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:
[clip]
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