> Even better is when you get so well known locally that people bring stuff
> you! Someone gave brought me a big box of stuff pulled out of an old
My father came home one day (before he retired) and said 'Is a DEC PRO350
of any interest'. Of course I replied in the affirmative to which he said
'OK, there's one in the back of the car for you'. I then received a
_loaded_ PRO 350 (it even has an ethernet card in it...), a VR241
monitor, keyboard and the proper desk for it with the motorised column
for the monitor.....
-tony
> > That's fine, because if you play your cards right you'll most likely end
> > up out-living most of us here and then you can piss on all our graves.
> >
> It could be interesting to know the age"spread" of thist list contributors,
> and how long we've had the computer virus under our skin.
> I myself turn 60 next time, and have been in this business sinc 1967 or so,
> where I got a Cobol course as an "education by mail" (dont know the correct
> english term for that one
>
> Nico
~52.
Started as a radio apprentice in 1969 and the course included digital
(tube) logic, etc. ~1976 Paid for a short course in EduBasic on a
PDP8, then opened a commercial account at Control Data to get access
to processor time (Kronos and Scope). In those days you were taken
into the store room and you walked out with whatever manual took your
fancy. Best investment I ever made, didn't cost to open the account,
just paid for usage. Played with BASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN, Athena, etc.
Won't bore you with the rest
Regards,
Garry
> It could be interesting to know the age"spread" of this list contributors,
> and how long we've had the computer virus under our skin.
1960; Been keenly interested in electronic and technical things for as far
back as I can recall ... As a child I spent all my time "building things",
but didn't really get exposed to computers until the mid-70s when I fell in
love with an IBM 370 (See below)...
First computer of my own was a homebuilt 8080, followed closely by an Altair
8800 (which I still have). Long and highly varied list of machines follow,
including several more homebuilts. Never an "appliance operator", I always
used the machines as a creative outlet. Always been interested in low-level
and systems type aspects, designed my own interfaces, wrote my own operating
systems and development tools - still use mostly my own software, although I
have a couple systems configured with winblows for "when I really have to".
Pretty much the same story professionally, worked for various high-tech
companies, got caught up in it for a while - did a few "salvage jobs" where
I was came in to "rescue" a project after "the team" had spent all the money
and had little to show for it, eventually became a director at one of the
major telecom players ... at which point I realized I was rapidly leaving
the relm of "hands on", so I stepped off the ladder. Turned my hobby into a
business, and I've been hawking my embedded systems software development tools
and contract services for the past 15+ years... (and being much happier for it).
Regards,
Dave
---- (below) ----
For those who didn't experience IBM mainframes - IBM was not always just another
player in the "me to" Wintel market - in the 70's, they were one of the major
forces in the computing industry, and to our university computer center which
was built around the IBM mainframe, at times they seemed like denizens of
Mount Olympus. Here are a couple of my "favorite IBM moments" from that era:
----
At the University of New Brunswick, we had mostly serial TTY terminals, however
at one point they brought in five IBM 3270s which were set up at one end of the
user access area. The idea of being able to "instantly" write an entire screen
page was really cool, and in short order I wrote a "tank game" where multiple
people could enter a virtual maze and shoot at one another, which pretty much
realtime updates of the visible maze and other players. It was very popular, but
due to a bug somewhere in the system, it had the undesired effect of crashing the
entire mainframe. (They had a "traffic light" in the access room, which would show
Green when the system was up and running, Red when it was down, and Yellow if it
was scheduled to be taken down shortly. Invariably, a short while after a couple
of people started up my game, all the TTYs in the area would stop responding and
shortly after that the light would switch to red).
My "favorite moment" came one Sunday morning, when the computing center announced
that the system would be unavailable for the day (a very rare occurance) - I came
in to see what they were up to, and found the access room empty except for 5 guys
>from IBM, complete with suits, ties and briefcases - sitting at the 3270 cluster.
