What computers were used for in years BN

[TBI 2,351]

This was the earliest one!

[BilboroughShirley 1,120]

I still have my four figure log tables book from school days. A bit of social history.

When my dad was at school they were taught to use log tables and he got into deep trouble. He asked the teacher who invented log tables and how did they do it. Clearly the teacher did not know and so he gave my dad a severe telling off. He should have known Napier and powers of 10 if he was teaching it! " Simples!"

[Michael Booth 7,364]

Left handed people seem to twist their hand around the pen to write.

[The Engineer 614]

The earliest 'computers' were people - it was a job that involved crunching numbers and writing it out with ink on paper. Arguably the earliest 'computer programmer' was Ada Lovelace (daughter of Lord Byron). Ada worked with Charles Babbage but never really got any credit because she was a woman. In more recent times her contributions have been acknowledged. In fact there's a computer language called Ada in her honour, notably used in air traffic control. Ironically, as a girl, Ada had been fascinated by the concept of flying.

[ChrisB 150]

Michael Booth, #30

There's a simple reason for that, when you're right handed, you can see what you've written as you write from left to right.

When you're left handed, you cover up what you're writing with your hand as you work across the page.

Regarding computers, many companies had them installed in the 1970s, mainly to do wages, initially.

Before that, a sort of forerunner to the computer was the comptometer, I can remember seeing many ads in the Sits Vacant columns for Comptometer Operators. Anyone else remember them or have experience of them?

[Bubblewrap 3,815]

Played about with a Comptometer(out of use & gathering dust) when I worked at Brush Transformers. (1971-95)

[TRD 196]

Just found my old Spectrum in the garage

[Dave 48 847]

http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/12/11/retro-delight-gallery-of-early-computers-1940s-1960s/

This makes a good read.

[tomlinson 879]

When in the RAF I went on a short introduction to computers course at Blandford Forum. I didn't like them much then and I don't now but the interesting thing was the pre-course reading - 'The Ladybird Book Of Computers', which was very useful. Ours were delivered openly for all to see but the Group Captain's was delivered in a plain brown wrapper, a distiction of a sort usually reserved for pornography.

[Cliff Ton 10,457]

Arguably the earliest 'computer programmer' was Ada Lovelace (daughter of Lord Byron). Ada worked with Charles Babbage but never really got any credit because she was a woman. In more recent times her contributions have been acknowledged.

There was a programme about her on BBC recently. It's still on iPlayer for a few more weeks. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p030s5bx/calculating-ada-the-countess-of-computing

[loppylugs 8,427]

Still have fond memories of my Atari ST from about 1985. Used a windows environment while IBM compatibles were still messing around with DOS. 512K of memory and a floppy drive, colour monitor too. No modem, no internet, not much in the way of viruses, but unfortunately no Nottstalgia either.

[The Engineer 614]

Another use for computers was to learn computer programming skills.

In the early '70s, we used to make a weekly trip from school to Trent Polytechnic Newton Building. They had a computer in the basement but I never saw it. We'd create our programmes on punch cards (they had the machines to do that) then leave the stack of cards for their technicians to feed into the computer. We'd go back the following week to see what the results were. The usual case for a few weeks was to receive a printout saying something like "run time error" and little else. Frustrating, but it concentrated the mind to try to get it right. The language I learnt was BASIC but I think it did FORTRAN as well. Each card was one line of code with up to 80 characters.

Did anyone else 'interface' with that computer?

[Ayupmeducks 1,730]

I've mentioned this before, our first "computer" was a Commadore64, we had the cassette player with it and a few games on plug in modules. I loaded a few games "longhand" via the keyboard and found many "typos" in the books, so learned how to debug the script I'd entered, just wished I carried on with debugging and learning. That was the early 80's

First real computer was an old Texas Instruments, "full tower" 8086 processor, old and slow by todays standards, but helped me with random characters learning to copy Morse Code. It got me up to 13 words per minute to pass my ham radio morse code test for my Advanced ticket.

Next was a 286 when we first went on the internet, at 28Kbs, IF we were lucky!! That was around the early 1990's.

Since then I've been assembling my own computers from ordered parts.

[DJ360 6,721]

When I worked at the Coal Board Laboratories in Cinderhill, we used calculating machines called 'FACITs' (It was the manufacturers name)

Basicaly you keyed in numbers and then wound a handle;

There was also a cylindrical slide rule about... though I had no clue how to use it.

I also had a 'normal' slide rule and somewhere I still have my Log Tables from school.

Re: Computers. I recall reading New Scientist back then and seeing regular reports of how somebody or other had got the equivalent of 2, then 4, then 8, then 16, transistors, on an area the size of the head of a pin. Then it went exponential. The start of the 'integrated circuit', or 'silicon chip', on which our lives are now based.

Col

[philmayfield 6,115]

The cylindrical slide rule was a powerful piece of kit. It could be equivalent to a conventional slide rule over 40 feet long. I loved slide rules - so fast to use. You just had to guess where to put the decimal point!

Phil