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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