My national tabloid love affair with a computer

From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Tue Apr 03 2001 - 22:19:47 MDT


At 09:49 PM 4/3/01 -0400, Jim F. wrote:

>I wonder if anybody on this list ever had a love affair with
>a PDP-11/45?

Funny you should ask that. I'm not absolutely sure about the model, but a
photo of me peering lovingly at the front of a PDP-11 was published in a
Sydney newspaper on 14 January 1973. My long hair was wrenched back out of
sight, lest I look Unscientific. Ha. Those were the days. Suits and ties
they wore, scientists.

(The machine belonged to the newspaper and was used for financial
accounting, I imagine, since computerized typesetting was not yet
fashionable. The editor pretended that I'd used it for my statistical
analysis, when in reality I'd done all that with pen and paper and counting
on my fingers. Oh, and a quite expensive Sharp calculator with a display
that showed results to three significant figures and had no square root or
other function keys.)

Damien Broderick



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