on the version, the cards could be numbered (certain holes in the card represented its sequence number) ... then there were "sorters" where you could drop your stack, and have it re-sorted.
Ahh, the memories. Tech College in 70's had 360 Model 50 for class use during the day, ran the county systems overnight. Started coding by wiring 1401 control boards. Then on to 360 Assembler, FORTRAN, RPG/II and COBOL. Started with airlines coding their aircraft maintenance tracking/forecasting system. Wrote on 80-column coding sheets, turned over to the keypunch folks, got card deck back, checked it, then added our personal Job Cards and sent it to the computer room to be run. When we each got a 3270 terminal, thought we were in hog heaven. First machine was the 360/50. Last one before retiring was z/OS 15 machine. Do what you love, never work a day in your life? Yup. Got into programming by total accident. College cancelled a math class, guy pinned up a newly opened course that fit my, now open, day and time slots. Intro To Computer Programming. Sure, why not??!! The rest, they say, was history.
I started coding RPGII on paper. After your input, calcs, output, etc. were defined you could type your code directly into the system on a keyboard and a 8 line/40 column CRT. Fun times.
@@dneumet During short summer break in tech college classes, worked as temp S/36 operator at an HVAC manufacturing plant. Their entire accounting and manufacturing software system was RPGII. They had a problem where IBM coders came in to track down the problem. The printed copy of the code was in 6 of those 132-character green-bar folders. Each 8-10 inches thick. They let me flip thru one of them. Holy crap! RPGII was meant to be a management report generator, not code full-blown business control systems. RPGII has the 100 status switches that can be set, their code had routines to do crazy storing of multiple sets of those switches depending on the part of the code it went to next. Using up to a dozen sets of those 100 switches. 🤷♂️🤦♂️ The company had both a 96-col card keypunch machine/reader and an 8-inch floppy key-to-disk machine with CRT. Think the key/disk display was limited to 80 columns.
@@tomgates316 IIRC those key to disk were only 40 characters. The high school I went to had some 3741 and some 3742 units: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3740 At one point I had to maintain RPGII code that was developed for a large drug company. The developers were in South America. Trying to interpret their Spanish language field names into English was somewhat challenging.
Hard to believe a quick 13 years later and I would have access to a PET and Apple II computer at school, and between me and my friends would have those and Commodore and Atari computers at home as well. At school in the computer class, we would be learning about punch cards and still using a teletype with a modem to printout a career report from some remote computer. It was a wild time to be a 12 year old into computers.
My first job with computers in the early '70s was across the hall from an IBM shop. I worked on a Honeywell & one of my main jobs was feeding punch cards into the reader.
My father brought one of those home every evening so he could log in after dinner if he had to--there was a cover that snapped on and allowed it to be carried around like a briefcase. We had a second phone line for the acoustic modem. My first experiences with a computer were playing around on his engineering account on his work mainframes with that terminal. I think his employer encouraged it, maybe because they thought they were educating the next generation of IT workers.
@@MattMcIrvin Yes I had a second line for work also. However I used the 700 to connect with our PDP-11/70 which was considered a minicomputer and spoke ASCII. IBM mainframes used EBCDIC. However I believe there were ASCII computers that were called mainframes, such as the DECSYSTEM-20.
That's a common misconception. Lovelace was still learning calculus while Babbage was designing the Analytic Engine, and you can bet he had some arithmetic programs in mind for that. However, she was the one who realized that numbers could be symbols, and so the engine could do algebra.
“Hi, I’m Troy McClure. You might remember me from such educational films as “‘Alice Doesn’t Live Anymore’ and ‘Mommy, What’s Wrong With That Man’s Face?’ “
In the 80s and early 90s we used those cards as scratch paper in school. Corporations would donate them and they were things that sat in storage for many many years and eventually when that storage was cleaned out they would donate all the used paper and cards for us to use. The old printer paper from that time would have private information on one side social security numbers, financial, you name it the other side would be clear so we would obviously use the other side for our scratch paper. Big corporations such as general motors, fidelity, vanguard etc would donate all of this stuff which would contain the most private financial information you could think of.
It's funny that people back in the day imagined that computers and robots have "robotic" voices like beep boop boop while nowadays real robots and AI sound like your friend.
Never was "smart enough" for my school's computer-Science course. Even though I was the nerdiest. Took the Math and Science and Physics prizes every year... Now All I do is computer, day in day out, year over year... go figure...
A lot of RUclips videos wouldn't even fit on a single IBM 3350 disk drive (introduced in 1975), which was the size of a small washing machine, that a bank might use to store customer records.
317.5 Mb/drive would still allow a lot of youtube videos to fit. RUclips videos are heavily compressed and 317.5 Mb is quite a long 1080p youtube video. But they would be way to slow to play them back! (not to mention the processor capacity would probably also be way to slow. Or the video capturing.
@@Magnus_Loov Well I guess I should have said a lot (and I do mean a lot) of videos I watch would exceed a 3350 capacity. For example the below video, mp4 @ 1920x1080 is 553.76MiB and is less than 29min (which I don't consider quite long) ruclips.net/video/noHL7YwB7JU/видео.html
@@Magnus_Loov The below video from a very popular RUclipsr is 238.66MiB...(mp4,1920x960) and only 24 min. So you couldn't even add another similar video to a 3350. ruclips.net/video/ZDtaanCENbc/видео.html
Also in regard to this video...this is at the resolution I'm likely to watch. The same 24 min mp4 video @ 3840x1920 (which is available and some people with more powerful equipment may prefer) is 1.09GiB so it wouldn't even fit on three 3350s if you split it up.
When our maintenance guys found some used RL-02 drives for sale in the 1980s, the company sent them to California to check their quality. They were excited to purchase a few of them as spares for our PDP-11 processors for only a few thousand dollars each. Today a tiny 32Gb flash drive can hold 160 times as much data and we could buy hundreds of them for what only one RL-02 cost. Incidentally, our old PDP's used the very same type "core memory" (magnetic core) shown in the video. The memory was inserted on a huge card in a drawer below the CPU.
