Did Bill Gates
chastise you for stealing that BASIC interpreter?
Lee
Reynolds
Tech
Support Analyst Sr
ASU
Advanced Computing Center
a2c2.asu.edu
GWC-178
480.965.9460
(Office)
480.458.7434
(Mobile)
From:
plug-discuss-bounces@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
[mailto:plug-discuss-bounces@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us] On
Behalf Of Dazed_75
Sent: Tuesday, November 15, 2011 11:27 AM
To: Main PLUG discussion list
Subject: Re: Introductions and Current Status
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