Anyone around 18 in the group?

[Major.Mikey]

On Friday 05 August 2005 08:25 pm, Victor Odhner wrote:
>
> 14 April 1958, at 15, I was a member of the last
> team to report a sighting of Sputnik II as it broke
> up on re-entry.  We shouted trajectory notes into
> a reel-to-reel tape recorder, with WWV playing
> in the background.

WOW!

> New Year's eve, 1970, I got a whole top-end
> Burroughs mainframe to myself in the factory to
> run an experimental printed circuit router.  Man,
> that machine was the pinnacle.  A whole room full
> of head-per-track disk units, and well over 3 MB
> of memory, but it was a multiprogramming multi-
> processor setup with virtual memory, and no assembly
> language:  programmed totally in ALGOL, including
> the OS.  I had written the programs that wired the
> thing, including the 18,000 wires on the six-foot CPU
> backplanes.  That was three years after I left the
> journalism field to become a technical writer, before
> the days of CS degrees.

WOW WOW!

> In 1983 I got to bring a Morris Microcomputer home,
> to work remotely.  It had two low-density single-
> sided 5-1/4 floppies, total capacity in the 300+ KB
> range.  This CP/M machine had a 64KB memory, a
> BDS C compiler, and an editor called MINCE (Mince
> Is Not a Complete Emacs).  It had a 9600 Baud modem
> so I could upload my work to the office.  I have the
> catalog to prove that its list price was about $4,000,
> and the Honeywell VIP terminal it drove listed for
> another $4,000 

I had a commodore 64 about that time:-)

> 'Young'ns' -- hrmf.   :-)

That's me:)