Reality Check by Dave Whamond for August 03, 2015

If my memory serves me right this is the first time I have ever seen two Ralphs in the panel.

Remember when our disks were,“floppy”!

I remember EIGHT-INCH floppies! And disk drives that looked like top-loading washing machines. And punched cards …I’m gonna shoot myself now.

That was all just the other day, wasn’t it?

Remember when they made all that noise to connect to a BBS because there was no public internet.

Watch Halt and Catch Fire.

Ooh, and 300 baud modems.

I still remember my grandmother telling me what life was like before the first telephone.

KSR 33 teletypes with modems running on 72 baud. Whistling into the modem to get the teletype to chatter away printing meaningless characters. Saving the paper tape punch holes to use as confetti.

At one time our national defense relied upon the same type of computer Washington D.C. used to program their trash truck route. It’s been over 40 years. I hope it’s not still being used for either purpose.

Welcome..You Have Mail…..AOL

Since I work for a major manufacturer of computer memory (Micron Technology. The consumer brand is Crucial.), I’m especially enjoying today’s strip!

John W. Mauchly, co-inventor of the Eniac, once reminisced to me about recording data at 100 bits per inch on stainless steel magnetic tape and trying to get up to 300 bpi. Now that’s a computer memory of a computer memory.

Some places/computers had both floppies (5 1/4") and stiffies (3 1/2)—you needed to know which was wanted.