Age

Late to the game. I always seem to get postings somewhat after others, as evidenced by seeing the originals along with most of the responses, in one batch. 1965. Got interested in ham radio in about 1972 when my father revisited that briefly, but didn't get licensed then. A school field trip in 1974 or 1975 was my first hands on -- the University of Nebraska had a machine running some variant of Spacewar (says my current knowledge), and I got to play for about 20 seconds until I got killed. I remember seeing an ad in an airline magazine in late 1975 for some machine whose identity I can't recall -- looked like an early PET (says my current knowledge again) with chiclet-style keys. Wanted it badly, but couldn't convince the parents to buy it. I didn't actually get to use a machine for real until about 1980. First real exposure was a programming class in high school -- fortran on punched cards, using the Michigan State University CDC 6500. (Anyone having a line on a copy of MSU's SCOPE/HUSTLER O/S, please let me know.) I subsequently funded my own time on that machine. Or maybe they were running most of the jobs on the 750 by then. About 6 months later, a TRS-80 model III came home, and I taught myself BASIC out of the manual over Christmas break. When my parents went overseas again in 1981, we had e-mail through The Source. I talked the school into letting me use their printing terminal (on site for some career exploration service) to dial in. Much concern over long distance telephone calls. :-) When I went to college, I bought an Osborne 1, blue, single density floppies, which I still own. [I should get that out.] Got an Epson MX-80 with graftrax, and a 1200 baud honest-to-god Hayes smartmodem too. One of the roommates wasn't impressed with the keystroke noise; another didn't like the fact that the modem auto-answered the phone one day. (I was playing with the idea of BBS software, and had gone to a terminal room to dial back into it.) I took COBOL (on cards), pascal and VAX assembler (on a VAX 780 running VMS 3.x), and 6502 assembler on 8032 and fat-40 CBM machines at the local community college. At the university, I got a student job supporting and expanding a menu-driven system which delivered horticultural info to growers statewide. It ran on PDP-11 gear, and when I first started, was running v6 unix. They upgraded to v7 while I was there. When I visited my family overseas, the project computer guys let me into their VM-370 machine, a 4331, and a DG (model? ran AOS-VS). I wheedled my way into a SAS class there too. The office machines were Vector Graphics S-100 machines, which was my first round at CP/M. I used to help the secretaries get Memorite to work, solve floppy problems, etc. One of the machines had a real ST-506 hard disk. The problem immediately became how to structure files on it so that they could find things. 10 MB, whee. Or was it 5? Later, I got a real job "over there", and managed a VAX 730 (VMS), and wrote some COBOL code for it and a 750. After struggling in college for a couple of years, I took some time off and got a job doing tech support on hardware and OS stuff, working on Prime superminis. On a work trip I stopped to see some friends; a fellow who was a grad student at Berkeley showed off a Sun workstation; shame I didn't get to play on it! The employer subsequently considered porting the application to VAXen, so a MicroVAX came to visit the office for a while, and later I was mailed off to Marlborough to benchmark on some of the bigger machines. Somewhere about 1986 I bought an SB-180, which I still have, and it was my main machine for several years. [Should get this out too.] I was lucky enough to get to test a Telebit Trailblazer from home for a fairly extended period of time. In late 1988 I bought my first PC, an NEC 386SX/16. Later, I spent time on AIX machines. I was the first sysadmin for the campus gopher and web services at MSU, hosted on an RS/6000. Picked up perl programming to help with document conversion and mounting at this point. I looked at early Linux, but first installed it and ran it for real in the 0.9 range; still using it on my desktops everywhere. Finally got my ham license in 1995, and am firmly resisting tube gear, since I have these other historical interests. (Ok, ok, so I got hooked on Moto Syntor X radios instead.) Most of the rest is too new to be "on topic". :-) It's also mostly boring by list standards. If there's a gathering in Dayton, I'd love to come along. ^[[145q De