Re: One step too few
Ah, a mate at uni had a PDP/8 in his bedroom !
A lecturer in the physics labs had refused to let it go because it was so ideal for teaching the fundamentals of "how stuff works" - toggle in stuff on the switches, step it, see the results on the lights. While he was away on vacation, they wheeled it out onto a landing and put a notice on it "free to good home" !
So my mate had chad all over the floor, and whenever I went round, we'd be rewinding punched tapes by hand while we talked - I guess it was the male techie equivalent to those women who can knit while they chat. But this was no ordinary PDP/8 - it had hard disks, two of them, 32k each (don't know if that was bits or words, between them they took a few feet of rack space), a high speed punch, and a high speed reader - in addition to the floor standing keyboard/printer/punch/reader terminal. Three full height 19" racks - good job he had large rooms.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
