OK... my turn
1976, brief access to a computer at school that read mark-sense cards
and had a "Lazy T" prompt (so the teacher called the sigil on the
left edge of the one-line display). I remember virtually nothing
else of it, so I have no idea what it was.
1977, weekly access to a pair of original 4K PETs at the downtown public
library
1978, A friend of mine and I discover a DECwriter w/integral acoustic
coupler and unearth a dialup number and account to a RSTS machine
somewhere with a full suite of BASIC games. Many trees are sacrificed.
1978, A year-and-a-half of savings plus matching funds result in me
buying a 30-day-used 32K BASIC 2.0 PET and C2N tape drive.
1979, An older friend loans me his Quest Elf that he used to use to control
a simple robot (he gets it back twelve years later)
1981, I build my own Quest Elf kit.
1982, I bring home a C-64 from my first job - my employer (Bruce and James,
the creators of WordVision, a word processor for PC-DOS 1.0) received
C-64 S/N 00002007 as a free development machine from Commodore. It
is so flakey (I'm told there's a bug in the first rev of VIC-II chips)
that we replace it at the dealer for S/N 00002345 (which I still have).
WordVision is announced for the C-64. My demo of it shows at Comdex.
The product is never started.
1982, I find a PDP-8/L at the Dayton Hamvention which takes two years of
fiddling to fix (finally got a print set and had it working in days)
1983, I get a 300-baud VIC modem and discover BBSes.
1983, I rescue a PDP-8/i with a rack of DF-32 fixed-head disks because the
owner doesn't want to pay to replace the burned-out front panel bulbs.
1984, Bruce and James folds and I keep the C-64 in lieu of pay.
1984, My next job is programming kids games under the Reader's Digest brand
for the C-64 and Apple ][.
1984, The longevity of software companies being legendary, six months after
I start on the kids games, Reader's Digest stops selling software and I
get a new job working with MC68000s (the COMBOARD) PDP-11s (11/04, 11/34a
primarily) and VAXen (11/750, 11/730). My first exposure to VMS is V3.6.
1984, My boss gives me a PDP-8/a that's rotting on the shelf. I learn the joys
of being a hobbyist and buying from DEC resellers as I aquire an RX8E
and RX01 (and eventually RL8A, RL01, KT8A, etc.)
1985, I get an account on a 2Mb 11/750 w/dual RK07s that runs three flavors
of UNIX (4.0BSD, 4.1BSD and SYSV) depending on what customer bugs were
being worked on at the moment. (I still have _this_ 11/750, too (S/N
BT0000354), which I've upgraded to 8Mb w/new mem controller and wire-
wrap wire). I begin to learn C.
1986, Amiga 1000 w/256K and one floppy. It doesn't become useful until I
bump the RAM to 2Mb and get a hard disk the next year... a WEDGE 8-bit
ISA adapter and Everex XT MFM controller w/ST-225 (for $15/Mb) - cheaper
than a commercial 20Mb SCSI drive kit from CLtd - $1,000 at the time)
1986, I put up UUCP on an 11/730 at work and discover Usenet.
1987, I run UUCP on the Amiga 1000 at home (and am known to the world as
...ihnp4!cbosgd!osu-eddie!giza!kumiss!erd). I add a second ST-225
to my MFM controller and learn the joy of buying new disks on a
reoccurring basis (latest one - last week: 80GB)
It's all downhill from there
-ethan
=====
Even though my old e-mail address is no longer going to
vanish, please note my new public address: erd_at_iname.com
The original webpage address is still going away. The
permanent home is:
http://penguincentral.com/
See
http://ohio.voyager.net/ for details.
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Received on Thu Nov 16 2000 - 10:30:03 GMT