I was doing Basic and Machine Code on a Superboard Challenger 1P in 1982 and TRS-80 with 16k RAM, and Apple II in 1983... 48k RAM and there was 40 columns of text... to have 80 columns we have to buy a US$200 80-Column card... (extension circuit board) and later on was doing Assembly on IBM 360 to find prime numbers as a college homework... I still remember a guy who was already working at a business and he saw me completing the homework and he said to me, "No, that is a homework impossible to finish!"
i studied computer science in the late 70's. we used punch cards. write the program in 'basic' and computer staff would turn that into cards. you'd then take the cards to the computer lab.... which was a whole entire floor of the building. overnight staff would feed it all thru and the next day you would get your print-out to hand in to the teacher. from writing to the result would take at least 3 or 4 days.
The amount of paper used must have been astounding. Even at a terminal, paper being used instead of a view screen. I remember working with those washing machine sized hard drive units and their disk packs, just as they were on their way out in favor of much smaller hard drives.
They must have been hernia-inducingly heavy lol. What was the storage capacity? I saw a photo of a 1GB hard disk unit from 1985 (the year I was born) and it was enormous. Compare that to the 32 GB microSD card that fits inside my phone today and it really blows your mind how far things have come.
I remember working with 2 pack sizes. 300 mb, and 80 mb. Yeah, a far cry from what we have today. Even from the late 80s. The actual drive units were like a moderate sized home washing machine. With a flip up lid where you drop in the disk pack. I think the larger pack was a stack of 10 platters. Each 30mbs. I don't remember the configuration of the 80mb, But it was a little less than half as deep, less platters. Close and wait for it to spin up to operating speed. These drives were prone to "head crashes" as the heads 'flew' like less than a millimeter over the surface. A dirty finger print would be dangerous. And a hair or spec of dust on the surface would be like hitting a mountain at 1000mph to the hands. The critical time of vulnerability was when the cover was lifted off the pack while loading or unloading in the drive. The drive units had all sorts of airflow and filtering system to keep the disk area free of particals. Part of the reason why the drive units were huge and heavy.
I worked in a large financial corporation where the mainframe's CPU, tape and disk drives, various printers and dozens of typists (who's sole job was to spend their days inputting data into punch cards) occupied two of the building's 10 floors. Card readers and very large continuous form listings were part of everyday life. We also had terminals spread throughout the building connected to the mainframe, running all sorts of useful office applications. Fast forward exactly 40 years, and I can't help but be amazed at the power of having a wealth of information (Google, RUclips, Universities, etc) at our fingertips in our PCs or better yet, our smartphones. It may not be so for younger generations who grew up with this, but to me, it feels like I'm living in some kind of strange science fiction movie where absolutely everything is connected to computers one way or another. We even have little devices with which we can communicate (while looking in the face, no less) with anyone in the world. The future has arrived. I'm glad I had the chance to witness the before and after.
In the 1980s, computers were grossly slow. However, they were really fun. Sharing software was easy with such tiny programmes to move around. Taping into another computer was as easy as knowing the telephone number their harmonizer was connected. A harmonizer was what a telephone modem is today, but much slower. It was easy to programme in BASIC. I still remember the code today. But the actual utility of computers was really more a novelty than a necessity. There was no World Wide Web at all and the Internet was horribly cryptic, slow, and hard to use. Few used it, even fewer knew about it. Today, the utility of computers is far greater than the entertainment aspect of computers. We need a better balance of entertainment and utility for computers today.
7:45 - Timesharing. Already common in 1970. So when the Feds where awarding grants, to save money, they wanted those awarded grants to share computers, developed Arpanet to network computers over long distances. This eventually turned into the Internet. Didn't get into computer until taking Fortran, in college, in the 1970s. Then it was on punch cards, which I handed to a clerk, at a "window", and picked up my printout, a day later.
In 1985 we learned to use the typing machine at school 'cause we had to learn how to type letters on them, you know, that was the time, at least in France..... and when we went to the I.T classroom to learn how to use a computer, I was thinking "what a waste of time typing on those big old ugly computers with big screens without life, you know, the ones with black screen and green letters, they will never be used anyway. Me typing from my macbook pro today, how wrong was I LOL.
Its ironic, while computers increasing skills, in school the students have many options to response a single question, like; who is the first man on moon? Option A: Pancho Villa Option B: Neil Armstrong Option C; You
Quote from my 7th grade math teacher in 1970: "I have to teach this chapter on binary math even though you will neve see a computer." Just 10 years later I bought a "Color Computer" from Radio Shack....😁
My first experience was working on a PDP-8L with an ASR-33 I/O console in 73' The only disk pack I handled, were DEC RP series, all the rest we sealed (and the size of a large refrigerator)
Working with language is a big change from just working with numbers! It means that life is now comprehensible enough on paper to take over not just one universe but quantum numbers of universes so getting hacked politically is in a whole other field compared to the 1960's.
My new Windows 11 computer runs on vacuum tubes, and is programmed by punch cards! ... It has the latest magnetic core memory, and the output is displayed on a television screen! ... The system is very compact, taking up an entire room, and weighing-in at one ton! ... It cost $50,000.
It's amazing to see just how far computers have advanced over the last 50+ years. Perhaps, quantum computers will one day make our current systems seem like mere toys. I did get a chuckle when the analog computers of 100 years ago (from 1970) where mentioned as archaic. Kind of ironic the computers of 1970 are considered archaic by our standards today. Yeah, it will be interesting to see where technology takes us in another 50+ years. Thanks for sharing this video!
But the punched cards were invented by an American census worker named Herman Hollerith to speed up the compilation of the 1890 census (the 1880 census took seven years to finish, and he could see where it was going). The cards (a few of which are still in use) are officially called Hollerith cards in his honor, and they are the same dimensions as United States currency in 1890. The code used for Hollerith cards, or at least a 1964 upgraded version of it, has traces in IBM’s 8-bit code called EBCDIC, used in IBM mainframes.
I'm never disappointed when I see that particular font in a title. The sound effects here are way over the top glorious. The future was way cooler then... Thanks for saving it and sharing it!
Glad you enjoy it! Thanks for being a sub.
