On Wed, May 29, 2002 at 09:28:39PM -0400, Tom Suzda wrote:
<snip>
> I remember the
> Wordstar, Lotus, and probably anything else you want to throw at me.
I started out in 1974 with an acoustic modem hooked to a teletype, with
the school district's mainframe one the other end of the line. Dartmouth
BASIC. HP handheld calculators were upwards of $325 at the time, and I
got an HP-21 for graduation.
Funny, when I got to college, the way you did computers was to keypunch
a boatload of cards (which you bought at the University Co-op), and hand
them over to the high priests. If you didn't drop the cards and get them
out of order, and if they didn't get mangled, and if the third Frisbee
to sail across the Quad floated just right, you got a printout to tell
you what aggregious error you'd made. I was used to immediate feedback
(at 300 baud). I took one look at that setup and decided that Computer
Science wasn't in my future.
Years later, I bought an Epson QX-10, with 256K of bank-switched RAM
(actually ran a variant of CP/M called TP/M). It ran a "suite" called
"Valdocs", which contained a word processor, spreadsheet and the like,
on a green monochrome character-mapped display. Two 5-1/4 floppies and
no hard drive.
Well, it's getting late. I better put my teeth in a glass for the night.
;-}
Paul
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