dsavage@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote: ...snip...
I still have my first Vector Graphic MZ System B -- an S-100 bucket that
came with a 4MHz Z-80A, 48K of dynamic RAM on a single card (!), dual
16-hard-sector Micropolis floppy drives, and CP/M 1.4. On the front panel
is a spiffy stick-on with a nautical rope border that says "The only
difference between men and boys is the price of their toys." At $4,250 in
1979, I should hope so. I also remember purchasing a D.C.Hayes
Micromodem-100 110/300 baud card, subscribing to The Source, and reading
the raw United Press wire stories about the Mount St. Helens eruption as
it happened. Back then "virus" meant the flu and "trojan" was something
you asked to speak to the male druggist about.
True that!
I bought my first 'computer' in 1980, it was a Tandy 100 pocket computer with 1.4 KB of ram and a had 4bit processor. It was programable in basic, and I made my own cassette tape drive for it.
I wrote my High Schools Truancy and Achievement program in basic on the new TRS-80 Model 3, I then moved to a different school. The next computers I came across were Apple II computers with 16KB! of ram, they were awesome, I thought you could do almost anything with them, then we got an Apple IIe with an incredible 48KB of ram, you could run a word processor with could you believe it a spelling checker. Before graduating I bought the newest Sinclair Z80 with 64KB of RAM but it's power supply died and I took it back for a refund. In college I learned Z80 and 8080 assembly, Basic and Pascal on the original IBM PC, and Became acquainted with UNIX on a Daisy Logician Workstation running Computer Aided Engineering Software {Each machine was worth over 30,000 dollars}. Since then I have learned to program on numerous things from PDP8's to PDP11's with toggle switches and ADM3a terminals up to current stuff. I first bought RedHat 4.2, but had been using Slackware since 1995.
And I am still half as old as some of the people who have responded.
