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Lets get to know each other better. Here's a forum to post images and short autobiographies of ourselves as well as any other info you would like to post about yourself.

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rosemarie
Posts: 4
Joined: Thu Jul 31, 2008 11:18 pm
Location: Klamath Falls, Oregon, US

new member

Post by rosemarie »

Hi, everyone--

I've been lurking for a couple of months, finding great photographs and impressively knowledgeable people here. Several years ago I retired from Lehigh Univ, where among other things (American lit), I got to teach science fiction. I've always been interested in photography. My SF students taught me about computers (remember the DEC20?). Science fiction + photography + PaintShopPro (which I've used since '97 or '98) = little local aliens.

My camera is a Cybershot H9: mega-zoom for Klamath basin wildlife + tilting 3-inch LCD screen for aging eyes. I have a Nikon F2 in the closet, and I've recently reverse-mounted some of its lenses on the H9 for real macro. And so I'm here to learn ... and to share my enthusiasm (if nothing else, till I've learned some more).
rosemarie

Aynia
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Joined: Thu May 01, 2008 7:42 am
Location: Europe somewhere
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Post by Aynia »

Welcome aboard.

The wealth of talent and knowledge here is quite amazing. Looking forward to your pictures.

Ken Ramos
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Location: lat=35.4005&lon=-81.9841

Post by Ken Ramos »

Good to have you rosemarie, welcome aboard. I am sure you will enjoy the forums, there is a lot to learn from some very talented people here. :D

DaveW
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Joined: Fri Aug 04, 2006 4:29 am
Location: Nottingham, UK

Post by DaveW »

Welcome Rosemarie,

Don't know about the US, but I sold my mint F2 (body only) in the UK in 2006 after using it for 35 years for more than I originally paid for it including a macro lens originally, in order to change to digital.

Being the last Nikon manual Professional camera that was not battery dependent (only a Photomic head requires batteries) with no limited life LCD's or LED's it now sells as a classic camera in the UK, both to film buff's and collectors. Probably the fully manual non-battery dependant Professional Canon's of the 1970's will also have the same status?

You may find it is worth more than you thought and could buy you some digital gear.

I cannot see the battery dependent, electronic shuttered, limited life LED/LCD display film or digital cameras being equally sought after in 35 years, since most then are unlikely to be fully functional. Plus the oldest 35mm film camera takes the latest films, but you cannot clip the latest sensor into an older digital camera.

DaveW

Harold Gough
Posts: 5786
Joined: Sun Mar 09, 2008 2:17 am
Location: Reading, Berkshire, England

Post by Harold Gough »

Good to see you!

You will find in this forum a wealth of info you have been unable to get from elsewhere, plus a great deal you didn't even know you needed.

Harold
My images are a medium for sharing some of my experiences: they are not me.

rjlittlefield
Site Admin
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Location: Richland, Washington State, USA
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Post by rjlittlefield »

rosemarie, welcome aboard! It's good to see another US west-coast person joining in.

Ah yes, DEC20 -- those were the days! Can't say that I ever got to use one of those beasts, though. I was cutting my teeth on Burroughs B5500 and CDC 6400 at the time. It's been a remarkable evolution since then. I still don't have a solid gut feel for the fact that my cell phone today is way faster and bigger (more memory) than the roomful of equipment that once supported a large university. Imagine trying to stack back then!

Anyway, glad to have you aboard and hope to see you often! :D

--Rik

lauriek
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Post by lauriek »

Welcome!

Is the DEC20 older than the Vax 11/780 & 11/750? I used those years ago and a bunch of microvax2s!

rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

Is the DEC20 older than the Vax 11/780 & 11/750? I used those years ago and a bunch of microvax2s!
Hmm, let's see... (rummages around in Google)...oh yes, here it is...
http://research.microsoft.com/~gbell/Di ... e/1976.htm

"January [1976]: Introduction of the 36-bit DECSYSTEM-20, the lowest-priced general-purpose timesharing system on the market."

"October [1977]: Introduction of the VAX-11/780, the first member of the VAX computer family." (The VAX-11/750 was not until Oct 1980.)

