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We had the same thing happen to our program connector. It happened when someone (initials = JJ) tripped on the cable. He blamed whomever it was that screwed the thing in.

Warranty? We don't need no stinking warranty! Just an old OI and some soldering stuff - voila, good as new. :cool:

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Remember when the next great thing was the printing added to the top of the punch cards and you didn't have to read the holes anymore?

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Oh nooooo ....

It's like being at the old dinner table from my childhood,

"And we drafted without computers...
forget the calculators - we used slide rules...
the punchcards piled up so high we needed more office space...
and we programmed in three feet of snow...
up hill...
both ways.

That's the problem with you kids, you get everything handed to you. No sense of appreciation for us old 'dinosaurs' as you put it Mr. smarty pants. Just remember that slide rule put dinner on this table for years..."

Make it stop, pleaseeeeeeeeee ...
;)

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Aren't vacuum tubes those things that get clogged when I'm cleaning my room and tick me off really bad?

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OK,
Which one? K+E or POST. I have two Versalogs witting in a drawer. Remember when you could hear an engineer coming down the hall by the thwack of the case against his thigh? Even uphill, both ways in the snow.

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Al, that's a {sort of} quote from my father who is no longer with us. If you actually handed me a slide rule, I'd only be able to write about it. I have no clue what those names mean. Dad was a Mech E, project manager, and Chief Engineer who specialized in bulk material handling for 36 years and he loved being in the shop and on the job site. He always spoke fondly of his slide rule and the regular old drafting board. He annoyed the heck out of me when I was a kid about "the good old days" and only since his death 12 years ago have I really come to realize how amazing his accomplishments were. Two of them are here

Now that I've completely hijacked this thread (protect me, Pedro), I would like to say that the guts are certainly perty, but I hope to never see them up close. Keeping the magic smoke inside is a good thing, eh George?

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A quote from the above post just popped up at the top of my screen. Thanks for the laugh :)

Major big-time Deja Vu. When I was a physics undergrad at Purdue in 69, there was no such thing as a handheld calculator. For my FORTRAN class, I had to get up at 4 am, walk 5 blocks to the Math Science building, and stand in line 2 hours for a seat at a keypunch machine.

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Back in my day... when we used IFI controllers with backup batteries and Pluto was still one of the 9 planets...

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I was down the road at Rose Poly in Terre Haute in 70 as an undergrad..(Became Rose Hulman when I was a sophomore)
Yes no calculators... until we got the SR-10 (Slide Rule 10)
I still have one..... I am tempted to give it to students who forget their calculator in my physics class.

Same computer... same keypunch rooms....

its hard to believe we are coming up on 50 years since those times.

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Some days I pine for an LED calculator.
Punchcard chads* made the very best confetti.
But I don't miss the old days. And I never dropped a deck, not even once :)

*I didn't know they were called that until some presidential election a few years back.

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My roommate had a 2000-card deck in a shoebox bungee-corded behind his bike seat. He hit a pothole.

Yes, all 2000.

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At the risk of joining a "walked to school, barefoot, in the snow, uphill, both ways" discussion ...

We were thrilled when we got to use teletype machines to do DiffEq homework. It printed out graphs using keyboard characters - Ka chunka chunka chunka ... chunka chunk.

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By 1980 when I took intro FORTRAN, things had improved - I rarely had to wait more than half an hour for a punchcard machine. This is because the upperclassmen had access to teletype terminals - key presses went right to the computer, and paper came rolling out right in front of you!

I also remember my first infinite loop. The 200 page printout quota saved a couple of forests, but left me enough paper to make an awesome Christmas tree for the Physics Club study room.

I still have a couple of small (~100 cards each) decks from the latter days of punch cards at the office around 1991 or 1992. I've had to change the rubber bands at least twice.

Slide Rules! I learned to use a slide rule back in middle school from Isaac Asimov's book. I didn't switch to using a calculator until the eighties when the TI-30 (LEDs, HD batteries last about 2 hours) dropped below about $75. I really wished everyone had used slide rules a few years later when I was teaching labs as a graduate student. By this time, 4-bangers were pretty common, and scientifics not uncommon. It was a distinctive form of torture to grade lab papers in which students measured distance with a meter stick and time with a stopwatch, and reported velocities to eight significant digits. To this day, I have a slide rule on my desk at work. I only use it a few times a year, but sometimes it's quicker than a six-year-old PC.

In hindsight, grading those lab reports did help prepare me for FRC mentoring. A little.

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So after reading this thread i feel so lucky to have had a tape recorder for a drive on my TRS 80 at the high school I went to. But I do know what punch cards are :)

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Off topic:


I actually have one of those. An old Rockwell, rescued it from the local thrift shop. Still works too :D. I also have a bunch of 1978 vintage HP LED 7-seg displays (the mutiplexed bubble kind) that for a college project I used for a display on a electronic FM radio I built and programmed.



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I remember IFI controllers... does that make me "old"? :D But I've only been in FIRST for... going on nine years. Funny how no matter how long I've been around, it seems like I'm still relatively new. In FIRST, nine years isn't really a long time.