On occasion, I come across something that makes me feel really old. Like this photo of the Altair BASIC operating system on 1" paper tape:
My first programming language was BASIC and I stored my programs by punching holes in rolls of blank paper tape. When I wanted to run the program again, I simply loaded the tape into the reader and read it back in again. If I made any changes, of course, I had to punch a new tape to save them.
Today I do the same thing, but I load the program from a hard drive or a thumb drive or the network. There are still eight bits in a byte and they still serve the same purpose, but the underlying technology for manipulating them is totally different.
No comments:
Post a Comment