Well, first off, I was born in 1986, so I'm 18. A bit young, but there you
go :)
Let's see.. where to start.. Well, the first computer I actually used was an
Acorn BBC Micro (Master 128 if I remember correctly) in primary school (age 8
or so). I talked to the IT teacher and she let me borrow the manual and some
BBC BASIC guides. At the parent's evening that year she spoke to my mother
and apparently said "Get this kid a computer!". I got a Spectrum +2A fpr ,y
birthday, again with a load of programming books. Wrote a few games, then hit
the limits of the hardware.
A year or so later I had a fairly high end 486SX/25 with 4MB of RAM and a
160MB Conner hard drive, MS DOS 6 and Windows 3.1. I learned QBASIC, then
Visual Basic, then didn't really do much programming until '96, when my uncle
let me borrow his copy of Delphi 1.0 for the weekend (including the manuals).
I learned ObjectPascal from that :)
In '98 or '99 I managed to scrape together enough cash for a 56k modem, then
got an account on Freenet UK - my first internet connection, on a K6-II/450.
All of 56kbits a second. IIRC, I joined classiccmp in 2000 (might have been a
bit later), then joined the MIT PICLIST a few months later. Getting ADSL in
'03 really made the mail downloads go quicker - I've had my own fileserver
running since mid-'02, late-'03, running Linux.
As far as programming skills go - I know C, some C++, x86 assembler, PICmicro
assembler (12, 14 and 16-bit varieties -- PIC12, PIC16 and PIC18 devices),
QBASIC, Visual BASIC (DOS and Windows versions), Pascal and BBC BASIC.
Other hobbies: Well, electronics is the main one. I'm entering the Parallax
(www.parallax.com) SX Design Contest - all being well, I should be able to
get the firmware for my entry stabilised within the next few hours. It's
gonna be a long night! :)
I'm a real tech nut - I won't go anywhere without my Minidisc recorder (Sony
MZ-N710) and my mobile phone (Nokia 6210 or Samsung V200, depending on which
one's charged at the time).
Oh, and I've got a bit of a reputation for destroying hard drives when they
fail. Usually with big drills and hammers. I'd love to see a thermite
reaction melting a defunct IDE hard drive down at some point though :)
Gee, I've just written most of my life story.. maybe I'll put this post
on my website at some point :)
Later.
--
Phil. | Acorn Risc PC600 Mk3, SA202, 64MB, 6GB,
philpem at philpem.me.uk | ViewFinder, 10BaseT Ethernet, 2-slice,
http://www.philpem.me.uk/ | 48xCD, ARCINv6c IDE, SCSI
... I believe I will take this opportunity to remove my ears.
> At the Keeble & Suchat(sp) camera store near Stanford there is
> a guy upstairs (Pro cameras) named Richard. He answered
> the phone: "Professional. Dick speaking."
My mother woked for a time with a certain 'Frank A. Sweet'. He used to
answer the 'phone 'Sweet FA here'. Seriously...
-tony
Mike <kenziem at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> How many variations of LK201 were produced?
> Are they interchangeable?
All LK201s are mechanically, electrically and functionally identical. The
only difference is in keycap engravings. Yours doesn't work because there
is something wrong with the keyboard or the terminal, not because it's
different.
MS
> 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
OK, I'm 37.
I've been interested in electronics for as long as I can remember, I
built my first transsitor radio about 32 years ago. I've never really
been interested in programming/software, I'm very much the hardware type.
The fact that computers are interesting pieces of heardware is why I
collect, restore, etc them. This might explain why I like to keep the
hardware of my machines as original as possible, even for things like
power supplies. The power supply _was_ part of the original design, it
should be preserved (and if you think all SMPSUs are the same, then, boy,
have I got news for you...)
My first computer (not suprisingly) was a Sinclair -- in my case an MK14.
That put me how his designs for life. I've used some of the others, I've
never found one I consider to be even moderately well-designed.
I then got a TRS-80 Model 1, used Beebs and RML380Zs at school and fooled
around with some other micros. Then I went to university and picked up the
Philips P850. Chatting to a friend about it that night (this was some 19
years ago), we realiased that unless something was done -- and fast -- a
lot of computer history was going to be lost for ever. At the time,
museums were not bothering to preserve common micros and minis. So we did
something about it. We (I suspect particularly me) started collecting
everything we could get our grubby little hands on. The rest, as they say,
is history...
-tony
So far the list looks ok, and I'm going through all the classiccmp related
websites and getting them up now.
