How did you get started?

From: Alexios Chouchoulas <alexios_at_vennea.demon.co.uk>
Date: Fri Apr 11 06:08:07 1997

> Is this a generational thing? My first computer exposure what to a
> mainframe in the late 70's, but my first computer was an 80's micro.
> Are people in the 40+ age group more likely to have fond memories
> of minis?

  Of course. My own exposure was to micros in the 80s, so I begun by getting
machines I had worked with back then. I don't discriminate at all, though,
and would definitely love a PDP-8. But with storage space waning, seriously
collecting minis (I won't even dare to think about mainframes) is a bit of a
problem.

  Ignoring the fact that I can't seem to find any, anyway. :-)


> I may not be an "old fart", but seening today's kids, sometimes I feel
> like one. (Nintendo?, why in my day we had to type in our games on
> membrane keyboards. It took hours to type them in. We stored programs
> on cassette tape, and we liked it...)

  "And you tell that to young people, AND THEY WON'T BELIEVE YOU!" :-)

  Seriously now, I got my first (long expected) when I spent about an hour
showing a Spectrum to my current flatmate (aged 19 I think) and trying to
explain how you plug it into a TV set for display (instead of a monitor) and
a tape recorder for data storage (but where's the drive?). Once she realised
that the computer *was* the keyboard, a computer does *not* necessarily come
with a printer and, once you write data to the tape, you can actually *load
it back* again, everything was fine.

  Until she asked if I could lend it to her to do her industrial design CAD
and Word work on.

  I think the Speccy's insulted now. :-)


--------------------------- ,o88,o888o,,o888o. -------------------------------
Alexios Chouchoulas '88 ,88' ,88' alexios_at_vennea.demon.co.uk
The Unpronouncable One ,o88oooo88ooooo88oo, axc_at_dcs.ed.ac.uk
Received on Fri Apr 11 1997 - 06:08:07 BST