6 Technologies From My First Job

I was sitting around on New Year’s Eve playing Zork, and I got to reminiscing about technologies I have used which either no longer exist or have passed into no usage. Thinking back to my first summer job where I actually got paid to program (actually, I was paid to do physics, but programming was a big part of it), here are six tools I used…

First, we used a KIM-1 microcomputer. This 6502-powered beast had a whole 1024 bytes of memory, and no persistent storage. We used this to control a Perturbed Angular Correlation Gamma Ray Spectroscopy experiment.

After the experiment ran for a while (collecting data in scalar registers), the KIM-1 would dump these registers out to a more “permanent” storage – in this case paper tape. This was great stuff to work with, frequently breaking, sometimes absorbing moisture and swelling.

The experiment would generally run for a couple of days, after which we would have to process the data – which meant uploading it to the mainframe. For the upload, I used a very old (even then) teletype machine, connected to a screaming 300 baud acoustic coupler.

Using this, we uploaded the data to the university mainframe, where I got to analyze it in one of my favourite languages of all time, APL!

Computing was different then!