W2HX via cctalk wrote:
The first personal computer I ever came in contact with was the TRS-80 Model 1
(Level II) at a friend of my father's in Long Island around 1979. I learned to
program basic at his house and practiced during the summer at my junior high
school that had a few Model 1's for kids to work with. The school let me come
in and play.
With my Bar Mitzvah money in 1980 I bought my first computer, TRS-80 model III
(I think it cost me $1200). I learned a LOT on that machine. I belonged to
LICA (long island computer association) and one of the guys there operated a
TRS-80 business computer. I can't remember what model, (II, 12, 16, etc) but it
ran Xenix. He had 2 modems and two phone lines at his house connected to it and
granted access to club members. I built a micromint 300 baud acoustic coupler
kit, connected my TRS-80 Model III to the phone and over to his Xenix machine.
I was hooked and learn a LOT about *nix style operating systems spending HOURS
tying up the only phone line in our house connected to it. Really formative
years for me.
When I left for college, I brought with me the TRS-80 4P. Nice little machine,
did all my papers on it.
All that "fragmentation" to me was wonderful. Different models, different
capabilities it was magical!
73 Eugene W2HX
I see that the actual fragmentation is about how each and everyone got
in touch with computers, personal or mainframe or whatever! Me, I was in
junior high and usually understood everything in the math class by the
first 15 minutes, after which I would become restless (bored) and the
teacher would send me several buildings away to inquire about the room
temperature of the computer room, which hosted an HP3000 system with
several terminals (that included primitive graphics capabilities via
serial connection!). It was 1978, and I learned BASIC right there.
Afterwards, it was Apple II and their Franklin clones as a freshman,
running UCSD Pascal... in 1982. Later it was the Z80 card in the same
computers, running CPM, but just for the sake of using the Z80 assembler
tools. And we were using also the said Apple II to impersonate card
readers that would send jobs to the IBM 4381, as a sophomore... My dad
bought me an HP71B calculator in 1984, and that really was when my
numerical math skills progressed. I still do that for a living. And
the height of my BS years... getting to run MATLAB in an IBM-AT with a
math co-processor. Later, as a teacher, getting my first BITNET email
account in 1987, learning XENIX, wiring phonenet for the Mac network at
the university, then as a grad student (1989) using VAX machines at
UW-Madison, but also Apollo machines, Sun 4/50 machines, and HP-300
machines... and in1990, I telnet-ed to UCSD to run jobs in a Cray at
UCSD... whoa, such memories...
Carlos.