"May [1985]: DIGITAL introduces the MicroVAX II."
The Burroughs B5500 was introduced in 1964 (an astonishingly advanced machine, BTW -- virtual memory and programmed in ALGOL). And the CDC 6400 in 1966. But I didn't get to play with them until 1969. :(

We need to stop these reminiscences -- suddenly my joints are starting to feel stiff! :lol:

--Rik

rosemarie
Posts: 4
Joined: Thu Jul 31, 2008 11:18 pm
Location: Klamath Falls, Oregon, US

Post by rosemarie »

lauriek wrote:Welcome!

Is the DEC20 older than the Vax 11/780 & 11/750? I used those years ago and a bunch of microvax2s!
My answer would have been, "Yes, 'cause the mainframe we used after the DEC20 was a Vax."

I did word processing on them: really cheap way to print out things to give to students. Or: the university paid for it, not my department.
rosemarie

g4lab
Posts: 1437
Joined: Fri May 23, 2008 11:07 am

Post by g4lab »

Aahh yer all a bunch of whippersnappers. :lol:
I took my first Fortran course in 1968 on a batch processing (I guess almost every university computer was batch processed then)IBM 1130 in 1968. It had a washing machine sized magnetic drum storage unit.

Then the summer after I graduated in 1973 I took a production management course where we did PERT and CPM on the universitys' mainframe using
INTERACTIVE terminals. It seemed like the computer was a person. It would prompt you with whatever the character was. The terminal was a Selectric on Steroids not a screen. I remember thinking how cool that was.

Then at my first real job there were were DEC PDP 11s 12s and 8s
Minicomputers before the advent of microcomputers. One was hooked up to a LINC Laboratory INstrumentation Computer It actually had a removable disk drive. Large HD cartridges like 15 inch in diameter. It had magnetic core memory. You had to key in the boot loader in binary on the front panel with rocker switches. Then it would suck the rest in from paper tape. Had a whole huge bay of support gear.

And that was the first machine I ever saw a video game played on. Asteroids on a screen about ,Eight inch diagonal and you had to play using two potentiometers (ie volume controls) that were hooked to the A/D converters. And the student who brought it in was a very early geek.
Programmed in FOCAL and by the PhD stoonts in assembly.
It was hooked up to a giant electrohydraulic materials test system for long term characterization of materials for aerospace and medical purposes.

Why it seems like only yesterday.
:roll:

lauriek
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Post by lauriek »

Hehehe the oldest machine I used didn't even have a name on it so I have no idea what it was, it was controlled by a real teletype terminal with paper, it had no screen.

It also had to be booted manually by entering the boot commands on 8 binary switches and entering each byte of the bootstrap sequence! How frustrating was that when you'd entered quite a few commands correctly and then buggered one up and had to start again!!

It was hooked up to various analogue drums which you could load ancient magnetic tapes around 3ft by 6 inches onto, being careful not to get caught up with the wheel on it's inexorable way around! It was used for transcribing really really old seismic data in ancient analog formats into more modern tape based analog formats... (the output was usually 9 track tape, SEG-Y format).

Having said that I'm not /that/ old ;) This machine was an antique when I was using it - it was required to interface to the old analog readers we had it hooked to. We also had a couple of similar but newer Texas instruments machines with 21 track 1" tape drives for slightly less old input data!

It actually sounds like a similar machine to the one you mention - it had magnetic core memory - I used to have an old broken board of that from the machine but I think I lost it over the intervening years...

Cyclops
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Post by Cyclops »

Hi Rosemarie,I'm a bit of a Science Fiction reader myself,currently on a A A Attanasio book.
Canon 5D and 30D | Canon IXUS 265HS | Cosina 100mm f3.5 macro | EF 75-300 f4.5-5.6 USM III | EF 50 f1.8 II | Slik 88 tripod | Apex Practicioner monocular microscope

Jbailey
Posts: 520
Joined: Sat Jul 05, 2008 6:45 am
Location: Wisconsin, USA

Post by Jbailey »

Welcome, Rosmarie:

I'm retired, too. My earliest sight of a computer was the original "Illiac" at the U of Ill. in the mid-50's. It was all vacuum tubes!

My first computing was via 100 BAUD teletypes connected by suction cups to a telephone. The computer itself was a sluggish time-sharing system.

Real dinosaurs, right?

Three cheers for Sci-Fi. I indulge in reading it from time-to-time.

Get some photos posted.

Jim

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