Anyone around 18 in the group?

[Victor Odhner]

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.   :-)