Bits and Bytes (1983)

connorsoliver

Just finished episode 1. I'm fairly young and I haven't had much experience with older technology, so seeing how the floppy discs were read and how the programs were found through the directory was fascinating. Also, I thought it was quite comical how how large the hard discs were. Did they have smaller hard discs at this point or was that it?

JaredBusch

@connorsoliver said in Bits and Bytes (1983):

I haven't had much experience with older technology, so seeing how the floppy discs were read and how the programs were found through the directory was fascinating.

it still works the same way. just the media changed.

connorsoliver

@JaredBusch Ahhh I see.

connorsoliver

Episode 2 down. It must of been such a pain that floppy discs only worked on specific computers. Also, has anyone here tried to learn a new language on one of the old fashioned cassette programs? Seems like it would be impossible.

scottalanmiller

@connorsoliver said in Bits and Bytes (1983):

Episode 2 down. It must of been such a pain that floppy discs only worked on specific computers.

Actually no different than today with hard drives, SD cards, etc. That's actually not really changed, the primary thing that has changed is that while Windows can't ready most things, everyone else can read almost everything else. But if you make things with other computers, Windows still falls down and doesn't know what to do.

scottalanmiller

@connorsoliver said in Bits and Bytes (1983):

Also, has anyone here tried to learn a new language on one of the old fashioned cassette programs? Seems like it would be impossible.

It's not as bad as it seemed. You still do all of your learning in memory, and would just save when done. Only a problem if you lost power before you saved it.

connorsoliver

Interesting how even back then with very basic computers, they knew that they would one day be an essential part of life. It was also cool to see the elderly people trying to grasp the concept of computers in episode 3. Now if only I could convince my grandpa to start using computers

scottalanmiller

@connorsoliver said in Bits and Bytes (1983):

Interesting how even back then with very basic computers, they knew that they would one day be an essential part of life.

That gets more and more in the series. It was truly amazing just how much they knew about the future of computing even way back then. And nearly all of the key technology that we still use today was already around then, just expensive or big or slow or whatever.

mary

@connorsoliver I found it crazy that there was no standardization. Imagine having to have different commands for different computers! We complain now when something comes out on IOS and we have to wait a week for Android and vice versa.

scottalanmiller

@mary said in Bits and Bytes (1983):

@connorsoliver I found it crazy that there was no standardization. Imagine having to have different commands for different computers! We complain now when something comes out on IOS and we have to wait a week for Android and vice versa.

Same today, just fewer machines. But Mac, Windows, and Linux all use different commands still today. And Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, BSD all are similar to Linux, but still generally different.

Windows has two different command sets just between the CMD and PowerShell shells, in fact!

mary

@scottalanmiller so is there any kind of movement toward standardization oris this just the way it is?

mary

Episode 3 - some questions I have:

Curse keys using shift-I wonder why they didnt use what we have today?

We don't have a stop button to end a loop program so how do we stop it now?

Do people still leave gaps in numbers for programs or can we insert now since we have mouse w cursor ?

Sorry if this looks weird I'm on my phone!

travisdh1

@mary said in Bits and Bytes (1983):

Episode 3 - some questions I have:

Curse keys using shift-I wonder why they didnt use what we have today?

A lot of old keyboards had no cursor keys, so they had to make a way to move around the screen without them.

We don't have a stop button to end a loop program so how do we stop it now?

Bill Gates answer to that question was reboot (yes, I spent much of my early years in DOS.) The real answer to this question however is, programmers aren't supposed to do something that causes an eternal loop.

Do people still leave gaps in numbers for programs or can we insert now since we have mouse w cursor ?

Manually numbering lines of code just doesn't happen in most programing languages. BASIC was one of the few (that I've used) where this was required.

CharlesHTN

@scottalanmiller said in Bits and Bytes (1983):

@Scott said in Bits and Bytes (1983):

Had a TI 99/4A and an IBM PCjr.

Ha! "Had", past tense. Lame.

Ha! "a", singlular. Lame.

I have three.

Really need to pull them out and try connecting to my 49" LCD TV in the living room. My 13 year old son has never seen what these look like.

I have one of the expansion boxes, complete with the MASSIVE 32k Memory upgrade! Plus dual 5.25" single sided floppies. Not sure if we still have the original TI cassette recorder or not, but hopefully, we at least have the cable.

LOL...weird first post, eh? I've come across this site from time to time, but mostly hang out on that other spicy site. Don't know why I never came here, given my pedigree. These are my Great-Grandparents: http://hatchermangohill.com/About Us.html (John and Pearl, the ones in front of the first Hatcher Mango tree).

scottalanmiller

@mary said in Bits and Bytes (1983):

@scottalanmiller so is there any kind of movement toward standardization oris this just the way it is?

Not really, never has been. There is a tiny movement towards it, always, as good products and approaches get identified. When MacOS 9 was replaced with MacOSX in 2000, Mac moved heavily from "totally custom" to "half custom" and half matched to Linux and the rest of the UNIX ecosystem. Windows offers some "UNIX-like" options, that you can add on, Linux can install PowerShell from Windows.

But the underlying tools are different, because the underlying systems work differently.

Think of it like video games. You have different controllers (steering wheel, flight stick, joypad, keyboard/mouse) for different types of games because the games work differently and have different control needs. OSes are the same. What's a really obvious and useful tool on a text based system line Linux is very cumbersome on an API one like Windows and vice versa. The tools actually need to do different tasks, so having a standard tool that does two different things would be potentially more confusing, rather than less.

scottalanmiller

@mary said in Bits and Bytes (1983):

We don't have a stop button to end a loop program so how do we stop it now?

In most OSes... Control-C is the universal "Stop" standard.

scottalanmiller

@mary said in Bits and Bytes (1983):

Do people still leave gaps in numbers for programs or can we insert now since we have mouse w cursor ?

Yes, but only if using those ancient languages. No modern language has numbers of that nature, that went away in serious programming around the time of that program and in the PC world by the late 1980s.

BASIC on those cheap 8bit computers had it, but even by the 16bit era with the Commodore Amiga 1000 in 1985, AmigaBASIC had dropped the need for numbers.

I had to still use them when teaching Fortran 77 in 1994, but that was because we used a 1977 version of Fortran instead of the 1992 version that had removed the numbering.

Today, the need for numbers is just a historic novelty and it's pretty hard to even find a way to experience them. Easiest is to fire up a Commodore 64 emulator.