Moving, taxes, and how old am I?

[BobK]

Indeed. My Radio Shack cassette recorder served a dual purpose…playing music on cassette and recording the Basic programs that I managed to cobble together. Back then I even purchased a pre-written program, except instead of coming on a cassette tape, it came printed out on paper and you had to type it all in yourself. That is when I learned that I dont tpye so goood and had to trace the error statements to repeatedly correct my typos…

The Timex Sinclair 1000 computer was neat toy, but the bubble membrane keyboard was a pain in the a$$, so I purchased a used keypunch keyboard from the back of an issue of Popular Mechanics along with a ribbon cable and re-wired the Timex Sinclair 1000 to use that keyboard. Of course that required using my Radio Shack multi-meter to determine all the keyboard combinations necessary to match the keypunch keyboard to the bubble membrane keyboard…it was a multi-day task.

Of course, who can forget taking five phone calls to successfully get your acoustic modem to connect to a bulletin board to get some needed information, only to have another person in the house pickup a different phone in the house and disconnect your call…seems like the good old days, weren’t always so good…

[Bill]

@Photomancer

Engineering and Pre-med students all had HP calculators that cost about $300 ($1,919 in 2021 dollars). My first semester of tuition and fees at Cal. St. Uni., Long Beach was $78 for 18 units ($500 in 2021 dollars, my books cost more). By the fall of 1974 prices for a 5 basic functions (= + - * / SQRT calculators were down to about $100 and NEC came out with a bunch of calculators that specialized in financial, statistical, math (mainly trig) functions with some memory plus little 3" magnetic strips you could program (I got the statistical one one because they were allowed in exams by spring of 1974).

My first calculator was a Casio scientific bought from either the Bennett Brothers Blue Book or the Best Products store. It came in a spring-loaded metal case with a padded leatherette covering when everything else had a soft case with a belt loop.

I used it through high school.

Senior year, I spent what felt like my life savings on a TI SR-52 programmable calculator and the optional combination charging base and thermal printer. It also had the little magnetic strip cards for storing data or programs. I did not end up using the programmability much in college, but it was a tremendously valuable introduction to programming for me.

@Photomancer

My first IBM PC clone in 1986 4.33 MHz, 640K RAM, 40MB (that’s FORTY Megs which means in had a partition becuase it exceeded 32MB) was $2,800 ($6,719 in today’s dollars). But for those dollars I did get a VGA monitor and a modem card that was the max speed allowed by the FCC.

My first “PC” was a true blue IBM bought in 1983 for around $4000. I could not spring for the additional cost of the XT with the hard drive. Still, it was probably the best money I had ever spent as I built a career using what I learned writing code on it.

[Bill]

@richmeyer

The very first handheld calculator was co-invented by Jerry Merryman at Texas Instruments in 1967, the other co-inventor was Jack Kilby. Jerry Merryman designed the calculator in 3 days and it took 2 years to build, not bad for a guy without a college degree.

The calculator industry lead to the TMS-1000 which caused Intel to develop the 4004, followed by the 8008, then the 8080. And the microcomputer industry was off to the races…

Edit:

Before electronic calculators were mechanical adding machines. Dad had a fancy one in the restaurant office which can multiply. One day, my brother and I tried multiplying a number consisting of all nines by another to see what it did when it overflowed. It went ka-chunk-ka-chunk for almost a minute before just stopping. We thought we broke it! When we finally got up the nerve to tell Dad what we had done, he just shrugged, reached behind the beast and reset the built-in circuit-breaker.

[Bill]

@BobK

Of course, who can forget taking five phone calls to successfully get your acoustic modem to connect to a bulletin board to get some needed information, only to have another person in the house pickup a different phone in the house and disconnect your call…seems like the good old days, weren’t always so good…

Fast forward twenty or so years. The Wi-Fi at my parents’ place would drop out whenever the phone rang. No, there was no direct connection as the Internet was via cable modem.

The problem was that the cordless phone setup they had at the time operated at the same frequency as Wi-Fi.

[BobK]

I read about some folks having the same issue with WiFi and their microwave ovens.

[malcolmputer]

@mikeglass

I hated the teachers that would let you use a calculator but it did you no good. The tests used variables instead of numbers.

Don’t worry, it took a couple decades, but when I rolled in with my TI-89 with CAS that showed them up. They started having problems making tests we couldn’t solve with the calculator and ended up banning them again.

[dryad2b]

@malcolmputer

Don’t worry, it took a couple decades, but when I rolled in with my TI-89 with CAS that showed them up. They started having problems making tests we couldn’t solve with the calculator and ended up banning them again.

Little did they think that it was probably more valuable for you to learn how the calculator worked…

I never programmed the 2nd programmable calculator. I never thought I was doing anything repetive enough to be worth the effort of programming.

For that matter, I never bothered figuring out how to program the paper-tape CNC machine that we had in the Industrial Processes lab. The instructor was nearly retirement age, so he wasn’t teaching it. I figured it was (already) old tech, so I wouldn’t run across one. Now, as an adult, I realize that those suckers are expensive, so if I’d been able to continue, I might have seen one in action.

[artg_dms]

4 function calc along w/ log and trig tables -> good ol’ CRC manual. Good times.

Speaking of taxes - trip thru the Way Back Machine
Any body remember Schedule G?
Classic example of how to extort / extract more from the masses without raising taxes

[dryad2b]

Wow. I’ve probably never made enough money to need to file a Schedule G. I never filed one on my own, and they were gone by the time I started filing taxes professionally.