I earned my BS in ComSci WAY back in 1980. I wrote lots of IBM S/360 assembler (and also COBOL and FORTRAN) programs on 80-column punched cards in the late 70s. They ran on the school's IBM S/360 Model 50, with 512 KB of magnetic core memory. it was a fairly limited and older machine even then, but I learned a LOT about computing on it. The school also had a BASIC HP 2000 (IIRC) time-sharing machine that we used via async 9600 bps terminals. It was much more enjoyable to use because you could just type your lines on the screen, list them out, edit and reorder them, etc. without having to deal with a bunch of punched cards that could be, heaven forbid, DROPPED AND SCATTERED!
I'm still in the business, and I'll probably finally retire in a 2 or 3 more years. I've worked with MANY different kinds of computers and operating systems. These days I write a lot of Java code in Eclipse on a nice M1 Macbook Pro with 16GB memory, a very fast 512 GB SSD, and nice big color screens, all connected to the internet via a very fast wi-fi connection. My laptop, as well as my iPhone 13 Pro, each have FAR more computing power than all 5 of the IBM mainframes that were used to control the Apollo moon shots.
How very FAR we have come just in my career. It's frankly mind-boggling, and I've been amazed for well over four DECADES in this ever-changing business of information technology!
I had a very similar experience in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Wrote Fortran and IBM 360 assembler language for Electronic Engineering classes. Also assembler on SEL 800 series with 24 bit word width, had to enter bootstrap code with binary switches to read 2 pass assembly code punched tape from teletype ASR-33. Later on worked with Data General NOVA minicomputer, HP 2100 minicomputer & DEC PDP-8 & -11. It was a major revolution when we got hard disk drives and CRT terminals to write and save/load code. I later got to design and program microcomputer systems with 8080 and 6800 microprocessors. When the IBM PC came out in mid 1980's then computer programming and controls really took off.
@@WJV9 NICE! Back in college I wrote a cross-assembler for the Motorola 6809... in S/360 Assembler! That was crazy, and it required two boxes of 80-column cards for the source code! It output 6-bit BDC machine code on 80-column cards that could be taken to a weird machine that could read the cards and write the contents to a paper tape, that could be taken to the 6809 machine and the instructions read in from it.
Later on at IBM, I worked with the Series/1 minicomputer. It competed with the DEC PDPs. It was a nice EIA 19" rack-mounted 16-bit machine with separate sets of 8 registers for each of the 4 hardware interrupt levels. We had lots of adapter cards for it: analog I/O, digital I/O, the Programmable Communications Subsystems, async, bisync, SDLC, and later on even a S/370 channel adapter to hook it up to a mainframe. Those were fun times, and I wrote some Series/1 Assembler back then.
The group I was in even wrote our own OS for it, since the OSs from the lab - RPS and EDX - weren't really suitable for what we were trying to develop. I don't think any customer was ever able to put RPS into production... it took HOURS to do a Sysgen of it. RPS was a disaster that never worked... like trying to run MVS on a 16-bit 360 KIPS machine with 64K of RAM and a 9.6 MB hard drive. It was LAUGHABLE!
The HP 2000 BASIC source code for the computer game Trek 73 can be found on the Internet.
que buena onda pudiste ver toda la evolucion de las computadoras! una leyenda!
How about BASIC?
"If you look around, you'll see many ways that computers are affecting your daily life.."
..is spoken as I watch this on my phone.
I want to see them monitored for good reasons. Keep bad things away from the eyes of the innocent child.
I have the very first IBM 360 operators console that UPS installed in St. Charles Illinois, as well as some punch cards. I think it's a great historical period for my Father who also wrote the program to allow UPS to track the paychecks to employees at that time. As UPS grew, so did the responsibilities with senior staff. Dad retired at 50% pay when offered to him and became wealthy when UPS's stock split and then had an IPO, which tripled the value of the stock. What brown did for my father's family and so many others, they still ask, What can Brown do for You?
Thanks for being a sub and for the comment. It makes sense that UPS would have been an early adopter of big data.
That's pretty cool I have a 360 green card and many manuals. I still have many greenbar listings. I use to have boxes of punched cards. My mom used them them to write a memo of what was on her VHS tapes. She liked how they fit in the sleeve of the tape. Today I can run MVS on my Linux desktop
Stan, where do you keep this wonderful monstrosity? Does it fit in your basement (I hope?) You and Curious Marc are in a VERY small club, having IBM 360 operators console in your home! Awesome!
Insane that St. Charles keeps popping up in my Internet browsing. Grew up there, moved there in 1977 when I was just a kid. Where was this massive UPS facility?
Do you remember how to 'Manually' Read IBM Punch Cards?
0:36 That intro music was a bop :)
We have come a long way . I still have a floppy disk from high school in the 80s
I like how they use analog synthesis to portray computers from a sonic perspective. Two things I am passionate about in one quirky space.
these videos are incredibly powerful to me....especially since I'm trying to get my girls away from TikTok at least passingly familiar with the way tech used to be.
The irony of watching this film is doing so with my computer that is more powerful than the people of that time could ever imagine and through the internet, which they most likely had no idea that would even be possible. I'm sure they would be proud to know that all their hard work is put to use so I can watch youtube videos.
I read someplace that 3 iPhones have more compute power than existed on Earth in 1968. I don't know if that's literally true, but the spirit of it certainly is.
@@josephgaviota considering the computer on Apollo 11 had less computational power than a calculator it seems believable
I wrote my 1st computer program in machine language in November 1963. IBM 1620. I wrote the loader app that ran when I pressed the button labeled IPL (short for Initial Program Load) to cause the computer to read one 80 column card into core starting at memory location 1 and transfer execution control to that location. I punched the instructions myself on an IBM 024 keypunch machine. Sheer joy! I loved it. Still at it with two 60 year anniversaries coming up. You see, I married my wife on the 2nd day that very same month. JFK was shot that month too. 2 wonderful things. A 3rd thing I also will never forget, as sad as the other 2 were joyful.
Wow! What did that program do?
@@lajosszel This was a classroom assighment
The specs were to create and run a program with input, process and output. And to provide documentation describing what it did.
My little program read another card, punched that card, typed it on the computer console typewriter and printed it 100 times on the "high speed" line printer. Quotes because high speed was 100 lines per minute.
