Where Are My Keys
. . . or . . .
Forgotten Computers and Software

Where are my car keys? I can just ping them, right? Ah, if Life were that easy. Wait a minute, some car keys DO have bluetooth and only need to be close to the car to open and start it! Remember when car keys were actually … KEYS! LOL!

Full  Disclosure – I still have car keys that look, act and FEEL like car keys! Most now have bluetooth and all you have to do is be NEAR the door, NEAR the car and the keys open and start the car! Ah, the good old days of fiddling with multiple keys … good times, good times.

So how many computers have YOU worked on and have … forgotten about! I had a post awhile ago about just that topic, ‘Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL“.

Whether you bought them or used them at school or work, there are probably a dozen or more … Forgotten Computers and Software over the years. Me? Maybe a couple of dozen computers and many, many more software programs or applications!

Remember when the ENTIRE COMPUTER was one huge modular unit! And the very first computers I worked on at U of Calgary, were either hidden from site and you presented your punched cards (FORTRAN!) and waited for  the output!

Then when I started taking ‘Computers in Education’ courses, I was handed the keys to The Vault! I had access to the ‘teletype’ room where I could code in BASIC and run the output on rolls of newsprint! Good times, good times!

The first program I worked on was for Probablity with a simulation of pulling coloured balls out of a ‘Greecian Urn’. And it even printed out an ASCII Greecian Urn! Yeah, I have a printout, somewhere in  ‘The Garage’ and will look for it one day! LOL!

I was fortunate enough to be invited to a lecture given by Grace Hopper. And you might rightly say … WHO? Well, she was a TITAN OF COMPUTER SCIENCE! And she gave us all a … NANOSECOND at the  end of her lecture! Wait, what?

She concluded her lecture (best lecture of all time!) with how  she explained to her Non-Techie Supervisor, how fast light travels and how that impacts any lag or delay with satellite communications! She brought out lengths of ROPE to demonstrate how far light travels in a second and working her way down to a NANOSECOND or a BILLIONTH OF A SECOND! Turns out, it is about a foot!

And she pulled out about 100 small lengths of multi-coloured wire and spread them on the desk for us to take as we walked out. Well, I have never seen such a rush of people to get their ‘Grace Hopper Nanosecond‘! Fortunately I was able to get one for myself! Unfortunately, it has disappeared in my many moves over the years! But what a memory for me!

And I bet I can name a MASSIVE computer related piece of ‘software’ that almost everyone will have forgotten about … Y2K! And if you have NEVER  heard of that term … then you are probably not much older than 20 years old!

Y2K refers to a software ‘glitch’ that did not take into account the calendar year 2000 in most computer code developed between 1980-1999. Basically, EVERYTHING!

Typically, amongst other problems, only 2 digits were used to indicate the calendar year, thus ’89’ and ’99’ were used for ‘1989’ and ‘1999’ in databases, calculations, spreadsheets, banks .. YOU NAME IT! So when the decade ended and we entered the year 2000 … uh-oh! Right back to the year 1900!!!!

I remember staying up, hoisting a glass of champagne and welcoming … ‘The End of the World’!!! But, or more punny, ‘Byte‘ nothing happened! LOL!

So that brings up … Y3K! LOL! I sure hope I am still around to toast 3000!

And this post quickly turned to Grace Hopper, didn’t it! I love telling people this story AND most people have never heard of Grace Hopper! AND an even BETTER Grace Hopper story! She is credited with the first EVER case of ‘debugging’ a computer …. LITERALLY!

She  crawled into a computer …  it  was that big! And she found a relay switch, an actual MOVING PART INSIDE A COMPUTER and a moth had become ‘trapped’ beneath the lever! She then proceeded to ….’debug’ the computer and documented it! That document, moth and all, are in the Smithsonian now!

• Grace Hopper’s Bug
• Moth in the Machine : Debugging the origins of ‘bug’
• Inspired by Women in Technology

I found SO many articles, images, cartoons and resources while doing my usual bit of research for my post, I have more links below than ever before!

Articles on ENIAC, UNIVAC, Personal Computers, COBOL and most especially, Grace Hopper. Take a trip through time, wax nostalgic, and think back to when a computer took up an entire room, if not an entire building!

Oh, and if you see an old, really old, Apple Computer at a garage sale … maybe think about buying it! It could turn out to be this one! worth almost HALF A MILLION DOLLARS!

What you hold in your hands now is not just a phone – it is the FUTURE that visionaries like Grace Hopper could only DREAM of would eventually be possible!

And as Arthur C. Clarke described in ‘Clarke’s Three Laws” at Wikipedia:

1. 1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
   2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
   3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

We truly live in a Magical Time now!

Enjoy the Magic!

 

1. Personal Computer – Wikipedia
2. Grace Hopper – Wikipedia
3. Five Fast Facts About Technologist Grace Hopper
4. Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992): A legacy of innovation and service
5. Grace Hopper To Programmers: Mind Your Nanoseconds!
6. Nanoseconds Associated with Grace Hopper
7. Untold History of AI: Invisible Women Programmed America’s First Electronic Computer
8. 10 Oldest Computers in The World
9. 10 Colossal Old Computers That Changed History
10. Timeline of Computer History
11. Computer History Museum – YouTube
12. 11 Mind-Blowing Collectible Computers That Will Make You Nostalgic!
13. Acorn, Sinclair, Amstrad and Epson: 10 computers that time forgot
14. Rare Apple Macintosh prototype up for auction
15. Ultra-rare Apple-1 sells for the price of 8 Mac Pro computers
16. The Vintage Mac Museum – Rare Items
17. Computer Collectibles
18. Andrew Booth and the Forgotten Computers
19. Forgotten PC history: The true origins of the personal computer
20. The forgotten software that inspired our modern world
21. PC Pioneers: The Forgotten World of S-100 Bus Computers
22. The Lost Civilization of Dial-Up Bulletin Board Systems
23. Alan Turing’s Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science
24. 10 Ancient computers that are still in use today
25. How Forgotten Legacy Systems Could Be Your Downfall
26. If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It: Ancient Computers in Use Today
27. Avoid the Trash Heap: 15 Great Uses for an Old PC
28. I Wrote This on a 30-Year-Old Computer – And it was awesome!
29. What Is the Oldest Computer Program Still in Use?
30. COBOLed together: the oldest legacy systems still in use today
31. Meet the world’s oldest computer program that’s still in use today
32. Brush up your COBOL: Why is a 60 year old language suddenly in demand?
33. 5 ancient software programs we refuse to give up
34. The 10 oldest, significant open-source programs
35. Legacy systems: Too old to die?
36. How Government Agencies Walk the Line with Legacy Software
37. We care about old computers
38. Candorville – Comics

As long as I have ‘The Garage’ there will be forgotten and old computers stored there . . . and magical OAC posts!

 

ENJOY!

TTFN!

 

Computer Pioneers – Part 1

ENIAC – The First Computer

Apollo’s Forgotten Computer
The LVDC

Forgotten Fun
Texas Instruments TI-99/4A

Tano Dragon 64
Unboxing

Panasonic JR-200U

1983 Radio Shack TRS80
Color Computer 2

Tandy 1000

Sinclair ZX81 – British Computer

Why Apple Products
Use 30 Year Old Software

Evolution of Laptops
1975 – 2020

Top 10 Horribly Outdated
Technologies Still in Use Today

Quantum Computers
Animated