ROFL !!!

I got my start in High School when the National Science Foundation decided to start a revolutionary thing called Computer Math for secondary schools.  We started by learning how to do math in binary and then progressed to binary logic.  By the middle of the 1st year we were writing Fortran IV for the Univac (?) 1600 at the university.  We wrote code on coding paper, our teacher would take it to the University where some poor schmuck would keypunch it into IBM cards while the teacher learned what to teach us the next week.

It was maybe 7 years later I got my first computer.  A Technical Design Labs Xitan Z80 kit with 8 KB memory and front panel switches and light for I/O.  You would write little programs on paper and enter each byte into memory with the switches and HOPE you made no errors!  It did come with BASIC on a paper tape, but you had to build the paper tape reader which I never did. 

I converted a TV into a monitor and bought a surplus keyboard.   They announced a way to convert an audio cassette player/recorder into mass storage and you could get an assembler and BASIC on audio tapes.  You had to enter an IPL program via the switches in order to load from the tape.  But after that is was fun and mostly easy to write extensions to BIOS for the tape and burn a new BIOS EEPROM that understood how to use the tape.

It was the cat's meow when I moved up to 64 KB of RAM and I thought I was in 7th heaven when I bought dual 8" double sided double density floppy drives for $2500.  I tried to add a 10 MB hard drive a couple of years later, but never got it to work.  I never did find out if the problem was the drive, the controller, or the BIOS extension I was writing.

Now that all sounds very primitive to you all, but I did the billing for my employer on that system and that was around $1 million per month where the units of billing averaged one cent each (though a LOT of them).  Some years later I bought the very first IBM AT to be delivered to Denver.  I do not remember when I first tried Linux.  I just remember it was a very early Red Hat and I spent maybe a month of evenings trying to get it to work.

So believe me when I tell you that ALL distributions work well compared to those days!
--
Dazed_75 a.k.a. Larry

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive.
  - Thomas Jefferson

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