What is your net age?

[perry]

Oh, and for those who wonder about "computer" age:

My first real use of computers was in the late 1970''s. One of the things I did was program IBM wireboards (you plugged in wires from point to point on a large electronic based circuit card to sequence how the data was sorted or stored). This was in the days of punch-cards.

I have written programs on punch cards - and know the horrors of dropping your deck and getting the cards mixed up.

I remember the great advancement of being able to write a program on a screen - and storing it via real to real tape.

On the home computer side; I first entered that when 8K home computers were on the market; and you stored your programs and data on cassette tapes.

I was writing amature game programs for use by the other students on campus when we moved to 16 K home computers. Wow, what space and freedom to program.

I wish I had copies of some of the games I wrote.

I remember working on systems before MS-DOS existed (and how much of a kludge MS-DOS was compared to TRSDOS). Most people do not know that Radio Shack owned the desktop business world market for some time... and it was Radio Shack that IBM was targeting when they introduced the PC that made Bill Gates famous because he sold a program to IBM for the operating system - while maintaining the rights to independently market the program himself to other computer MFRs.

Apple also had a very good DOS system (pre-mac) and owned the educational PC market.

Lots of memories; lots of things I''ve forgotten.

Perry

 

[strmrdr]

I started programing on a trash80 while in middle school around 84.
The got out of it for a while then in college worked on 8086s too the component level. (EET degree)
Learned assembly both micro(z-80 I think) and 8086.
That is best forgotten!
Played around on other peoples systems after that off and on.
Then got back into it in 94 and on the net in 95.
In 96 I was a global ircop on a large irc network, after having someone try and carry out a death threat in 97 I got out of it in late 98.
Went pro in 1999 mostly doing workstations and quickly moved to networks and servers.

 

[Linda W]

Skippy,

I remember punch cards with a computer, my uncle had one of those.

My first job out of high school, we didn''t have computers. We had what was called a Dura machne. I had to type an original letter on a tape the punched out the letters. Then it ran through a machine that typed out multiple letters.

EGAD, I am an old timer. HA!!!

Linda

 

[perry]

Date: 5/3/2008 1:55:14 PM
Author: strmrdr
I started programing on a trash80 while in middle school around 84.

The got out of it for a while then in college worked on 8086s too the component level. (EET degree)

Learned assembly both micro(z-80 I think) and 8086.

That is best forgotten!

Played around on other peoples systems after that off and on.

Then got back into it in 94 and on the net in 95.

In 96 I was a global ircop on a large irc network, after having someone try and carry out a death threat in 97 I got out of it in late 98.

Went pro in 1999 mostly doing workstations and quickly moved to networks and servers.

I too remember assembly language...

I owned a Trash 80 mod 2; which was the first computer I purchased for myself (I used other peoples computers up to then). Two floppy disk drives.... (and I think 64K) It was the absolute latest and best. I still have fond memories of the word processing program - it was heads and tails above anything else out there at the time.

The printer (dot matrix) came with a roll of paper - or could do sprocket feed of paper.

Storm; overall, it sounds like you were just getting into things as I was starting to tune out on the programming level. Other than some dial up stuff; for the most part after the Trash 80 - which I think lasted me to about 1988 when I replaced it with some portable TRS product; was the last time I did much work in programming. After that I was more into using computers to do work instead of writing programs and troubleshooting.

I was the computer guru at the first power plant job out of college though. The company purchased the first IBM PC. It had a 20 meg hard-drive. I got to set it up and program it for everything - and help everyone else at the plant with it. I had a better word processing program on my own Trash 80 though.

Do have a great day,

Perry