Age, was Re: IBM mainframe goes for 99 cents

From: Wai-Sun Chia <waisun.chia_at_gmail.com>
Date: Sat Feb 26 08:02:16 2005

On Sat, 26 Feb 2005 08:15:57 -0500, David V. Corbin
<dvcorbin_at_optonline.net> wrote:
>
> >>> > It could be interesting to know the age"spread" of thist list
> >>> > contributors, and how long we've had the computer virus under our
> >>> > skin.
> >>>
>

Born 1966 (age 39). Started relatively late, at age 16, on a Tandy
III. Learnt Basic on the tandy, doing animated sprites, which was my
clone of Space Invaders. Bugged the hell out of my dad, whom finally
got me a C64!! :-) Cost him a pretty penny too!! Pretty soon
afterwards, got a 1541 drive and an the original assembler development
kit from Commodore. By 17 I was a 6502/6510 assembler addict, doing
complex polyphonic realtime music on the SID. Soon after when my
high-school set up our first computer lab, it was populated by Apple][
clones from Taiwan, so I promptly did my first port to the Apple (but
the music quality was down graded to monotonic due to lack of audio
facilities on the Apple).

Missed the PDP era (although I did a migration of a PDP/Dibol system
to HP-UX once). Professionally cut on VMS and Unix. Did AT&T Unix on
3B2s, Dynix on Sequents (very interesting architecture), OSF1/Alpha,
Digital Unix/Alpha, until today Tru64/Alpha.

So today I plan to fill up what I had missed on the PDPs! :-)

/wai-sun
Received on Sat Feb 26 2005 - 08:02:16 GMT