Age

From: Tom Jennings <tomj_at_wps.com>
Date: Sun Feb 27 14:31:30 2005

Born 1955. My father was a ham, motorcycle nut, car nut, etc. I
made electronic stuff since grade school, worked for an
electronics company while in highschool (janitor, then technician,
then programmer). Got pretty good at electronics young. Hooked on
a Nova 1200, LINCtape, Silent700 on a little rollaround cart
around 1975, then bought a SWTPC 6800 kit in 1977?, and got my
first lesson in vaporware when I bought 4K BASIC from SWTPC and
found it needed 6K to run. Debugged a solder bridge or something
by tracing out MIKBUG program execution on the buss with a
two-channel Tek tube scope ("give a boy a hammer, everything looks
like a nail"). Wrote FORTRAN4 and Nova assembly, then a
cross-assembler for my SWPTC machine for the Nova. About the only
software I still have from that era, printed on paper.

(I'm actually not that nostalgic; I have little interest in the
computing stuff I worked on most, CP/M, MSDOS, hardware,
1977-1995. It's a weird coincidence I just got the Nova, though
nostalgia certainly affected my decision to take it. Most of the
science and tech stuff I'm interested in was made before I was
born. )

Got my amateur Extra license a few years back so that I could put
my two Korean-War-era PRC-6 vacuum tube handy-talkies on the air
(6 meters). Plus mobile HF morse in my ancient Rambler auto :-)
Received on Sun Feb 27 2005 - 14:31:30 GMT