Everything worked the 1st time and I was shocked. My instructor was pretty surprised too I think. But then my instructor counted lines printed and there were only 99. He still gave me a A, while explaining that coding and testing were inseparable and equally important. And that eliminating bug's was as hard as writing the initial application. I never forgot those lessons. However, I've completely forgotten the data I put on the 2nd card. Sigh... 🤔
I have a jaw dropping story 🙂
In a big distribution center they had some stone age IBM computer that provided serial ports to item list printers but the hard drive crashed.
I replaced the hard drive and was going to start the motor to the IML 8" floppy but it was already running. The motor was nearly red hot and the floppy was transparent, no magnetic layer left.
I had to clean the drive and use the spare floppy but it failed to open the console, someone has moved it to another port without updating the spare floppy. Panic was near, I had to dial a friend who work for IBM and he told me that there is only one person alive that know this stuff.
I got his mobile number and he answered from his boat, he was fishing. I told the story and he asked me to follow the cable and tell him the port.
Then he started to give me the op codes for patching the IML floppy from memory, I entered it on the switch board and the machine started so the operator could roll back the current status.
Things like that don't happen any more.
"(...)You see, I married my wife on the 2nd day that very same month. JFK was shot that month too. 2 wonderful things. (...)" someone could missunderstand that. or maybe i do?
@@rodgerdodger2008 I envy you. Those times you coul really instruct the machine, speak its language literally. And the prof was really a prof, not someone between two jobs giving lessons he learned the night before, programming with softwares looking like flight simulators. But I don't complain it just came out. Cheers man!
Oh wow. This was the year I first went to university and wrote my first computer program (find the roots of a quadratic equation, in FORTRAN). I remember our lecturer - ex Navy - telling us not to complain if it was hard - "because when I started it was all 0s and 1s".
It's still REALLY all 1s and 0s inside! 😁
We must be the same age! I wasn’t any good at it then or now.
Gosh, I remember programming the quadratic root finder on the TI-83 (in TI-BASIC). Teacher said the same things "At least you don't have to code it in assembly!" (Which is still more user-friendly than machine language!)
It’s crazy how much it evolved in such a small time.
I praise all those mechanical and electromechanical engineers. They knew their job, they knew their devices and knew how to build new ones. There was no black box before their eyes like today. They used to connect passive pieces to make an active device. Today we play lego and ask ourselves: what is inside this?
No black box back then, indeed; they show a magnetic core memory plane in the video - memory where you can literally see physical bits. So cool
I programmed computers in the 60x, 70s and 80s. Quite apart from the electronics they were marvels os electro-mechanical engineering and fascinating to watch. Magnetic tape drives were amazing with their servo chambers to allow rapid stop/start which gave the spools their characteristic twitching, like they were alive.
They were called vacuum columns.
@@RaymondHng they were not all vacuum columns some were rollers on spring loaded levers.
@@geoff37s38 Those were called tension arms.
Some drives handled spools sealed with a clip ring. The spool was mounted and the drive opened the ring then threaded the tape through the path to the bottom spool, all done with photo cells and jets of compressed air. The operator only had to mount the spool, close door and hit the Load button.
@@geoff37s38 _they were not all vacuum columns some were rollers on spring loaded levers._
I think those were the "cheapies," like Pertek (sp?) had the spring-loaded tension arms. Kennedy and DG had the vacuum columns, and those were better; plus they didn't stretch the magnetic tape.
I remember reading about all this stuff back around 1970. It was only the next year that the microprocessor became available and started the microcomputer revolution. We knew that something awesome was ahead, but none of us could properly envision it.
I have done the same thing, I bought a mail course in Fortran, Cobol and Assembler for the mainframes 1972 but it took over 2 weeks to get back the errors from the compilers and by that time I had forgot what I was thinking.
I skipped that course and started to read about Unix instead but it took over 10 years before I got my hands on a terminal to a Unix system.
I was working with hardware so I was able to build my own computer using scrap I got from work. But as you say, who understood the coming future where 128 KB memory evolved to 128GB on a home pc ?
@@birrextio6544 128 GB is more of a professional workstation spec than the home pc. 16 GB is standard nowadays and 32 GB for the power home user. Anything above 32 GB and you are into something very demanding like super hi res video editing, several virtualised OS:s running etc...
@@Magnus_Loov You are right but the first home computers had 8,16,32 and up to 64 KB Ram so it's still million times more.
I had friends that made up to 1MB address space using bank switching but they only got 128 KB dues to costs and limited MB slots.
@@birrextio6544 What kind of computer did you build from scrap? What did you use it for?
@@gregorymalchuk272
The company I worked for was making prototypes and products in small series and I was working with testing.
Some cards was discarded as junk and I picked the good parts from them.
Well, the only thing they was useful for was tests and education, I learned the op codes and wrote simple things that made them boot and flash some lights and so on.
I'm not sure about what years but I guess I was using a simple 4-bits CPU 1972-1974.
Then it was not my choice what to use, it depended on what we was producing, so I ended up with a 6808 cpu, flex 2 DOS, 4 floppies 1MB each, 56KB Ram 2 Serial ports and a modem where club members could dial in and exchange files or I could connect a printer.
It got upgraded to 6809 flex9 DOS later and stylograph word processor and, URRRK! a basic compiler made by Bill Gates.
OK, not everything was stuff I got for free, I had to buy the box, power supply, wordprocessor, basic compiler, flex2, flex9 and a few other things.
I watched this in my iPhone
Absolutely amazing! You do learn something new every day! I only got into computers around 80-81 being born in the early 70s, I missed the golden age of programming. On a side note, This educational film reminds me of a great 70s Sci-fi underrated gem called Colossus: The Forbin Project. Simply amazing how much has changed in 50-60 years!
I'd hardly consider the vintage of this to be the golden age of programming, if the vintage is what you were referring to. The techniques are still very much the same today in the embedded world. Instead of punch cards or toggle switches, we use DMA, which removes feeding physical cards from the process, but from the perspective of abstraction, it's conceptually nearly identical when it comes to the concept of loading instructions into memory. And, in the "Time Sharing" concept at 7:52 is not conceptually all that different from what the industry is doing a lot of in the "cloud services" realm.
