Ok, I'll through in...
Sophmore summer of high school, 1976, went to clemson for computer camp.
Learned DEC Basic on a PDP 8E, with Teletype 33s and assembler on a PDP
11/45. The 8E was an interesting beast, six racks wide. Took them 20
minutes to load basic from a paper tape reader. The year after that I
built a SOL-20 from Processor Technology from a partial kit. Got it
from a computer store on Dale Mabry just south of Kenedy where a
tropical fish place is now. Still got it in my garage. Got a couple
Apple IIs out there too.
Yeah punch cards sent me off in a different direction too. But
eventually I came back...
Todd
> -----Original Message-----
> From: slug@lists.nks.net [mailto:slug@lists.nks.net] On
> Behalf Of Paul M Foster
> Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2002 10:52 PM
> To: slug@nks.net
> Subject: Re: [SLUG] ZX-80/computer history
>
>
> 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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