[VoIP] OT - A good clicky springy PC keyboard

[Doug Alderdice]

At 07:45 AM 1/24/2008 -0600, Russ Price wrote:
>My high school had a PDP-11/34 with about 16
>terminals hanging off it, and a pair of RK07 disk drives (28 MB apiece,
>and they were about the size of waist-high file cabinets).  I missed out
>on the keypunch era by about two years. :o)

Oh Lord, now I feel old... my high school had an IBM 360 mainframe with no 
terminals other than the console terminal, so everything was input on punch 
cards into the 1401 card reader and output on the line printer, the number 
of which is escaping me at the moment.  Hours spent at the 029 keypunches 
banging out lines (cards) of Fortran code, coding forms, flowcharts -- I 
still have my flowchart template somewhere -- and on it went... laughing at 
the freshmen who dropped their card decks in the hall, "IBM pickup" we used 
to call it.  I still have some of my card decks from high school with the 
various class projects.

Then into college (where there were green screen terminals on an HP 3000 
mini) and then it was hours banging out code in Pascal and COBOL... 
geez.  PC revolution hit when I was in college... I left for college with 
my new-as-a-graduation-present electric typewriter, and by the end of my 
sophomore year I had an early PC clone (a Sanyo).  Before the PC clone had 
(and still have) a Timex/Sinclair 1000 (remember those?) and I thought I 
was hot spit when I got a modem for it and was able to dial into the mini 
from the university house I lived in and do my coding from my desk in the 
house, with the modem bridged on the paystation line into the house 
(keeping this vaguely on topic)...

I better stop, I'll be flatulating dust here shortly, I'm so old... :-)

Doug.