About 1963, GE brought the Dartmouth time sharing system to Phx. It
coupled a GE235 "mainframe" (which had either 8 or 16K of 20 bit
words--I don't remember which) with a Datanet 30 Front End Processor.
They called the combo a GE265 (235+30). I was at Motorola Semi @ 52nd &
McDowell. They let us use it for free, but we had to rent a tty33 with a
110 baud modem (that's about 10 char/sec for you young sprouts) from
AT&T for $60/month. Since about once a week I was greeted by "Disk
crash, data restored as of ____" when I logged on. I ALWAYS dumped my
program & data to punch paper tape before signing off.
BTW, I wouldn't take anything for the experiences of those days--but I
sure wouldn't do it again for anything either!
-mj-
Victor Odhner wrote:
> ec wrote hastily:
> >Hey, YOU will be 'over 40' someday!!! Don't you
> >'young'ns' Know how to be PC...
>
> ... failing to parse my sentence, which was:
> >>Well, at least a few of you are under 40 . . .
>
> A few of *you*, I wrote. None of *me* is under 40,
> except the 50 pounds I have gained since my lovely
> wife began to cook for me 39 years ago.
>
> Everybody's got Memories. Lessee ...
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> In 1976, I drove 20+ miles to buy my wife some of
> the latest technology: A hand-held LED calculator.
> Woohoo! That was just 99 years after great-uncle
> Wilgodt Odhner started the world's first mass
> production line for mechanical calculators.
>
> 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 -- all this was on the end of our dining
> room buffet. My ten-year-old son spent hours hacking
> on that thing. He lives in San Jose now ...
>
> 'Young'ns' -- hrmf. :-)
>
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