First Internet message and ...

[Murray McCullough]

Grumpy Ol' Fred   cisin at xenosoft.com



*Wrote:*



*“More worrisome is that Murray is NOT A "NEWCOMER" who will be "scared off" *

*by corrections of his facts!  This is not the first time that he has *

*needed to be admonished to be VERY specific about what was "FIRST" about *

*something.  He wrote about the exact same event three weeks ago, on the *

*correct date, with much more accurate details, other than calling it "the *

*first inter-computer communication".  Not sure where he got the November *

*21 date, nor the "SIXTY years ago" (probably a simple misteak)*



*He is quite capable of some fairly good writing.  I don't remember any *

*prior time that he had to be reminded to "PICK A TOPIC!" rather than *

*string together eight unrelated concepts into four sentences.*



*On the other hand, if his confusion was recreational, that's OK, too.*

*Let's have a toast with him to the people who got the idea to work, *

*disunirregardless of who was "first".”*





**********  *



  Things we historians talk about are ‘firsts’ and ‘facts’. If we go to
original source(s) maybe then we will get things right. I guess the best
that can be said is we agree to disagree. A sad commentary in this age of
what my ‘facts’ and your ‘facts’ are, are not the same but we historians
should do our best to state ‘firsts’ and ‘facts’ are indeed that to the
best of our knowledge. The 60 yrs. as noted was a math error and here I
spent years as a BASIC, C and C++ programmer as isn’t mathematics the basis
for all programming languages? Let's indeed toast to all micro-computing
progenitors for making our hobby possible.



  I’ve been a hobbyist and experimenter since the 1970s though I worked on
mini-computers(PDP-8/11) in the 1960s. I got to work on them in high
school; I know we were rather privileged.



  For microcomputers it began in April 1978 when I built the Heathkit
H8($2500 Cdn.) a computer based on the PDP-11 with 4K(B) of an 8K(B) card;
now $2500 will buy a truly powerful home computer with 16/32GB of memory.
My second, the Coleco ADAM, computer was Aug. 1984. A bit more powerful and
more useful to be sure. Finally in 1989 I moved into the IBM PC world – the
Compaq Deskpro 386 which ran DOS, Lotus 1-2-3 and Windows 2 that could run
Word and Excel. Wow! Notebooks followed.



  And now(well Aug. 2019 to be precise) I built my own custom Mini-ITX PC
from parts sourced here and there for $750 Cdn. This makes me nostalgic for
the old days of computing we talk about on cctalk.



Happy computing.



Murray  ☺