Demography?

From: Olminkhof <jolminkh_at_nsw.bigpond.net.au>
Date: Mon Mar 2 05:43:43 1998

>I'm kind of curious as to the demography of the Classic Computer
>Mailing List. What are people's backgrounds, what are they doing now,
>and so forth.


Hi,
I'm Hans Olminkhof, mid 40's, a mechanical engineer living in Sydney
Australia. Married, 3 kids. I don't have much to do with computers for a
living, building the occasional Lotus Notes database being about it.

I was originally exposed to computers as an undergraduate and remember
writing my first program on punchcards in Forgo, a students version of
Fortran2. It ran on an IBM 1620 or something at the University of Western
Australia where we could see in the next room a PDP6 in all it's blue glory.
Never got any closer to that though. The next year we were limited to remote
teletypes linked to the new computer, a Cyber72 which I never saw.

I had no contact with computers again until about 1986 when I finally found
something useful to do on them, Finite Element Analysis. (engineer stuff).
We bought a 286 for home about 1991 and spent $500 a year later get the 80Mb
hard drive in it fixed. Not long afterwards I figured out how easy it was to
do all that myself.

One day in about 1993, I said to someone in a shop what a museum piece the
IBM AT I was looking at was. Somehow the conversation got around to me never
having even seen the original IBM PC. Then came a trip to the back room to
see racks and racks of them. I walked away with one for $20, got to fiddling
with it and a few weeks later owned another dozen or so. They would have
been on their way to the tip otherwise.

I got very interested in the idea of keeping them alive and in the whole
idea of how quickly this technology was progressing and disappearing.
Anyway, now I've got a whole heap of old computers, maybe half of them
working, lots of old software to go with them, manuals etc. I spend a few
hours a weekend looking around for more.

The list includes:
IBM PC's, XT's, AT's, Portable PC's, Convertibles, Displaywriters
Compaq Portable's, Portable Plus's, Portable II's
Kaypro II's, and IV's
Various Apple II's and early Mac's
Atari 400's and an 800
Various Apricots
A heap of Sirius's (Victor 9000 in USA)
Decmate III's
Osborne 1's and Executives
DOT's
An original PET
A CBM3032 and the wreck of an 8032
A Compupro box
A Cromenco C10
Various BBC's
HP 85's, 71B's and a 110
An MAI 4105
Various Microbees
An NEC APC and a number of APC III's
NEC 8201, 8401, Tandy Model 100
Olivetti M21
Panasonic 840
Sharp PC 5000, 2 X 7000's, MZ811
Sinclair ZX81 and Spectrum's
Epson HX20
Canon A200's
probably some I forgot, and some uniquely Australian machines,
a "Porchester Executive", a "PortaPak" and a Dick Smith "Mini Scamp" (a 1977
kit)
I've also got some PDP11 stuff coming when I organise a truck!
Received on Mon Mar 02 1998 - 05:43:43 GMT