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On Thursday, July 04, 2019 09:50:36 AM Richard Owlett wrote: > BTW my oldest machine is a Kaypro 10 ;/
Just for kicks, I'll mention that my oldest machine is a Digital Group Z-80, circa 1976, assembed from a kit, and with 2K on board RAM plus 2 auxillary memory boards with 8K each (iirc) for a total of 18K RAM. Long term storage was via a cassete recorder / player with a speed control to adjust playback speed for best result.
I programmed some floating point routines in machine language, and had thoughts of writing things like a word processor.
I thought (seriously) about buying (or, more accurately, wished that I could afford to buy) a used teletype machine (for about $1500) in order to have a means of printing.
It (the machine) was working when I retired it, but I should make some fixes if I ever un-retired it (I took out the 115 volt AC cooling fan to use as an air mover between two rooms of my house),
Aside: the Digital Group machines were pretty neat in that the CPU was on a daugherboard, and they made CPU boards with the Z-80, the 6502, the 6800 (iirc) (and maybe just the plain 8080) -- you could "convert" to any of those other CPUs by just buying, assembling, and changing out the CPU daughterboard.
BTW, that wasn't my first computer -- when I was significantly younger (i.e., 10 to 15 years before 1976), I acquired two other things (both long gone, I think) that were called computers:
* One was sort of a toy analog computer (one where you input numbers by doing things like using potentiometers to set a voltage to represent a number), and then read results on a meter (I'm somewhat oversimplifying that as I don't really remember much about that.
* The other was something that I believed had computer in the name, but was used to control model trains -- the intent was that you could speak into a (built-in) microphone and it was supposed to recognize spoken commands (things like "stop" or "go" -- and maybe I'm misremembering the commands, maybe the logic was based on detecting and counting syllables in the commands). It never worked very well, but I might actually still have it buried in a box of old model train stuff. ;-)
By the way, despite the years mentioned in this email, I am only 29 (or, at least, I try to convince women of that) (the same age (or was it 39) that Jack Benny always claimed to be, even when he appeared to be much older,
(I woke up with a headache today, and am not "in shape" to do any serious work, so I'd doing things like this).
Happy 4th of July (Independence Day) to all of us (in the USA or not). I hope the soldiers that might be marching in Trump's July 4th celebration are not "goose stepping".
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