Teletype to a PDP-11 was also not much fun.
Ah yes, forgot about that pest of a thing where you brought extra memory, but couldn’t really use it in a lot of cases.
A good move indeed. One thing I did hate was XML - I couldn’t never easily find a way to get the Data out - probably better tools available for it now.
I agree MacOSX has become too limiting molly coddling by default… to the point of annoyance… I tend to have to drop to shell if I need to do anything significant.
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Surely XML is a pretty simple data structure?
Ha! Dip switches and freakin’ LEDs! You must have been an Oligarch. I had to rub a balloon to my hair and use it to flip the bits on the disk.
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Did you ever do the light switch screw alignment tweaks for improved audio 
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Ah, now you are talking. Shell scripting is just brilliant. Contains all the commands you ever need, and these commands are decades old - none of that Powershell rubbish where you had to ensure everyone was on the right version. Give me a grep/sed/awk any day
It is, but never displays well in basic text editors. Perhaps it was just me
Actually truth be told it was before my time.. though my father worked for a computer hardware and system company in the early 70s and he brought back old bits of equipment that were to be scrapped such as bootstrap consoles for me .. and I used to wire up to make my version of bridge of the star ship enterprise in my bedroom 
I’ll see if I can find a picture…
It wasn’t a PDP but it was something like this
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Yes. I did the plug one at somebody else’s house. I got him to play a couple of tracks then fiddled with the plug on the standard lamp, I then asked him to play the same tracks again and was asked “have you messed with my record deck?”.
“I’ve been sat on the floor next to your lamp”, I said.
“What about before that?”.
“You’ve been in the room all the time and you saw I went nowhere near your hi-fi, is it better?”
“Yes, but how have you done it?”
My how I laughed! His wife was present too and she couldn’t believe what had just happened.
Blind tested? Not strictly he just played the same records twice.
Expectation bias - absolutely zero!
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The hackers of old were awesome. I have just tried to find a story that I loved about the exploits of a punch card guy from the 50ies. I thought it had been published by Eric S. Raymond but apparently not. The punch card guy’s name started with M, I think, but that’s all I remember 
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We are going down memory lane… the first piece of commercial software I wrote was in Awk… (for portability across unix and hardware types) and it was a real time X.25 data Analyzer … kind of like a very early precursor to WireShark. I was really pleased with it … We sold 9 copies (I seem to remember) to the then EEC PTTs. Even the term EEC sounds rather unfamiliar now… obviously it’s now the EU… and most PTTs are now privatised.
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I did the O’Reilly AWK book a long while ago and loved it
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Ooh, an Eight. We used one of those in the late ‘70s for processing scientific data from Ariel 6 telemetry (launched in 1979). By that time there were only two people left in the company who knew how to operate it!
The main Command, telemetry & test system was an Eleven, with switches to fire up the paper tape bootstrap loader, which would then run from two hard disks, and in ye Olden days, each hard disk can in a 6U high 19” rack case. Not the most reliable, we had three disks, with one as spare, and it was a good job we did, because we had a disk failure at the launch site at T-4 hours.
IIRC, at some point late in the programme, the whole switches & tape shenanigans were replaced by a diode matrix board, containing the bootstrap code. Power up, go off for a coffee, and wait. Progress, I suppose, but less fun!
We could also use the 11 for such vital tasks as Bob Supniks “Adventure” game, and the follow-up “Dungeon” - which morphed into Zork.
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Most of us had budget hi-fi at University, and I can remember going around aligning screws in plugs or light switches horizontally.
We all thought it was a bit bonkers until we did a few listening tests. Placebo effect or not?
There was one whereby you filed a few lines onto the pins of a 3 pin plus as well, not to mention duraglit to clean them.
A bit of fun when on a tight student budget if nothing else, we’d have been at the pub otherwise!
Brilliant! I tried to make a Tomorrow People belt using a TicTac box painted white, oddly could never get it to work 
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When I started work in 1977 in operational research, we used to play Star Trek in our spare time using teletype as input to a remote Univac 1180 and a fanfold printer for the output to see where the Klingons were. Four years later I was designing economic models for business planning on mini computers (System 34, I think). Shortly thereafter, migrated to Apple portables and HP touchscreen desktops. Those were the days.
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What does this mean? Note - I have several iDevices, but my computer is a Windows machine.
Probably nothing you need to worry about as you are using Windows. “MUSIC” is the name of iTunes now, and neither will play FLAC files.
You iDevices will happily play MP3, ALAC files etc, but not FLAC. If you really want to play FLAC then you will need to use a different app to “MUSIC/iTunes”
Does Windows natively support FLAC these days?
I think it has for a long time, but I don’t have a way to confirm that anymore
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