And the development cycle has been slowed. We are there now.

Jim, I'm not convinced yet. Moore's Law is still in effect, although some physical limits are coming into view. Software has gotten a lot less efficient in terms of the CPU and storage resources it requires, and as an old-timer in the industry, that pains me. However, I understand it as a tradeoff for the ability to do development more rapidly, and today's languages and tools are definitely a lot faster to write in than FORTRAN and COBOL were.

The first computer I ever used was a Data General Nova II minicomputer. It was rack-mounted along with a pair of Diablo 33 front-loading cartridge disk drives. The computer ran at a clock speed of 1 MHz. It contained a total of 64 KB (not MB, KB) of main memory, which was the maximum memory complement for that model. And the memory was magnetic core, with all of the quirks that came with that technology, such as the need to keep the room at a constant temperature. The disk drive cartridges held 5 MB each and were about 17" in diameter; one cartridge weighed about 15 lbs. We never had enough storage and a lot of less-used stuff got stored on paper tape. Most I/O was via Teletype 33 hardcopy terminals printing at the whopping rate of 10 characters per second, on a good day. The computer, when new, cost about $10,000 in 1974 dollars.

Yes, and we have Dick Tracy style wristwatches too!

But, damned it; where are the flying cars, they promised us flying cars!

You stored your p0rn on paper tape? egads, how barbaric!

My first real experience with the computers was in college, typing FORTRAN77 code on a dumb terminal hooked to a Dual VAX mainframe, whatever that meant. Fortunately, I came in not long after punch cards went out. But some of the punchcard machines were still there, and I heard the stories...

Has anyone else read "The Cosmic Computer?" It's an old space opera premised on the existence of one giant computer hidden somewhere in the universe...

I learned on an IBM 1401 - the big one with a whopping 16K of memory. We wrote in assembly language, a one-for-one representation of hardware instructions because a good programmer couldn't let some dumb compiler generate less than optimal code. Machines were expensive, and programmers were cheap, so we had to squeeze every bit out of them. I was told it cost a quarter of a million dollars back in the late 1960s.

In 1977, I started work here. The company had a great year previously, and made two large capital expenditures. Both were for five million dollars each. One was a business jet. The other was for five megabytes (yes, megabytes) of memory for the IBM mainframe. The memory was from CDC, because the IBM branded memory was even more expensive.

I managed to miss most of the punch-card era, for the reason that Data General was vehemently opposed to batch processing. So I never encountered it in high school. Did do card decks a few times in college, when I had to use the Univac 1108 mainframe, until I found in the campus bookstore the quasi-secret manual that told you how to use the demand terminals.

Now the war stories are coming out! You know the difference between a fairy tale and a war story, don't you? One begins, "Once upon a time..." while the other starts with "No shit! There I was!"

I'm told that, in the era just before mine, the computer science majors would celebrate the end of the semester by throwing their accumulated bales of punch cards off the top of the math building, which was the tallest (and ugliest) on campus.

Meanwhile, my son-in-law has an MS in computer science and has forgotten more than I, a lowly IE major, ever knew in the first place.

Here's an old prank from the days when computers needed operators. When you hired a new operator, and put him on third shift by himself, the last instruction you gave him before leaving him there for the night was, "Don't forget to empty the bit bucket." And then secretly watch as he tears the place apart, trying to find where in the computer the bit bucket is hidden.

("Bit bucket" is a CS euphamism for the virtual trash can; the imaginary place where deleted files and other unneded data gets dumped.)

And MarkD, I remember the rejoicing around our office in 1985 when Sun issued its new price catalog, and the 4 MB memory boards for the Sun-3 series were listed at $3,995. Because it meant that memory had broken the $1000/megabyte barrier. Little did we know.

You stored your p0rn on paper tape? egads, how barbaric!

He said the less-used stuff was on paper.