Hi Jeff, Thank you for typing exactly what I felt.
I love our small Model 100 community - It was literally my first computer that I brought with my own money. Actually, I think that I will share my story as long as nobody minds. It was probably sometime around 1983. I spent much of my life, like other teenagers at the time, at my local computer shop. There was kind of a community there, and I loved playing with the hardware. They sold Toshiba machines that were IBM clones, as well as MSX gaming systems. I was 17 years old and studying Mechanical Engineering at school. I also used to hang out at the local Tandy shop, but they were never as accommodating as the Toshiba shop. I was pretty good at interfacing their computers to various printers and modems. I understood RS232 - or at least knew that the data was on pins 2 and 3, and if you tied 4,5 and 6, as well as 8 and 20, any computer will spit out data and people were amazed when their little printers just worked. One day, a scientist from the Australian National University came in asking if they could help with interfacing their Toshiba T300 to a Microplate reader. I put my hand up and met Dr Ken Reid a couple of days later at his laboratory in the Department of Biochemistry. The Microplate Reader was an interesting device - it used a series of stepper motors that moved a sample plate containing 96 individual cells across the X and Y axis shining a light through the samples one at a time and returning a value for the amount of light returned. It didn't take long to make the required custom cable and we were moving the plate to whatever co-ordinates we needed as well as reading the transmission levels using a simple BASIC program. Dr Reid was quite startled with my ability to write programs and work with the computer, so he asked if I could help with writing the software that could analyse the plates. I spoke to my parents and Dad negotiated with Dr Reid to pay me Technical Officers' pay rate for the 2 weeks it would take to write. We had a T300 at home, so I could write software day and night, and at the end of the project, I came up with a basic program that could read a plate, create a series of graph of the results (T300 basic had beautiful graphics routines), and output raw numbers to a text file so they could be read into Excel. In all, the project was a tremendous success. At the end of it, I was paid $600 for the work. As soon as I had the cheque from the ANU, mum and I went to the Tandy shop, and it took some convincing for the shopkeeper to believe that I actually wanted to buy the Model 100 there - I left with my own M100, with my OWN money. And that was the tool for so much more interfacing work that I did for the next 10 years. Only a year or so later did I get a job at the ANU, at the Research School of Physical Sciences, as a Trainee Technical Officer. I transferred from mechanical engineering to electronics engineering and the rest is literally history. All because I had a knack for getting things to talk to each other. I still have that M100 - it is fully kitted out with 32K ram, and has the onboard direct connect modem modified for Australian CCITT tones :-) That's another story, involving a misspent youth with left telephones and BBS machines, and computers I should not have been playing with - But you have to ground a career in Information Security somehow :-) Kindest regards, Doug Jackson em: d...@doughq.com ph: 0414 986878 Check out my awesome clocks at www.dougswordclocks.com Follow my amateur radio adventures at vk1zdj.net ----------------------------------------------------------- Just like an old fashioned letter, this email and any files transmitted with it should probably be treated as confidential and intended solely for your own use. Please note that any interesting spelling is usually my own and may have been caused by fat thumbs on a tiny tiny keyboard. Should any part of this message prove to be useful in the event of the imminent Zombie Apocalypse then the sender bears no personal, legal, or moral responsibility for any outcome resulting from its usage unless the result of said usage is the unlikely defeat of the Zombie Hordes in which case the sender takes full credit without any theoretical or actual legal liability. :-) Be nice to your parents. Go outside and do something awesome - Draw, paint, walk, setup a radio station, go fishing or sailing - just do something that makes you happy. ^G ^G ^G ^G ^G ^G ^G ^G- In more laid back days this line would literally sing ^G ^G ^G ^G ^G ^G ^G ^G On Tue, 27 Apr 2021 at 08:14, Jeffrey Birt <bir...@soigeneris.com> wrote: > >> There are plenty of places on the Internet where you can discuss your > ignorant beliefs. > This is not the place. > > Nor is this a place for personal insults... > > Jeff Birt > > -----Original Message----- > From: M100 <m100-boun...@lists.bitchin100.com> On Behalf Of Robert J. > Hutchins > Sent: Monday, April 26, 2021 4:49 PM > To: m...@bitchin100.com > Subject: Re: [M100] Happy Earth Day from my M100 > > I think if you are unable to behave, you should leave this board. Please > keep the politics out of this space. > There are plenty of places on the Internet where you can discuss your > ignorant beliefs. > This is not the place. > > > > >
