1 Oct
2007
1 Oct
'07
1:47 p.m.
On 30/09/2007, Zane H. Healy <healyzh at aracnet.com> wrote:
Not knowing the show (and not caring to), my hand-wave
of an
explanation would be the guy had the computer around when he was a
little kid and took it to college with him. He might have written
software for it just for fun.
That's what I did, going up to the University of London in 1985, with
a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K in a full-travel keyboard and a small
black-and-white TV. At first, outside of playing, it did some basic
stats for me. Chi-squared and so on, written in BASIC. A year or so
later, it had a 5.25" floppy drive, a printer port and I was writing
essays on it. This made me painfully cutting-edge for the time; AFAIK
I was the only person in my year to have their own computer.
I also had an account on the college's cluster of twin VAX 11/870s, on
which I learned Fortran (which I thought would be useful, but wasn't)
and things like email and BBSs and comms (which I didn't think would
be useful, but was).
--
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