The one thing that was exceptionally well understood back in the 1970s that has been mostly lost today in the industry are concepts in system performance and management practices that were absolutely necessary to survive back then, and it's unfortunately made the industry nearly unbearable to the real hardcore engineers. The IBM of today is an absolute joke compared to the IBM of the 1970s, those guys really understood the human factors and productivity aspects that professional business users could benefit from; the green screen was less fatiguing on users who had to stare at the computer all day, function keys and macros simplified repetitive tasks. This SGI commercial from 1985 cites important studies from 10 years prior that modern IT management could benefit from: ruclips.net/video/9EEY87HAHzk/видео.html
The "golden age of programming" ??? What ???
To me the golden age was more in the end of 80's and 90's, while you had, at the same time, power and control over your machine, and could do fantastic things like COMPUTER GRAPHICS, in "real time"...
@@garryiglesias4074 i'm glad you said "to me"
thing is you could only do those things in the 80's and 90's after the underlying code was written and built upon and combined with faster more capable processors,
all those things you mention were possible in the 60's and 70's, it was just way more expensive and found in research labs, not on the common desktop or even the average office,
so for others the golden age was working towards making it possible for people like you to have your own golden age..
one persons golden age bootstraps anothers
there's a few videos about colossus on youtube ..
also others regarding analogue computers in the 40's50's etc , .
you might like this one .... the germans in ww2 had some of thier air defence flak guns controlled by a central analogue computer, great clip how it affected allied bombing here ruclips.net/video/1MsRNauv7rM/видео.html
Colossus: The Forbin Project is one of my favorite films. the guy from the young and the restless starred in it. very scary and foreshadowing of contemporary artificial intelligence
My father used those cards when he was programming for the railroad in Alaska in the 60's. I remember him telling me how long it took to enter all the punch cards. Now Quantum computers are coming into the picture. Pretty cool watching the progress increase exponentially.
Took just as long to make the actual train trip as it did to enter the punch cards
quantum computers are still a long way away. whoever develops it first will rule the world because it will make any security obsolete
In 1980 my typing teacher told us that someday we'd write on word processors which were small computers. Wow, he sounded smart!
Then he said the computers had a "chip" in them that did everything. Uh, they have lots of chips in them but OK.
Then he said if the computer broke, they'd just "open the chip" and "repair" it. UH, I tried to explain to him that integrated circuits were microscopic and couldn't be repaired when they fail. He said I had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. 42 years later I'm still pissed at him for knowing something that he didn't.
You were spot on. The only way to fix is to replace!
My Z80s and 6502s used to break down all the time. Such a hassle 'cause I never payed for the extended warranty. The repair guys would come over with their tiny little wrenches and have those puppies humming again within an hour or two. Quality work, but those those repair bills added up. Those were the days.
What he meant is that they would just open up a Commodore C64, then de-solder and resolder on some new chip, resistor, or capacitor. Handy repair job!
@@jeromeglick You think he was talking about a computer two years in the future? Maybe he did know what he was talking about!
Boy, to think in fifty years we went from "many people can use the computer at the same time in a method called 'timesharing'" to "I need my own computer as well as a phone I can carry in my pocket that has more computing power than that mainframe."
Man, Those were the days back in the Late 1960's where at our technical electronic school allowed us to program on an IBM 1401 system. We learned to use the O26 key punch machines and sorters, had the big magnetic tape drives, and had one very large hard disk.
At a later date, got to program on a faster IBM 360, but that was a 2 semester programming course.
Quite a jump back in time compared to what we have now with home computers sitting on our desks.
Real pioneers... When most knew very little about computers.
my mom tells me stories of card punch systems. they were everywhere in the 70s. in all metropolitan high schools and universities
Must have been an amazing time to be involved with computers.
Wow! My first computer was a Commodore 64 back in '81, I was 5. Now I train Tier 1 agents the in's and out's of troubleshooting multi-building networks for a NOC.
Thanks for the Commodore, Grandma! If you'd only known how much you would change the life of that little boy. I've gone from cartridges and cassette tapes to 5 1/4" floppy drives to 3.5" drives to CDs...DVDs...and now a tiny little thumb drive that holds an unbelievable amount of information. I hope I'm around for a while yet, I'm curious to see what the future holds.
Not possible. Was not released until '82. Maybe you had the VIC-20
@@knerduno5942 You are correct. Coming back to this comment I apparently fat fingered the date. '82 it was.
@@AsmodeusMictian I do that often also!
I can remember early 80's loading up a program and asking my more experienced co worker what does it do? He always had the same answer, read the program. After not too long I was reading and writing programs.
Hey, IBM! Good news! By 2015 everybody will carry a computer in their pocket that far exceeds the 360 line of machines.
The bad news: not a single one of those computers will carry your brand name.
But IBM would still build many of the “server” computers that feed data to (and collect data from) all those pocket computers!
IBM entered the personal computer business in 1982 and exited it in 2005.
@@RaymondHng I was referring to servers, not individual PC workstations.
Kinda disappointed modern machines don't make all these cool sounds :) (Yes, I know they didn't actually back then either. I was around then).
C3PO made sounds like that back in 1977!
@@antonioveritas A long time ago..
@@nicolacasali8304 And in a galaxy far, far away!
@@nicolacasali8304 Just realised that is was of course R2 D2 who made the funny noises. But since C3 PO was fluent in 6000000 forms of communication I expect that he could make funny noises too!
@@antonioveritas Of course! I visualised R2 D2, too.
I absolutely love this channel!!! It's not just fun to watch, but it is archiving media that would be long gone if it weren't for you tube and special channels like Periscope. If I ever run into something worthwhile I will definitely try these people!!
Amazing what progress has been made in the last 52 years!
When this film was made, it was showing cutting edge technology. It had a certain wow factor because it was showing very futuristic machines in action 😮 Technology that must have seemed quite incredible at the time 🤯
Watching this film in 2022, it still has that wow factor but it's for completely different reasons 😮 Now it has that wow factor because I'm looking at "antique" computer hardware in action 🤯 This is stuff that I've only read about! Very few examples of this computer hardware actually still exist. And these days equipment like this would be something shown on display at a computer history museum. Quite fascinating! And something that I've never actually seen in use in my lifetime 🤷♂️
Still men went to the Moon at that time and today still not ready to go again...!
