Generation gap, sorta

[madbaker]

Friday night I went to an alumni cocktail reception for a relatively new institute the college set up - it's a quantitative economics program, so right up my alley. I would have done that track in a heartbeat if they'd had it when I was there. Reasonable chattage with folks there, although I was the only alum from anywhere close to my era.

At one point, I was talking to four seniors. So, they're about 20 years old. I was explaining how two days before our semester-long econometrics regression project was due, the VAX crashed, and they hadn't made a backup since before the semester started.

After about five minutes, one of them got up the courage to ask me "So, what's a vax?"
The others piped in, obviously relieved, "Yeah, was it a kind of intranet?"

(pause)

"No, it was a mainframe system. We didn't have an intranet back in the late '80s. See, PCs didn't have the power to run computational packages, and..."

"What's a mainframe? Was that a forerunner of Excel?"

(pause)
Eventually, I told them to look it up.

Comments

[tsgeisel.livejournal.com]

A Vax is an early form of a server, based on Charles Babbage's computational engine. You programmed it with punch cards, and it ran on steam. The operators spent a lot of time shoveling coal into the boiler, and removing stuck cards - which, of course, meant that you had to figure out which card went wrong, and re-load your entire program.

Still, it was able to communicate with the outside world, by means of morse code, but you had to have a special device on the receiving end in order for it to be translated automatically. Otherwise you had to transcribe the data manually, which is why so many old-time computer people also have Ham Radio licenses.

They stopped producing the VAX when the complaints about the pollution from the coal-boilers got to be too much. Fortunately at around this time IBM was developing some higher-powered machines that ran more efficiently, so the computer industry was saved.

[madbaker.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, I was too dumbfounded to start prevaricating. I like your version, though!

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

*applause*

[dame-cordelia.livejournal.com]

Very nice story. For some unexplainable reason I have the fear that those seniors haven't heard of Charles Babbage.