relative age

From: Frank McConnell <fmc_at_reanimators.org>
Date: Tue Oct 21 23:07:22 1997

allisonp_at_world.std.com (Allison J Parent) wrote:
> if highschool was x years ago:

> 1980 s100, apple][, swtp, LSI11, micronova Microprocessor chips

> 1977 PDP-11, vax, nova Some LSI and bit slice

... HP 3000 Series II. Well, that's what we had at my high school
in 1977. Sometime along about 1980 it got upgraded to a Series III.
Micros weren't in the schools in 1977 but some of us were aware of
them (I used to hang around the Radio Shack and poke at the TRS-80).

HP brought the 2000A timeshared BASIC system out in...1967? I know
there were some (later models, 2000F and 2000 Access) still in service
at various Washington DC suburban area high schools into the early
1980s at least, maybe into the mid-1980s. Prince Georges County
(Maryland) and Fairfax County (Virginia) both had them, maybe others
too.

...

We had a mark-sense reader way back then in 1977. An HP 7260A, hooked
up as a pass-through device between the terminal and the 3000, but the
3000 had some special "driver" software (in the form of the FCARD
intrinsic, which sent the right escape sequences down the wire to get
the card reader to Do Stuff).

We used it daily to "run attendance": each student had an associated
IBM card, and the homeroom teacher would send the cards for absent
students to the office. Read cards into disc file, run programs to
generate report (print report on continuous-form ditto paper with
tractor holes) and update database with attendance information.

We also used it twice quarterly to do progress reports (mid-quarter)
and report cards (end of quarter). These used mark-sense forms that
were pre-printed, then printed in the line printer, then sent out to
the schools and teachers where they were torn apart along their perfs,
marked, folded, spindled, mutilated, and sent back for reading.

Note that bit about being torn apart along perfs. Feed a few thousand
of these through (the 3000 at our site did processing for about a
dozen schools) and the torn perfs leave lots of paper dust all over in
the reader. Twice a quarter, we used to have to call the CE to come
out, take ours half apart, and vacuum all the paper dust out so we
could read the attendance cards.

After I graduated I found that they'd replaced the 7260As with
Scan-Tron readers. I saw one once but, well, it's been 14 years or so
and I didn't really look at how it plugged in -- given that they had
it talking to the 3000 somehow I would bet that it did RS-232. I
think I remember being told that they had had to write some software
to deal with it, but I guess that wasn't too big a deal as they had
also changed the mark sense forms, from two that would fit down a slot
designed for IBM cards to one that was wider and didn't need to be
kept synchronized with a partner.

-Frank McConnell
Received on Tue Oct 21 1997 - 23:07:22 BST