I love vintage technology and agree totally with the “wow” factor, as you say!
My first year of college compsci was the last year my school was using keypunch machines. Those things were built like tanks and were so satisfying yet frustrating to use!
In the late 80's, when I turned 18, I got my first factory job where I ran a CNC turret press that was programmed with punch cards.
My first college computer course in 1971 used IBM punch cards. We wrote our programs on punch cards, submitted them and waited days for a printout of the results. It was a Fred Flintstone operation compared to today.
looks like something they would have made us watch in school even though we were 20 yrs past it
"By 1964, experts say man will have established twelve colonies on the moon, ideal for family vacations."
Something that I will always miss are all those sounds that all those machines generated, magnetic tapes, printer heads, magnetic disks and all those midi sounds was like being on another planet, now you enter a computer room and you only hear airplane turbines 😂
Wow!!! Such clarity of Teaching and animation sequences perfectly time imitating the CPU cycle. Glad to have seen this. Thank You
Wow, those synth sound in the background are insane.
Always was interested how unch cards worked
Thanks for making factories, and houses and all that we need with life.
Dang. I knew I should have sold off my stock in gears and levers back then.
1984 my college Fortran was on punch card…compiling was slow and one code error caused so much grief!
I came into computers at the age of 7 with one of the first Microcomputers. TRS-80 Model 1, I owned Atari computers into the 80's until I bought a 486. First minicomputer I used was at college was a Digital PDP 11/44. First job with computers was an IBM System 38. How times have changed. I now do Help Desk and Desktop support for a company.
I remember going on a field trip in the 1st grade to the Science Center at Flushing Meadow's in Queens, NY Circa 1973. They printed our names on punch cards. I kept mine for many years and used it as a bookmark. I don't know if my mother still has it, but I will have to look for it one day.
Interesting to see a Fedco card at 9:58. Even without the film credits, that helps potentially place it in southern California in the late 20th century at the very least (and more likely in the middle of it.)
Fedco used to staple your bags closed when checking out. The one we used to go to (Van Nuys) felt dated even when we went there, and the building itself had been added to several times; the entrance had a desk with people who could answer questions, and who occasionally glanced up to check for a membership card as people entered the store.
Ah, but that's all NON-computer memory.
In any case, I'm happy to see films like this have been preserved. Thank you, Periscope!
As another So. Cal. boy, I too remember the Fedco in Van Nuys. I bought my first toaster there as a teen.
@@josephgaviota A toaster? Interesting...why particularly do you recall that? Was it one of your first personal purchases? Or perhaps it was it a gift?
I bought a GE Great Awakening clock radio, and the double-album Supertramp: Paris there (probably some other stuff, but those two I clearly recall from 1982 and 1980, respectively.) Still have the LPs, and the box for the clockradio.
Remember how the toys were out "on the patio?" Or that little18" ramp you had to go down from the entry foyer to the store proper?
Good times; thanks for sending up a flare.
Wow this brought back some college day memories in the mid 80s. I recall in my freshman year using punch cards to write a short 80 line program (yuk) - one time I saw a staff member drop a whole box of hundreds of punched cards - I'm sure he had fun sorting those out! The pen and CRT interface seems advanced for 1970 though.
Depending on the version, the cards could be numbered (certain holes in the card represented its sequence number) ... then there were "sorters" where you could drop your stack, and have it re-sorted.
Ahh, the memories. Tech College in 70's had 360 Model 50 for class use during the day, ran the county systems overnight. Started coding by wiring 1401 control boards. Then on to 360 Assembler, FORTRAN, RPG/II and COBOL. Started with airlines coding their aircraft maintenance tracking/forecasting system. Wrote on 80-column coding sheets, turned over to the keypunch folks, got card deck back, checked it, then added our personal Job Cards and sent it to the computer room to be run. When we each got a 3270 terminal, thought we were in hog heaven.
First machine was the 360/50. Last one before retiring was z/OS 15 machine. Do what you love, never work a day in your life? Yup.
Got into programming by total accident. College cancelled a math class, guy pinned up a newly opened course that fit my, now open, day and time slots. Intro To Computer Programming. Sure, why not??!! The rest, they say, was history.
I started coding RPGII on paper. After your input, calcs, output, etc. were defined you could type your code directly into the system on a keyboard and a 8 line/40 column CRT. Fun times.
@@dneumet During short summer break in tech college classes, worked as temp S/36 operator at an HVAC manufacturing plant. Their entire accounting and manufacturing software system was RPGII. They had a problem where IBM coders came in to track down the problem. The printed copy of the code was in 6 of those 132-character green-bar folders. Each 8-10 inches thick. They let me flip thru one of them. Holy crap!
RPGII was meant to be a management report generator, not code full-blown business control systems.
RPGII has the 100 status switches that can be set, their code had routines to do crazy storing of multiple sets of those switches depending on the part of the code it went to next. Using up to a dozen sets of those 100 switches. 🤷♂️🤦♂️
The company had both a 96-col card keypunch machine/reader and an 8-inch floppy key-to-disk machine with CRT. Think the key/disk display was limited to 80 columns.
@@tomgates316 IIRC those key to disk were only 40 characters. The high school I went to had some 3741 and some 3742 units: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3740
At one point I had to maintain RPGII code that was developed for a large drug company. The developers were in South America. Trying to interpret their Spanish language field names into English was somewhat challenging.
Periscope films they're the best
Hard to believe a quick 13 years later and I would have access to a PET and Apple II computer at school, and between me and my friends would have those and Commodore and Atari computers at home as well. At school in the computer class, we would be learning about punch cards and still using a teletype with a modem to printout a career report from some remote computer. It was a wild time to be a 12 year old into computers.
10 years later kids would be fighting tooth and nail to get some time on the one and only Apple II in their classroom.
My first job with computers in the early '70s was across the hall from an IBM shop. I worked on a Honeywell & one of my main jobs was feeding punch cards into the reader.
Computing has come a long long way!! This is the history!!
Kinda goes to show, coming up with an idea is one thing, actually making it work is something else.
This video was done the year I was born, it was very interesting indeed
I watched this from magnetic tape.