Four of them were playing my game (and making some favorable comments), while the
fifth guy was madly running diagnostics, scrolling through dumps and generally
trying to figure out what going wrong - they did find it, and after that my game
no longer crashed the system (although it still cost a small fortune in processor
time to play it!).
----
Fairly early in my career, I worked on developemnt software for a 6809 based test
system at Mitel - this had a CPU/RAM card, and various interface cards. One of the
hardware engineers had designed a floppy disk controller for it, however software
support consisted of a monitor program with commands to read and write tracks/memory.
On my own time, I wrote a decent multitasking operating system and disk file system
for it, and when I demonstrated it, the company formed a new devision to develop
this "advanced test system" - I was in charge of the operating system, languages
and development software ... We ended up selling quite a few of these to IBM, and
having been launched on my path by my experiences with IBM MVS, I took great pleasure
in the thought that they had bought and used *my* operating system (yeah, I know -
to them it was just a piece of test equipment... but at the time it was a "favorite
moment").
--
dave04a (at) Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com Collector of vintage computing equipment:
http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html
Nico de Jong wrote:
> It could be interesting to know the age"spread" of thist list contributors,
> and how long we've had the computer virus under our skin.
I'm 31, born in 1973, and I've been into electronics since I was about 6
or 7, and computers not long after. First computer was a ZX81, then a
48k Spectrum, then a string of relatively unusual kit bought by my Dad's
boss for various datalogging projects and subsequently discarded.
AIM65, Epson HX-20, stuff like that.
Among one pile of bits was a manual for a Sinclair MK14 - attempted to
write an emulator on the Speccy in machine code, but didn't get very
far. Subsequently wrote one in Turbo Pascal on an Amstrad PCW8256 -
very slow, but it worked!
Currently I've got various PCs and Macs, an Altos 386, IBM Workpad Z50
(not strictly speaking a classic but unusual enough to be nearly
on-topic), various Psions, a Sanyo MBC-4050 (the one mentioned on this
list, picked up from a guy literally 2 minutes up the road from me!), oh
- and the PDP11 that has been the source of so many of my postings recently!
Gordon.
Jay,
I think there is a problem, at least with the list. I had problems with my
email server (randy at s100-manuals.com), I changed it to cctalk at randy482.com.
I just started sending back to my s100-manuals.com account.
I canceled my subscription again (for randy at s100-manuals.com).
I also subscribed to cctech with my randy482.com.
If that fixes it I'll let you know.
Randy
> > There is a certain etiquette in place when talking on the telephone, right?
> > Most of us say "Hello" at the beginning, "ByeBye" and the end, and engage
>
> Do we? I answer with, "What the hell do you want?", or if I'm feeling
> nice, "This had better be good." However, I always end with, "Don't ever
> call here again, you freak!"
Please remind me not to bother calling you when I find a pile of Apple
1's 'Free to a good home' ....
-tony
I myself am 23 (I'm probably one of the youngest members here), born
1981. I guess you could say that I'm a second generation classic
computer user.
Anyhow, I cut my teeth on an Osborne 1 that my dad owned (that he hooked
up on old Amdek B&W monochrome monitor to), as well as the Apple //e &
//e platinums at primary/elementary school. After that it was primarily
PCs from there on (what can I say, I was the generation that got
corrupted at an early age!). It remained that way until 1998 when I was
given a Commodore 64C (which I still have and has been heavily expanded
since then), and now, well, have a look at my collection now! ;)
David M. Vohs
Digital Archaeologist & Computer Historian
Computer Collection:
"Triumph": Commodore 64, 1802, 1541, Indus GT, FDD-1, GeoRAM 512, MPS-801.
"Leela": Original Apple Macintosh, Imagewriter II.
"Delorean": TI-99/4A, TI Speech Synthesizer.
"Spectrum": Tandy Color Computer III.
"Monolith": Apple Macintosh Portable.
"Boombox": Sharp PC-7000.
"Butterfly": Tandy 200, PDD-2.
