>
>> So, can we compromise on: CI, CII, CIII, CIV, CV and CVI ?
>>
>> Dave should be happy!
>> --
>> pj
>>
>> Seriously though, many of the styling changes were influenced by the
>> thinking of Harley Earle -- you can keep the underlying frame and
>> powertrain yet change the body without a 'model change.' I think the
>> current numbers are pretty good.
>
> FWIW, the roman numerals are used on the engine generations.
Since it's the 2000s, how about C001, C010, C011, C100, C101, C110? (binary for those old farts...)
Learned Fortran spring of '72. In '73 I was a junior, writing COBOL. What fun, lugging around 500+ card decks in my backpack. I remember what a great deal it was when we got buffered card punches. If you made a typo you didn't have to start all over with a new card.
On topic - I'm getting ready to buy new rims for the '93. I can get C6 replicas at Tire Rack for a pretty decent price. Is that like sacrilegious or anything?
On Fri, 10 Aug 2007 15:42:24 GMT, Eugene Blanchard wrote something wonderfully witty:
Wasn't it surprising how much we could get done with the resources we had available? Nowadays none of the programs have any elegance in the code since memory & disk space is dirt cheap. Just use up gigs of memory and not worry about it.
Yeah, current crop of folk have no clue about good 'tight code.' Cut my teeth on a Burroughs B300. Lots of 12AU7 flip-flops. Scratchpad" memory was a drum with beaucoups heads. I/O was punch tape. Ran the tape thru a Flexowriter to get a printout. Then we a got a "wow" upgrade to mag tape and transistorized flip-flops.
Chief mathematician was driving a white '53 'vette. She offered it to me for $ 3K. Cluelessly looked down my nose at a 6cyl engine and Powerslide. Bought an used '61 instead -- ah, the "wisdom" of youth!
Did a human fertility experiment and had to swap the '61 for something that would accommodate offspring. Graduated to a UYK-5 with an assembler. Hog heaven! (save for the 'joys' of the CRPI.) Finally learned how to spell 'diskpack' in '74.
As early as 1989, I was working with CAD and the system required a second chip (math co-processor). I recall having a computer with a "turbo" button (to get something like 20 MHz)! The harddrive was less than 40 megs and I was the envy of all others in the company. Now my kid complaints that her MP3 player only holds about 200 songs with 1 gig!
I'm laughing about how similar backgrounds so many of us had. The first computer experience I had was a time share teletype-like terminal with a paper tape drive. We would dial in to a server, run the tape, and then get the results of our program. It was in this new modern language called BASIC.
Later, for engineering classes, we used a small computer to run engineering programs. I can't remember what it was, but I want to say it was a 1600 or something. I know IBM had a 1600 series, but it seems like this was an RCA or something. The highlight I do remember is that we could play Star Trek on it. However, you have to be beyond geek to do so because it was so slow to play that game, making chess look like a speed sport. Also, by small, I mean it fit in one room, only had three boxes each about the size of a medium kitchen table the card reader, the printer, and the processor.
Then with work, there were the PDP 11 computers, DITMCO (built by Drive In Theater Manufacturing Co. or something like that and ran electronic test gear), VM-100 (?) and so on. The VM-100 (?) could be programmed by 8 inch floppies or you could do it manually in Assembly by hand from the switches on the front panel. The highlight was it had 64 kb of memory. I looked at a TRS-40 (?) at the time, and the guy was proud to announced that while it started with 4kb or 8 kb (I forget), you could expand to 16 kb and there was going to be a 32 kb expansion soon. He told me I was nuts when I told him the one I had (VM-100) had 64 kb. He said there was no computers around with that much.
Through this time, there was Fortran 4, Fortran 77, and PASCAL but I missed COBOL somehow. Remember $ job cards? I managed to mispunch one once that would shut the school computer down. It became the most valuable card ever, when you were getting close to a project deadline and needed an extra day to figure out why yours wasn't working. You could shut the computer down, it would take them a day to get it back up and running, no one in class could get their jobs done, and the prof would have to extend the deadline a couple of days. I used it several times until they finally returned it to me ripped instead of simply marked.
My first computer was a Sinclair Z80. These were later built as a Timex 1000 I think. Mine had something ridiculously small (now) like 4 kb but I think it could be doubled with an add-on to 8 kb. I might have that wrong, it might have been 2 kb and 4 kb.
The first real PC I had was an AT&T. It came as the 2 floppy drive model. The options were an expensive 10 MB hard drive and an incredibly new 20 MB hard drive, huge compared to the first IBM PC with a 5 MB and soon 10 MB drives. It was also extremely fast, with its 8 MHz 8086 processor compared to the PC with a 4.88 MHz 8088.
I scanned all the computer magazines to get a hard drive, and found the hard drive cards so I didn't lose my two floppies, which were very important to "obtaining" new software. :-) I found this 30 MB hard drive card that most around told me I would never ever need that much space and I was wasting my money buying something so big that I could never use.
Now most of us carry around 40GB to 100 GB in a 5 to 7 lb black slap about the size of two or three spiral notebooks that operate at 500 GHz and up. And some have ones that are simply limited in smallness due to the need of a keyboard. What an incredible history we have gone through.
The Wolf With the Red Roses wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
Welcome to the winblows generation.
So-called "visual" development systems have spoiled developers (I don't call that type true programmers).
I remember writing a lot of stuff in assembler and getting some truly efficient code, even for it's day. (640k DOS systems w/10mb hard disk) AFAIK, some of it is still in use with the public school system in toronto.
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