Now, we’re didn’t have Bluetooth back then like you do today, so we used to plug our headphones in through that little hole you see on the side of every computer. I bet you've always wondered what that hole was for! We used to have them on our phones, too, only back then they didn't have wifi and we called them iPods...
I was having an awful time yesterday using a white noise file to drown out office sounds. My Bluetooth connection kept dropping for a few ms and the white noise would cut to silence. So I rooted around and found the proper analog cable for my Bose to plug in to the MacBook Pro.
My first program was written in FORTRAN on punch cards, back in those days we tied an onion to our belt—no, we didn’t do that, and I was just a kid, so Truthfully what I observed was that in those days mainframes had a “machine room” where the cabinets were cooled with air conditioning popes that ran under the raised floor.
The engineers had those suction cup handles glaziers use to carry panes of glass, they were used to lift floor tiles up to access the cabling and AC running under the floor. Because of the AC, the space under the floor was cold. And that’s where they stored the beer, or a can of root beer for the kid who was hanging around writing simple programs.
I remember that like the day-before-yesterday, but to everyone else it’s as like telling an anecdote about Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage commenting on your pull request against the Difference Engine.
Ah, I remember the old machine room days. (and I love the typo of air-conditioned popes). A few years ago, my department had a field trip to the Blue Cross/Blue Shield data center in Waukegan for a tour. So unlike the machine rooms of yore, although they did have an IBM big metal machine up there alongside all the rack-mounted servers (and even that was tiny compared to the old IBM mainframe I used to work with at UIC back in the 80s).