"Shapeshifter": Epson QX-10, Comrex HDD, Titan graphics/MS-DOS board.
"Scout": Otrona Attache.
(prospective) "Pioneer": Apple LISA II.
"TMA-1": Atari Portfolio, Memory Expander +
"Centaur": Commodore Amiga 2000.
"Neon": Zenith Minisport.
> It could be interesting to know the age"spread" of thist list
> contributors,
> and how long we've had the computer virus under our skin.
I'll be 47 in a couple months. I never saw a computer until I
went to college in 1976 and met a PDP-11/40 running RSTS/E. I
lived on the computer for the next 3 years until it interfered
with my grades and I had to spend time on classes instead. I
got a programming job in 1981 in RPG on an IBM S/34 immediately
after college and have been doing software development ever
since, on IBM mainframes (COBOL, CICS, Assembler, ADS/O, etc),
PCs (Basic, C, MASM, OS/2 PM, Visual Basic, IIS based web
development), primarily Microsoft platforms, taking occasional
breaks from programming to dabble in the management side of
things and fly around the country doing requirements studies,
marketing, training, etc. I always tire of corporate management
and politics after a few years and get back into the programming
side of things until they twist my arm and talk me back into
management stuff again. I've been in this cycle of management/
technical flip/flop since about 1986. For the past 20 years
I've been involved in development of software for the insurance
industry.
Ashley
What a mix, right?
First the AIX stuff. v2.2.1, definitely on-topic. My RT has been
laid up with a failing IDE disk for a while. The E70s that it came with
were serious junk, and near death. I now have a couple of Maxtor ESDI
disks to play with, and I also found a 1.2GB Medalist that should work
in it with the IDE/floppy controller that's presently in it. For
power/BTU reasons I'll go with IDE if possible.
The problem is that the AIX floppy images are no longer on the
dementia.org FTP site, and I've stupidly lost my archive of them. Does
anybody happen to have them stashed away? Floppy images are nice, or I
have the sort-of-SCSI 1/4" tape streamer and adapter too.
For whatever it's worth, my company is an AIX software and services
partner. That means I can legally have any version of AIX needed to do
or to properly research my work. :)
While I'm at it, does anybody have an RT mouse they don't want, or a
Matrox graphics adapter?
On to Amiga UNIX. The little information I can find about
installation (see rant below) says that the original v2.x requires a
Commodore 3070 tape drive, which is an Archive Viper-150 in an external
enclosure. I don't have an Archive drive, but I do have an
IBM-firmwared Tandberg TDC 3600 an a Sun-firmwared TDC 4220, both of
which are QIC-150 compatible.
The first question is whether AMIX looks for Commodore firmware on
the tape drive, or will any 150MB quarter-inch drive work?
The second question is whether install media for AMIX v1.x exists in
downloadable form?
<rant>
Somebody mentioned "more appropriate fora for discussion" the other
day. Well, the only active AMIX forum seems to be a freakin' MSN Group.
Since I don't have and don't EVER want an MSN .Net Passport, I don't
get to play there.
Do they think all the world is already owned by MSN?
</rant>
Doc
Born 5/16/48
Computing History:
Monroe programmable calculator (H.S. Math/programming class) punch-card
input/ impact printer out
HP2100 batch system (H.S. field trip to local university Engineering
department)
Nova?? based Basic Timeshare (H.S. Field Trip to university Business
department)
Poly88 Kit built owned
HP41C (traded for poly, was a better fit for my US navy life)
Ohio Scientific board - never finished (left it on the ship on leaving
navy - oops)
Commodore 64.
Macintosh
VAX 11/780 at work VMS 3.x
same Macintosh upgraded to fat mac
IBM PC/AT clone (televideo color 10mb)
Ran BBS on above after replacing it with newer PC.
Macintosh SE
Mac Powerbook 170
Various IBM clones running win31, Win95 and Win98
Current:
Macintosh iBook OSx
Windows98 Laptop (toshiba)
Linux redhat 7.3 laptop (IBM)