I have noticed that the new server seems to be very slow in delivering posts
compared to the old server. This doesn't make a lot of sense, given the old
server was a 1.2 P3 and the new server is a 2.0 P4. Go figure. However,
since it seems to be working, I'm going to continue with the website
migration and complete that. Then I'll turn back to the mailing list and
find out why it's running slow, and, then finally start the work on the
archives.
Regards,
Jay West
[quote]
Looking to possibly sell - will send pictures.
- I have a very unusual collection of 4 mainframe face
panels (1410 - 360/40 - 370/145 - 370/158) and 14
control unit boxes that have nothing inside of them, I
am thinking of selling them. I was in the computer
service arena for 30 years.
Thank You for your assistance-
Dennis Correll
correll at mwt.net
[unquote]
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>
> I have to wonder if any mini or microcomputer family was ever NOT involved
> with running a model railroad.
I've never heard of a PERQ or a Philips P800 series being used for that.
Perhaps I should remedy it :-)
-tony
> After French took over the RCA, they started putting weird location
> marks: It goes like this: LL005 for fly, TL00x for transistor in
> horizontal, TV00x for video transistor amps. So on. Totally
That second character 'L' might well stand for 'line' which is the
conventioal name for the hoprizontal deflection system over here. We talk
abvout the 'line output trnasistor' where you'd say 'HOT'.
Were the transistors in the vertical stages called 'TF00x'? 'F' being
'frame' or 'field' depending on how old you are.
-tony
>
> Tony (and others),
>
> I wonder people (including members on this list) who use the justification,
> that because they (generally) choose to use old hardware that it is a valid
FWOW. I don't 'choose to use old hardware' I use what I consider to be
the best solution I can get (and afford). That does not mean the latest,
it doesn't necessarily mean the oldest.
I do however refuse to use anything I can't fully understand and/or
maintain. This does, alas, rule out much modern computer hardware...
> reason for not making use of features that are available on even mildly
> modern hardware.
>
> Should movie producers ONLY produce black and white movies because some
> people only have B/W sets?
_VERY_ bad example. All the colour TV stardards were designed to be
'both ways compatible' That is, a colour TV had to be able to correctly
display a B&W signal (this was the easy way, since the set could be
designed to detect the lack of colour information (the 'colour killer'
circuit) and respond accordingly). And also an unmodified B&W TV had to
be able to produce a good (albeit B&W) picture from a colour signal.
People with B&W TVs did not lose out when colour TV signals came along.
THey could still watch them, and get pictures like they'd always got.
> Should newspapers and magazines only use one color, one font, etc because
Interestingly, I stoppd reading one magazine when they started prinitng
in colour. The schematic diagrams printed over 'interesting' coloured
backgrounds gave me a headache. I think others felt likewise, the
magazine stoped being published not long afterwarrds...
Of the magazines I read, the one that could most benefit from colour
would be 'Clocks' (a magazine for people interested in real, mechanical
timepieces). And amazingly it's the one with the fewest colour pages per
issue...
> Just because my PDP-8 can't video conference or interact with my whiteboard,
> doesn't mean I shouldn't use them. It would have been quite convient if I
> there had been someone here on the list I could have interactively done
> video with while I was tring to repair my ASR-33's [my mechanical skills are
> limited = klutz]. Ever try to exactly explain what you are seeing when the
> lever jam between the typing unit and the underside of the keycboard in
> plain ascii?
Yes!. You get the partsbook -- I get it off the bookshelf, you download
it from bitsavers (I think) and print it. You then say something like
'Lever 12345 under the carriage is not moving forwards when...' And I say
something like 'Check spring 45321 on the same diagram'.
-tony
>
> >If you can get any colour other than green (and black, I guess) out of an
> >unmodified IBM 5151 monitor, I will eat a classic computer!
>
> If you connect it to a high voltage source, maybe you will get a brief
> flash of yellow orange, red (and maybe blue) out of the back... followed
> by some puffs of grey out the top.
Maybe... If you apply the HV to the mains connector, I suspect the only
thing that would fail would be the fuse (the 5151 has a linear PSU with a
nice fat mains transformer at the input).
If you apply it to the signal cable, well, it'll probably take out the
input buffer chip (a '04 IIRC, I can't be bothered to go and get the
schematics). Maybe some smoke. I doubt you'd get many interesting effects
though.
In any case, the monitor is not unchanged at the end, so I would class
that as a modification :-)
-tony
