Re: My national tabloid love affair with a computer

From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Wed Apr 11 2001 - 23:39:09 MDT


Doug Jones wrote:
>
> KPJ wrote:
> >
> > It appears as if Jim F. wrote:
> >
> > |I wonder if anybody on this list ever had a love affair with
> > |a PDP-11/45?
> >
> > I programmed MACRO-11 on earlier PDP-11 forms...
> >
> > Before that, I used a PDP-7/9...
> >
> > I have the PDP-4 source for the first interactive LISP...

My first computer was a breadboard beast built around an 1802 chip I
ripped out of an ancient TV Pong game with a keypad for entering hex to
get it to do anything. Eventually a simple tape-recorder was hacked in
to actually do primitive secondary storage. Later I graduated to an Elf
that a friend helped me hack an old iron ferrite memory core to. Then a
Trash 80, some early integrated system with the huge old actually floppy
floppy drive. Then a job on ancient CDC hardware hacking Fortran.
Many years before all that I was pulled into this elite kid computer
training thing on some antique IBM iron. Input was only punched cards.
The sick bastards only taught us Cobol! And the turn-around on a deck
averaged 2 days. I didn't want anything to with computers after that
until the first micro computer chips became available.

- samantha



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