Re: One of those threads, old stuff: was Confusion [WOOT]
On 12/05/14 00:50, The Wanderer wrote:
> On 05/11/2014 10:41 AM, Steve Litt wrote:
>
>> On Sun, 11 May 2014 15:13:21 +0900 Joel Rees <joel.rees@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>
>>> On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 10:03 AM, Joshua Anthony
>>> <janfany@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>
>>>> I confess to much ignorance of technical detail - despite 45
>>>> years as a computer support engineer, programmer and technical
>>>> writer, I still find a lot of stuff hard to grasp. ie. I am old
>>>> and lazy and think GUI is a gift from heaven. So would you, if
>>>> you'd started out punching ten words of machine code onto paper
>>>> tape in order to start up a mainframe system - long before there
>>>> was any form of visual display.
>>>
>>> Hey can we start one of those those threads? I think the
>>> teletype/paper tape terminal we used in high school to interface
>>> with the IMSAI box we built. (Much gratitude to a teacher who used
>>> a lot of his own money to make that possible for us.) So you've got
>>> me beat by about ten years. But, yeah, Univac 1100 with punched
>>> card readers and less main memory than my M6800 prototyping board,
>>> my first year in the community college's EDP courses. IBM System 34
>>> at my summer job.
>
>> Oh, there we go! I was late to the party, so my first computer was a
>> Heathkit ET6800 Microprocessor Trainer:
>
>> http://www.troubleshooters.com/lpm/200610/200610.htm#_Computers_Ive_Known_and_Loved
>
> The first computer I remember actually using was either an Apple //c or
> a blocky integrated-monochrome-monitor Macintosh.
>
> Unless you count my few and poor attempts (at an age not above, and
> probably fairly low in, the single digits) to play video games on what
> amounts, in modern terms, to a Texas Instruments video-game console. I
> don't recall what it was called, but I believe it was cartridge-based...
>
> I didn't get into computers far enough to know any of the details of
> what I was working with until much later, sometime in the early oughts.
>
>
>
I grew up in a house/garage full of computers. I learnt my times tables
on punch cards. My father put the question on one side for me, and the
answer on the other (for him). Apparently they still worked fine - as
long as he kept the order right.
My first computer was a hand-me-down, had no keyboard or monitor - just
a row of switches and the most interesting thing it could do was play
bad (static) music on a nearby radio. My first new, personal computer
was an IBM PS/2 50Z, reluctantly parted with, like the rest of my PS/2
collection in the "big clean-up" some years ago (sob). Bought with
several paychecks from my part-time job as a tape librarian working with
much bigger IBM iron (much of which is still in production, as is the code).
Kind regards
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