Introductions and Current Status

[Bob Elzer]

$2500 for a floppy drive, kind of makes me feel better for spending 
$5000 for a 386 with a whopping 320MB hard drive

LOL!!!



On 11/15/2011 11:27 AM, Dazed_75 wrote:
> 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
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------
> PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
> To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings:
> http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/pipermail/plug-discuss/attachments/20111115/601f9352/attachment.html>