I was 2 in '76, who was the wrong guy? Ford? or Carter?

Chris:

Reagan's speech at the '76 convention is legendary.

Naw. Carter's tribute to Hubert Horatio "Hornblower" Humphrey in 1980 was legendary. That single phrase summed up Carter's entire administration.

The same was true in 1984 with Cuomo and Mondale.

oj --

I hope a stronger case against Edwards can be made (I think it can), because I can't see people not voting for Kerry/Edwards because they think the VP is better than the P.

Picking Edwards may suggest that Kerry needs an overall push, as opposed to a tweak here or there (Gephardt, the Mid-West govs, Richardson). The problem with that is that when you need an overall push, you may never get as much as you need, where you need it.

One negative for the GOP: Edwards running should not win NC for Kerry/Edwards but can it tilt the open Senate race. (I know Edwards left with mediocre polls for re-election, but is a different matter when the native son is the second in the party's ticket. People suddenly like you, like they did the Panthers, when you look like a winner.)

Has any vp ever helped a ticket other than LBJ who would have been happy to steal the election even if not on the ticket.

This is a little off topic, but there were hard drives in '76?

Jeff, yes. 5.25" wide, 4" high, weighed 10 lbs, and held a whopping 10MB of data. That's as much as TEN floppy disks!! WoooHoo!!

ray:

No, that would have been '86.

In '76, they would have been 5" high, weighed 200 lbs, and held a whopping 500KB of data.

Sorry, that should have been 5'.

I thought it was all reel-to-reel magnetic tape and punch cards in '76.

Naw, I think punchcards were out of date, even in '76.

I say that because the one and only time I operated a punchcard reader was in middle school (in 7th or 8th grade), which would put the date at 1978 or so. The machine was, I think, a hand-me-down from the local high school and was regarded as a toy, even then, by the teacher in charge of the school's computer center. Most of the machines in the center were Tandy TRS-80's (there's probably more memory in a Gameboy than in those things), and most of their programs ran on a cassette drive. I don't think I've even SEEN a cassette drive since 1985 or so, and the video games on those machines made Pong look sophisticated - which, in fact, it seemed at the time.

If you really want to feel old, talk about the computers of your youth.

In the future, archeologists will be able to date our landfills by the type of computers and computer equipment they find among all the other trash. Some of the common markers will be 8" floppy drives, 5" floppy drives, cassette interfaces, daisy wheel printers, black and white monitors and those huge parallel port cables.

Hmmm. I last used punch cards at the University in 1981. Perhaps Mr. Barrett's junior high was better equipped, though. However, I was using computer systems with hard drives in 1971. Of course, you couldn't see them, as they were locked away in the forbidden citadel of the "machine room". I had to use paper tape for a while in the early 70's but punch cards were so much nicer. My poor father had to make do with drum memory.

Annoying old guy,
I last used punch cards in 1989, when I was in the U. S. Air Force. So much for being the home of leading-edge technology, huh?

Any institutions with a DEC PDP11 kicking around may have used punch cards well into the 1980's.

Of course that's the legend from "Before Times".

I used punch cards in college (USC) through 1977.

But I'll bet that outside the big-iron mainframe world (which probably still had a lot of magnetic core memory running around) hard disks were the wet dream of a few nerdy techo geeks.

Who are now our overlords.