I watched this on a film strip on a projector
I watched this on smoke signals
Reel to reel video deck..
😂😂😂😂
The file for this video is 25 MB, so it will fit on a 10.5-inch reel of magnetic tape.
I remember this in middle school
Used to play Oregon trail on a silent 700
Oh the good old days
TI Silent 700, thermal paper and 300 baud. I recently found one in my closet.
My father brought one of those home every evening so he could log in after dinner if he had to--there was a cover that snapped on and allowed it to be carried around like a briefcase. We had a second phone line for the acoustic modem. My first experiences with a computer were playing around on his engineering account on his work mainframes with that terminal. I think his employer encouraged it, maybe because they thought they were educating the next generation of IT workers.
@@MattMcIrvin Yes I had a second line for work also. However I used the 700 to connect with our PDP-11/70 which was considered a minicomputer and spoke ASCII. IBM mainframes used EBCDIC. However I believe there were ASCII computers that were called mainframes, such as the DECSYSTEM-20.
Did you die of dysentery?
In high school, it was nothing but. #2 pencil abacab.
imagine if the narrator added "and some day, computers will be able to run Crysis"
That day has not yet come ;)
I remember seeing this film in Jr high
It only named Charles Babbage (mathematician), but Ada Lovelace was the one that brought the machines to life with 'programs'.
That's a common misconception. Lovelace was still learning calculus while Babbage was designing the Analytic Engine, and you can bet he had some arithmetic programs in mind for that. However, she was the one who realized that numbers could be symbols, and so the engine could do algebra.
Thanks Toby
I recall the little punchcards. In the back of magazines, they claimed to have schools that would train people to operate these huge computers.
“Hi, I’m Troy McClure. You might remember me from such educational films as “‘Alice Doesn’t Live Anymore’ and ‘Mommy, What’s Wrong With That Man’s Face?’ “
In the 80s and early 90s we used those cards as scratch paper in school. Corporations would donate them and they were things that sat in storage for many many years and eventually when that storage was cleaned out they would donate all the used paper and cards for us to use. The old printer paper from that time would have private information on one side social security numbers, financial, you name it the other side would be clear so we would obviously use the other side for our scratch paper. Big corporations such as general motors, fidelity, vanguard etc would donate all of this stuff which would contain the most private financial information you could think of.
I remember when I was a kid
It's funny that people back in the day imagined that computers and robots have "robotic" voices like beep boop boop while nowadays real robots and AI sound like your friend.
That title track is FIYAH! @0:36
Back then when Lazenby fonts was widely used as a statement of modern technology
Dig those crazy sounds, useless flickering lights and that check writing future font. It’s so Jetson like, lolol
The announcer of this PSA film was a long time staff announcer for KTTV Ch. 11 here in Los Angeles.
Name?
Never was "smart enough" for my school's computer-Science course. Even though I was the nerdiest. Took the Math and Science and Physics prizes every year... Now All I do is computer, day in day out, year over year... go figure...
A lot of RUclips videos wouldn't even fit on a single IBM 3350 disk drive (introduced in 1975), which was the size of a small washing machine, that a bank might use to store customer records.
317.5 Mb/drive would still allow a lot of youtube videos to fit. RUclips videos are heavily compressed and 317.5 Mb is quite a long 1080p youtube video.
But they would be way to slow to play them back! (not to mention the processor capacity would probably also be way to slow. Or the video capturing.
@@Magnus_Loov Well I guess I should have said a lot (and I do mean a lot) of videos I watch would exceed a 3350 capacity.
For example the below video, mp4 @ 1920x1080 is 553.76MiB and is less than 29min (which I don't consider quite long)
ruclips.net/video/noHL7YwB7JU/видео.html
@@Magnus_Loov The below video from a very popular RUclipsr is 238.66MiB...(mp4,1920x960) and only 24 min. So you couldn't even add another similar video to a 3350.
ruclips.net/video/ZDtaanCENbc/видео.html
Also in regard to this video...this is at the resolution I'm likely to watch. The same 24 min mp4 video @ 3840x1920 (which is available and some people with more powerful equipment may prefer) is 1.09GiB so it wouldn't even fit on three 3350s if you split it up.
@@billb6283 The file for this video is 25 MB, so it will fit on a 10.5-inch reel of magnetic tape.
When our maintenance guys found some used RL-02 drives for sale in the 1980s, the company sent them to California to check their quality. They were excited to purchase a few of them as spares for our PDP-11 processors for only a few thousand dollars each. Today a tiny 32Gb flash drive can hold 160 times as much data and we could buy hundreds of them for what only one RL-02 cost. Incidentally, our old PDP's used the very same type "core memory" (magnetic core) shown in the video. The memory was inserted on a huge card in a drawer below the CPU.
I was doing Basic and Machine Code on a Superboard Challenger 1P in 1982 and TRS-80 with 16k RAM, and Apple II in 1983... 48k RAM and there was 40 columns of text... to have 80 columns we have to buy a US$200 80-Column card... (extension circuit board) and later on was doing Assembly on IBM 360 to find prime numbers as a college homework... I still remember a guy who was already working at a business and he saw me completing the homework and he said to me, "No, that is a homework impossible to finish!"
Блин 50 лет назад даже американцы говорили настолько чётко, что учебный фильм воспринимается на слух, без особых усилий..
"2+2=THINK"
-Alfred Hitchcock Presents
Dig the ole 'computer sounds' at the beginning.
i studied computer science in the late 70's. we used punch cards. write the program in 'basic' and computer staff would turn that into cards. you'd then take the cards to the computer lab.... which was a whole entire floor of the building. overnight staff would feed it all thru and the next day you would get your print-out to hand in to the teacher. from writing to the result would take at least 3 or 4 days.
Sound effects by Atari.
It's very long time ago to see these kind machine.
Ironically, I am now using an older computer to watch this video on old computers.
The amount of paper used must have been astounding. Even at a terminal, paper being used instead of a view screen.
I remember working with those washing machine sized hard drive units and their disk packs, just as they were on their way out in favor of much smaller hard drives.
They must have been hernia-inducingly heavy lol. What was the storage capacity? I saw a photo of a 1GB hard disk unit from 1985 (the year I was born) and it was enormous. Compare that to the 32 GB microSD card that fits inside my phone today and it really blows your mind how far things have come.
