On 12/05/14 00:50, The Wanderer wrote: > On 05/11/2014 10:41 AM, Steve Litt wrote: > >> On Sun, 11 May 2014 15:13:21 +0900 Joel Rees <joel.r...@gmail.com> >> wrote: > >>> On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 10:03 AM, Joshua Anthony >>> <janf...@yahoo.com.au> wrote: > >>>> I confess to much ignorance of technical detail - despite 45 >>>> years as a computer support engineer, programmer and technical >>>> writer, I still find a lot of stuff hard to grasp. ie. I am old >>>> and lazy and think GUI is a gift from heaven. So would you, if >>>> you'd started out punching ten words of machine code onto paper >>>> tape in order to start up a mainframe system - long before there >>>> was any form of visual display. >>> >>> Hey can we start one of those those threads? I think the >>> teletype/paper tape terminal we used in high school to interface >>> with the IMSAI box we built. (Much gratitude to a teacher who used >>> a lot of his own money to make that possible for us.) So you've got >>> me beat by about ten years. But, yeah, Univac 1100 with punched >>> card readers and less main memory than my M6800 prototyping board, >>> my first year in the community college's EDP courses. IBM System 34 >>> at my summer job. > >> Oh, there we go! I was late to the party, so my first computer was a >> Heathkit ET6800 Microprocessor Trainer: > >> http://www.troubleshooters.com/lpm/200610/200610.htm#_Computers_Ive_Known_and_Loved > > The first computer I remember actually using was either an Apple //c or > a blocky integrated-monochrome-monitor Macintosh. > > Unless you count my few and poor attempts (at an age not above, and > probably fairly low in, the single digits) to play video games on what > amounts, in modern terms, to a Texas Instruments video-game console. I > don't recall what it was called, but I believe it was cartridge-based... > > I didn't get into computers far enough to know any of the details of > what I was working with until much later, sometime in the early oughts. > > >
I grew up in a house/garage full of computers. I learnt my times tables on punch cards. My father put the question on one side for me, and the answer on the other (for him). Apparently they still worked fine - as long as he kept the order right. My first computer was a hand-me-down, had no keyboard or monitor - just a row of switches and the most interesting thing it could do was play bad (static) music on a nearby radio. My first new, personal computer was an IBM PS/2 50Z, reluctantly parted with, like the rest of my PS/2 collection in the "big clean-up" some years ago (sob). Bought with several paychecks from my part-time job as a tape librarian working with much bigger IBM iron (much of which is still in production, as is the code). Kind regards -- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/536f9332.1000...@gmail.com