[artg_dms]

5 yr averaging. Got out of school and used it to average out income while in school with first full time job. The Clown Collective made it harder to use each year and finally it was eliminated.

There are many ways to raise your taxes without raising your taxes.

[rpetefish]

Sweet children! Cackle. Why, I remember when electronic adding machines were the “latest”. Ok. Enough snark. The first calculators I remember cost $300+. And a computer occupied the basement of one of the buildings on campus. Punch cards, the newest, fastest way to program!

[artg_dms]

Fortran IV and card decks. And lots of rubber bands to keep them in order…

[malcolmputer]

@artg_dms

And lots of rubber bands to keep them in order…

That was a life lesson from my granddad. He told me, the lady that runs your cards, make sure you’re nice to her. If you piss her off, she may take your bottom card and put it under your first card which will mean program begin, program end, and a bunch of cards that error out.

Ignoring the fact that any gender could run the cards it stuck with me that people working for you are people and if you piss them off you may regret it. I think it’s my first memory of “malicious compliance”.

[Photomancer]

Those were pre-Red Bull days. Like @mblatz says, usually very late at night around midnight, place was open 24/7 and most of the folks were tired. Usually took 4 hours to get back.

I do remember most of the keypunch machines could be set to number the deck which helped you renumber them when you DID drop them.

Oh, and the joy using the special tape to fix a mis-punched card because you ran out of cards and the bookstore wasn’t open at 1AM.

[BobK]

@artg_dms

Fortran IV and card decks. And lots of rubber bands to keep them in order

The trick I learned in grad school was to store my large card deck (was running a statistical model with tons of data elements) in a shoe box. Once in the box, we used a wide tip marker to draw a diagonal line from one edge to the other. While we didn’t serially number our cards for ease of re-building a deck, we could get them roughly into shape by observing where the marker line was on the top edge. It made reconstructing the deck in case of catastrophe (never happened) easier.

@malcolmputer

He told me, the lady that runs your cards, make sure you’re nice to her. If you piss her off, she may take your bottom card and put it under your first card which will mean program begin, program end, and a bunch of cards that error out.

We lived back in those days in a self-service world. You ran your own deck or it didn’t get run. The printer however was a different matter. The lazy students working in the computer lab at night didn’t want to get out of their chairs to “burst” the stack coming out of the printer until it was thick enough to warrant their attention. If you had a two page long printout with your error messages, you might have to wait an hour to get them off their lazy butts.

But nonetheless to your point, I’ve made it a life long practice to never complain to the waitress until AFTER she brings you your food, other wise you may be dining on a spit sandwich.

[urbite]

During that visit to Jerry Merryman’s personal lab, I fortunate to be able to purchased two classic IMSAI 8080 S-100 machines. I haven’t had time to catalog what’s in them yet. But just opening one, it’s fully loaded.

Need to find time to catalog everything, replace all of the electrolytics, confirm proper power supply system operation, then slowly add boards to bring up the system.

Will be fun to key in a simple program into RAM using the front panel switches, which I haven’t done before. Closest thing was using a hex keypad on the Heathkit ET-3400 MC6800 trainer.Will have to brush up on octal, as all I’ve ever used was hex.

“Wanna play a game, Professor Falcon?”

Two chassis, in great cosmetic shape.

Almost every slot is used in the unit I opened

Original IMSAI MPU-A CPU board, with 8080

The User Manual in 3-ring binder

A marketing brochure

Almost any S-100 technical info needed can be found here.
http://s100computers.com/index.html

[malcolmputer]

I recognize that Logic Analyzer. You need a second one? I’m looking to get rid of mine.

[urbite]

HP 1661? It’s a great analyzer, but it’s been supplanted by a Saleae unit for the most part. I use it occasionally when I need to look at more than 16 bits.

I have too much antiquated equipment already that I need to liquidate. But thanks for the offer.

[richmeyer]

During my visit to Jerry Merryman’s personal lab with @urbite, I was able to purchase a military R-390A radio receiver. It is a general coverage radio receiver that has a tuning range from 500 KHz to 32 MHz with a digital frequency readout. Very hi-tech for its time.

This radio receiver was widely used by all branches of the military services through the 1980’s. It was a Classified piece of hardware at that time. This specific model was built by Collins Radio, there were many different manufacturers of this radio over the 30 years of production…Collins was the original vendor in 1955 and was considered the best.

The R-390A radio has 23 vacuum tubes and it was very heavy at about 85 pounds. A fully operational radio like this is hard to find and is sought after by Amateur Radio operators to this very day. It is the most sensitive radio receiver around, it even out performs my modern top of the line Ham radio that I have. After re-capping the power supply and other known problem areas I was able to re-align it back to original specifications. With just a piece of wire as an antenna I can pick up the world.

So why did I buy it? When I was in the US Air Force during the end of the 1960’s and the start of the 1970’s I used to install these same radios in communication centers throughout Vietnam. I even repaired a few of them although I was not a trained radio repairman, I was trained as a Crypto repairman. Heck, during war times you end up doing a lot of things you were never officially trained to do. You’ve got a job to do…just get it done.

So…how old am I? This radio was built in 1956 according to its serial number. I was only 6 years old at that time.

[malcolmputer]

@richmeyer

During my visit to Jerry Merryman’s personal lab

still jealous over here.