On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 10:53 PM, Carlos E Murillo-Sanchez via cctalk < cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 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... > Don't get me wrong. Like you I learned a lot due to all the variety of differing machines that were available in the market early on. From a business perspective I don't think it made a lot of sense however to have so many internally competing models. Of course then, I guess you could argue that Atari probably had the most cohesive set of computers, but that didn't necessarily translate to great success. I guess that did mostly work for Apple with the II line, save for the major III distraction.