Mark Schoonover wrote:
On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 9:53 PM, Doug LaRue <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
** Reply to message from "Mark Schoonover" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on Wed,
7 May 2008 21:01:30 -0700
> I do remember seeing
> FreeBSD around 1992ish, and going further back, I did get some
> exposure to SunOS around 1990-1991 on a Sparc I.
all the talk about floppies makes me wonder why you guys didn't have
CDROMs in the mid 90s. Sure I've still got something like 30 floppies
I don't think Slack came on CDs in that time frame, I really don't
remember that much about it. Probably remember the floppies the most
because of all the time it took to create them, then find out part way
through install that one was bad and have to start all over.
of Concensus UNIX from around 1990/1991 but shortly after CDs were it.
I think I still have my Yggdrasil CD from around 92/93 somewhere around
here. Man, those were the days. Hacking a 386/40 by soldering on new
L2 cache chips and running multi-user with rs232 VTs on that bitch'n 32bit
system.
I think the most fun I had with a computer was with my Vic20. I did
weed abatement for the City of Vacaville, and saved all summer to buy
it. My dad was pretty pissed that I spent that much money, but boy I
had fun creating games and graphics. Even turned it into a morse code
memory keyer, and hooked it up to a 1950s Hallicrafters HT32B tube
transmitter. Had to leave the Vic20 running all the time because I
couldn't afford the tape player to save my programs...
My first personally owned computer was the KIM-1 with 8 KiB memory, a
16-key pad for input and six nine-segment leds for output display ...
and I was able to play chess or Dungeons and Dragons on it. It stored
programs on audio cassettes and many of them took over twenty minutes to
load. The VIC-20 came along several years later. I was working for the
Panama Canal Commission at the time.
Sorry, the magnetic core memory days predate me but I've seen some and
they looked really cool.
I had a chance when I was in the Navy to look inside a core machine. I
was in morse code school for the Navy and we used it as our trainer.
Could support 50 students at a time, up to 35 WPM. Looked like two
refrigerators sitting side by side... Those were the days of PDP11s
too, circa 1987...
In 1963, when I was sent to St. Paul, Minnesota, for classes in
repairing the military computers we were going to use on board
submarines, I got a tour of the Univac factory there and got to watch
the cores being manufactured. Sometimes those microscopic little ferrite
cores would break. Then the machine had to be unwired part of the way, a
new core inserted and the wiring re-done. Errors were frequent but when
they were done they were sealed up so nobody would have to look at the
core wiring again. It was tedious, painstaking work with constant
testing, work that only human hands could do. That's why memory was
expensive.
James
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