OK I'll play, and yea roughly in order...
5th Grade... summer school class, built a "multipler divider" out of colored
wood rods, was really just lookup tables but blew the instructors mind.
6th Grade ... DigiComp
Jr High.. K&E 5 scale slip stick...
Jr High.. Old Marchants and Fridens
Freshman in Highschool, Wang with nixies and the card reader... did my Chem
home work on it
Senior in High School IBM360, honors claass took us to the "Naval Post
Graduate School" in Monterey and taught us BAL360, met Dick Hamming and
Grace Hopper there... Dick was on staff, they brought Grace in to give US
our nanoseconds...
Jr Colllege.. 2 buddies and I spent $300 on a Sharp 4 funtion to do our
electronics 101 math with.
Jr Colllege.. Burroghs B200, learned to microcode on that pig..
Fresh out of the service managed to dig up an old 4004 dev system and an
ASR33 with a reader/punch.
No long after met Gary Kildahl for the first time at a local computer club
and he GAVE me a copy of CP/M 1.4.
Met Gordon Eubanks at the same meeting, he was Gary's student and wanted to
get input from us on what to put into "BasicE" his class project that became
C-BASIC.
I spent $1000 (no typo, 1 kilobuck) to buy a Persi Dual 8 inch Floopy drive
and built my fiirst 8080 CP/M machine. Console was the ASR33 fro the 4004
dev system. 1 year later I salvaged a I/O selectric and that became the
console.
1 year after that built a full boat 8080 CP/M machine, 64K, dual serial
ports, Console was a $200 "Soroc" Glass TTY ( Company name was an anagran of
Coors and the logo looked like the top of a beer can) printer was genuine
Centronis salvaged from a 2650 dev system.
1 year after that went to work for Gary at Digital Research... Did original
BIOS work for CPM86 on the then still Secret IBMPC.
Met Alan Cooper there he had written "Super Sort" and damed if I can remeber
the name a spread sheet program.
Do ya remember Gem and Ventura Publisher?
TI810 printers, PC, XT, AT, Clone Dejour. 2900 Bit slice. Every embedded 8
bit micro you can think of..
24 bit NTSC frame buffers and 3D Flying Logos.
SCO unix. Linux, Quad processor 4GHZ PowerPCs... Intel ZENON...
ARM, MIPS, "System on a Chip" for "Set Top Boxs".
Go here for a good picture of "history"
http://www.acmesi.com/History/index.html
--.- Dave
"Ivan Vegvary" wrote in message
...
How many of you have taken this road? Those that have know what I'm
talking about.
Slide Rule, Marchant, Friden, Monroe, Curta, HP35, HP45, HP67, HP95, Wang,
IBM PC, DOS, IBM XT, $395 for 64K Ram card, VisiCald, Wordstar
modern day PCs and CAD programs.
The above are approximately in order.
Just for fun, I did spend some time with a Soroban (same as Abacus minus
one bead) and could multiply and divide just about as fast as someone with
a hand-crank Monroe.
I think the slide rule should still be taught. It sure gave use the
ability to estimate the order of magnitude of the answer. Ask a kid today
what 100 times 100 is. No clue. Something that's lost today.
Just an old fart reminiscing,
Ivan Vegvary