I remember working with 2 pack sizes. 300 mb, and 80 mb. Yeah, a far cry from what we have today. Even from the late 80s.
The actual drive units were like a moderate sized home washing machine. With a flip up lid where you drop in the disk pack. I think the larger pack was a stack of 10 platters. Each 30mbs. I don't remember the configuration of the 80mb, But it was a little less than half as deep, less platters. Close and wait for it to spin up to operating speed.
These drives were prone to "head crashes" as the heads 'flew' like less than a millimeter over the surface. A dirty finger print would be dangerous. And a hair or spec of dust on the surface would be like hitting a mountain at 1000mph to the hands.
The critical time of vulnerability was when the cover was lifted off the pack while loading or unloading in the drive.
The drive units had all sorts of airflow and filtering system to keep the disk area free of particals. Part of the reason why the drive units were huge and heavy.
Wow i would love to know who did the soundtrack
imagine how someone from this era would react to a modern computer
I worked in a large financial corporation where the mainframe's CPU, tape and disk drives, various printers and dozens of typists (who's sole job was to spend their days inputting data into punch cards) occupied two of the building's 10 floors. Card readers and very large continuous form listings were part of everyday life. We also had terminals spread throughout the building connected to the mainframe, running all sorts of useful office applications.
Fast forward exactly 40 years, and I can't help but be amazed at the power of having a wealth of information (Google, RUclips, Universities, etc) at our fingertips in our PCs or better yet, our smartphones. It may not be so for younger generations who grew up with this, but to me, it feels like I'm living in some kind of strange science fiction movie where absolutely everything is connected to computers one way or another. We even have little devices with which we can communicate (while looking in the face, no less) with anyone in the world. The future has arrived. I'm glad I had the chance to witness the before and after.
Or a smart phone.
They expected much more than what we have got in fact so, surprised then disappointed to what our world came to.
@@coriscotupi The typests were usually called keypunch operators
They would be surprised we are not more advanced. They had very high expectations of what the future would hold .
In the 1980s, computers were grossly slow. However, they were really fun. Sharing software was easy with such tiny programmes to move around. Taping into another computer was as easy as knowing the telephone number their harmonizer was connected. A harmonizer was what a telephone modem is today, but much slower. It was easy to programme in BASIC. I still remember the code today. But the actual utility of computers was really more a novelty than a necessity. There was no World Wide Web at all and the Internet was horribly cryptic, slow, and hard to use. Few used it, even fewer knew about it. Today, the utility of computers is far greater than the entertainment aspect of computers. We need a better balance of entertainment and utility for computers today.
7:45 - Timesharing. Already common in 1970. So when the Feds where awarding grants, to save money, they wanted those awarded grants to share computers, developed Arpanet to network computers over long distances. This eventually turned into the Internet. Didn't get into computer until taking Fortran, in college, in the 1970s. Then it was on punch cards, which I handed to a clerk, at a "window", and picked up my printout, a day later.
Very good, i learning his video.
Despite computers weren’t that powerful back then,but they still did find their use in almost everything for different purposes.
In 1985 we learned to use the typing machine at school 'cause we had to learn how to type letters on them, you know, that was the time, at least in France..... and when we went to the I.T classroom to learn how to use a computer, I was thinking "what a waste of time typing on those big old ugly computers with big screens without life, you know, the ones with black screen and green letters, they will never be used anyway.
Me typing from my macbook pro today, how wrong was I LOL.
and not to mention that your simple little laptop has more processing power in it than the most powerful super computers from back then! lol
@@firelord3 haha yes, that's what I've been thinking aswell. I have the macbook pro M1 max 14" with 3 USB-C, 2T, 64G ram and max of this and that.
Old vids are way more fun
Great Extratone/Noize music!
Its ironic, while computers increasing skills, in school the students have many options to response a single question, like; who is the first man on moon?
Option A: Pancho Villa
Option B: Neil Armstrong
Option C; You
The old narrator and the sounds are cool
This movie smells like my elementary school library carpet.
Quote from my 7th grade math teacher in 1970: "I have to teach this chapter on binary math even though you will neve see a computer." Just 10 years later I bought a "Color Computer" from Radio Shack....😁
@10:22 R2-D2's cousin reading the credits
Wow, when will we get these fantastic futuristic machines?
My first experience was working on a PDP-8L with an ASR-33 I/O console in 73' The only disk pack I handled, were DEC RP series, all the rest we sealed (and the size of a large refrigerator)
Working with language is a big change from just working with numbers! It means that life is now comprehensible enough on paper to take over not just one universe but quantum numbers of universes so getting hacked politically is in a whole other field compared to the 1960's.
I don't know what is more interesting. The 1970 mystical video or all the commenters nostalgia. Probably the comments.
VERY GOOD SEE THAT TECHNOLOGY CALLED COMPUTER , AND TODAY THE INTERNET IS THERE
My new Windows 11 computer runs on vacuum tubes, and is programmed by punch cards! ... It has the latest magnetic core memory, and the output is displayed on a television screen! ... The system is very compact, taking up an entire room, and weighing-in at one ton! ... It cost $50,000.
It's amazing to see just how far computers have advanced over the last 50+ years. Perhaps, quantum computers will one day make our current systems seem like mere toys. I did get a chuckle when the analog computers of 100 years ago (from 1970) where mentioned as archaic. Kind of ironic the computers of 1970 are considered archaic by our standards today. Yeah, it will be interesting to see where technology takes us in another 50+ years. Thanks for sharing this video!
those young looking students are all now approaching 70 😱
"How do they help us in our every day lives?" ---- 'You have no idea'.
Still, yet another successful invention by the British. You're welcome, world!
But the punched cards were invented by an American census worker named Herman Hollerith to speed up the compilation of the 1890 census (the 1880 census took seven years to finish, and he could see where it was going). The cards (a few of which are still in use) are officially called Hollerith cards in his honor, and they are the same dimensions as United States currency in 1890. The code used for Hollerith cards, or at least a 1964 upgraded version of it, has traces in IBM’s 8-bit code called EBCDIC, used in IBM mainframes.