Betty by Gary Delainey and Gerry Rasmussen for February 22, 2024

I still have a pile of punch cards I use for notes.

40-ish years ago I was doing graphics by programming in PostScript.

Ahhhh! Those were the days my friend…

Xerox 860

Commodore, any model. 2 kb of RAM-woohoo!

Cromemco Z2 2 MHz Z-80, 48k and a paper tape reader. Definitely no vector graphics, no graphics at all.

I’d say no more than 35 years ago.

I programmed a monitor and control system for a satellite earth station in the early 80s. The user interface was a huge (for the day) colour vector monitor. Periodically, you had to pull out a control card and adjust one or more of nine variable capacitors (with a wooden tool, of course) to adjust the position of lines in different sectors of the screen.

My first Home Computer was an “Interact” from Protecto Enterprises. After everything it needed was loaded into memory, I had about 2k for my BASIC Programs. It was less expensive than the VIC-20, had no real “drives” (it used tape cassettes for storage space), and I loved it. I wrote Battleship and Robot Wars games, and a sort-of Screen Saver program that just displayed random-color ASCII Characters to random parts of the screen. After the screen had become filled with characters, it was kind-of like watching moving art…

Funny how those “ancient” computer skills like DOS came in so handy to actually know and work with Windows and its applications.

Learn C and Unix in the 1980’s and you’d still be using them today!

My first computer was a mainframe, 60 years ago. I think I still have some parts from it.

Behind the fancy graphics and ways of interacting (fingerprints, cameras, etc.) computers now are mostly smaller, faster versions of computers then.

Don’t knock vector graphics, it’s great for logos and stuff that you might need to resize.