TurboTax 2010 - beginning

Hmm, I recall working as an operator on IBM 360/25 and IBM 370/125 systems. Virtual storage, WAHOOOO!! Also, I recall JCL/JECL cards with forward slashes or...have I become demented?

1403 IBM line printers, card punches, card readers, card sorters....getting jammed up. AH, back in the early 70s it was.

"Uncal Bob" was built.

Hmm. After the IBM shop, I supervised a shop, in the late 70s, with a PDP

11/34?? 11/40?? Giant 25 meg HD. Used punch cards. Read them in, then transmitted the data 2,000 miles to Informatics in Columbus, Ohio for processing. Back came the reports, printing on our printer. DOE order system allowed drug stores to phone in their orders 24/7...when it worked.

Nope. I invented some of those JECL statements. Those of you who know me in this NG personally know which ones. /* for JES2, //* for JES3.

I guess size DOES matter!

S/N 3? Nice.

For me, it was college in the early 70s.

Boxes and boxes of IBM punch cards for each program, all in the name of FORTRAN IV.

Actually, I used to fix them at large corporate computer centers. I started by fixing keypunch machines, then moving into computers during the early 360 days in the mid 1960's, but I also worked on the older equipment. My customer at one time was a large insurance company. They had four 7080 systems, two 1401 systems, ten 360/20 systems, three

360/30 systems, and two 360/65 systems. They eventually got rid of the old stuff, and moved to some 370/168 systems.

I fixed all of them at one time or another. When they would break, I would dig out the logic diagrams, and the oscilloscope, and figure out what was wrong. The fun went out of it in the late 70's when they came out with error codes that told what component to change. What fun was that? So, I taught myself programming and moved into software.

For me it was the late fifties in the payroll dept of T. No 360, 370, PDP, or anything else. We had an IBM Card Counting Punch (605 or 650) and IBM Card Counting Statistical Machine (108). All "programming" was done by changing the wires on a panel.

?Hi, Sharx.

At Oklahoma University in the mid-50's, we studied "IBM Machines", since the word "computer" hadn't really been invented yet. Accounting majors didn't get into the wires and registers, but it was fun punching cards, sorting them, tabulating, and then watching reports print out on those big line printers with tall type bars jumping up and down. That was my only hands-on exposure to "big iron".

In the mid-to-late 1970's our CPA firm in San Bernardino, CA, used CompuTax for our first computer-prepared tax returns. We would use pencils to fill out CompuTax input forms - green print on legal-size paper. A courier service would pick up those sheets and take them 60 miles to somewhere in the greater Los Angeles area, El Segundo, I think. There, CompuTax employees would input our data, process the returns on their giant computers (360s?), and print them out on LASER printers! Turnaround time was about a week. First time we had seen laser printer output, but those returns we got back were beautiful! They sure beat anything we had been able to present to our clients before.

And it was during this time that microcomputers arrived - about 4 years before IBM produced one they called a PC. Minicomputers were the size of an office desk; microcomputers were about like today's desktops; portables were years in the future. My original TRS-80 - in December 1977, before they called it Model I - had 16 KB RAM and no disks at all until the next summer when we got the first 5.25" floppy disk. That held 87.5 KB of data - including TRSDOS, the directory and other overhead, leaving less than 50 KB free - on its single side (35 tracks of ten 256-byte sectors). The programming language progressed quickly from BASIC Level I (in 4 KB ROM) through Level II (in a new 12 KB ROM) to Disk Basic, all in about 7 months.

With that first TRS-80 and 4 KB Level I BASIC, I wrote an income tax estimating program in January 1978. It ran about 13 KB and took a long time to load from the music cassette recorder. And, of course, it did not even attempt to print a tax return. But, when we input the summarized data - ordinary income (split into earned/unearned), capital gains/losses, prior 3 years' income for income-averaging, etc. - the program would tell us the amount of tax in less than a minute! We used that for many tax planning purposes. (Divorce lawyers loved my program because it helped them argue for more - or less - spousal support.) We would pre-compute the tax before we sent the input forms to CompuTax; if their answer differed from ours, we investigated.

None of that matters now, I suppose, but I can't resist jumping in when you old guys (I'm only 75) start reminiscing. ;^}

RC

Saw my first DEC computer in 1960!! Scary!!!

NJOracle has written on 1/3/2011 12:27 PM:

I had a career doing that on ANALOG computers. :-)

R. C. White has written on 1/3/2011 12:34 PM:

My original IMSAI kit had 256 bytes of RAM and the only available floppy drives used 8" disks.