1970s Computing

I was in high school in the late 1970s. Being in Minnesota, which had high state income tax, we had really good schools. I was able to learn BASIC programming. The technology was crazy compared to the 2020s. We had one terminal (green and white) and one printer, which connected to a mainframe computer in Minneapolis, some 80 miles away, through a phone modem which was put in a cradle to give our 300 baud connection.

300 baud analog phone modem

What's 300 baud? That's 300 bits of data per second, which at 7 bits per text character is less than 43 text characters per second. There was no graphic interface, just text on the terminal screen. At 300 baud you could watch the letters pass across the screen.

In comparison, I just tested my Internet connection, and it was 481 Mbps. For 8 bit characters, that would be over 60,000,000 characters per second.

The BASIC language we learned was original BASIC, not Visual Basic. BASIC was invented in 1964, and is an acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.

So we typed in our programs one line at a time, then executed the program. Dirt simple programming. We saved our programs on 1" wide paper tape. The printer had a feature on the side to be able to print or read paper tape. Each row of 8 possible holes in the paper tape corresponded to one character. So we printed our programs on paper tape, then rolled them up and put them in our breast pocket. This made it easy to see who was in the programming classes!

When I researched computer international standards (ISO), I discovered there was even a standard for the paper tape. It still exists, "ISO 1154:1975 Information processing — Punched paper tape — Dimensions and location of feed holes and code holes." I think the original standard was around 1960.