Re: Old farts and new Linux

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On or about 2004-05-03 16:14, Don Levey whipped out a trusty #2 pencil and scribbled:

fedora-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:


On Mon, 2004-05-03 at 15:58, Charles Curley wrote:



A bunch of tadpoles on this thread. IBM 360s, PDP-11s, all new
stuff. _I_ worked on the world's first silicon based computers, in a
project on what is now called Salisbury Plain, England, about 5,000
years ago.

So there.


And here I thought that at 36, I was an 'old fart' when it came to
playing with computers. By the sounds of it, I'm still wet behind the
ears :)

I've been doing this since my first computer, a TRS-80 model III
(cassette tapes for storage, 48k of ram (that was the upgrade) and
hexeditors were my favorite toys).  I was shown linux for the first
time by a friend of mine the same day I passed my last mcse exam.
I've long since let the mcse lapse and haven't used anything other
than linux in years for both desktops and servers.

Ron



I am very much wet behind the ears. I started with a TRS-80 model II (with the cassette), along with a PDP-8E (paper tape reader). I graduated to a PET, and quickly to a Commodore CMB - the big guys had the machines with 16K RAM. Ah, the days of PEEKS and POKES.

When I got to college, my roommate had a PC, with an external Winchester
10Mb hard drive.  We figured, at the time, that this would be enough to last
almost forever.  We were also able to dial into the campus Vax and "chat"
with people on the other end of the state.

My first machine at home was a dumb terminal, with a 300/1200 baud modem in
1987.  In 1990 I got my first "real" machine, a 386sx.  Up until then I had
done BASIC, Fortran, and even COBOL on a TI-990.

But I've only used Linux since 6.1.

-Don


The mention of the TI 990 caught my attention. In 1977 I (thru TI) got hooked up with Ken Bowles and the UCSD p-system. I ended up writing a p-code emulator for the TI 990 computer, which (after many alterations) became products for the TI 99-4A and the TIPC. Alas, they never produced a lot of revenue.

As another aside, the TI 990 had, IMHO, the best insrtuctions for testing bits in the I/O space of any CPU at the time (or since).

--
Fritz Whittington
TI Alum - http://www.tialumni.org

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