My first tech device was a Sharp programmable scientific calculator, EL5101 it had 48 yes 48 steps of program storage, and 5 memories. It also had a wonderful LCD display and algebraic logic, eg you could enter expressions like
(1+2)* sin 45 in that order, no more RPN, and that's how it displayed on the screen, and you could recall and edit the command line. It was such a good one that they still make a similar model today, now with more than 1k of memory and just a bit faster. This was before the ZX81 and TRS80's. I used it to program a 2D moon landing game with the real orbital speeds and burn figures, all within 48 steps, calculating horizontal and vertical speeds.... And PDP-11's and VMS, fond memories. Guess where the DIR command came from? My favourite memory is of a PDP-11 that crashed running RT11 which was real fast....the console was on a separate power supply and it had this message on it: ?MON-F-Trap to 4: Power Failure When one of the office fuses blew. How many modern operating systems can diagnose a sudden power cut as they crash? John -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Laurence Bevan Sent: Thursday, 23 March 2006 1:27 p.m. To: 'NZ Borland Developers Group - Delphi List' Subject: RE: [DUG] You say potatoe I say.... Seeing we're all reminescing... My introduction was on NCR 499's in 1981, 4 cassette drives and a mag card reader. Wrote the Council's first word processor on a machine without a screen, even did mail merge! The highlight was when they upgraded the memory to a whopping 32Kb of RAM. You had to write some pretty efficient code to fit in that. Later, in 1985, we upgraded to a NCR 9300 with screens and 10Mb hard drive. In 1988 they added 4 x 20Mb (NOT Gb) removeable hard drives at a cost of $80,000. I had one of the first PC's with dual 8 inch floppies. Remember trying out Windows version 1 from a floppy, took about 3 minutes to load up calculator. My first home computer was a Commodore VIC 20, 3K of RAM and a cassette drive. I won a Commodore software competition by writing a game in assembler (never want to do that again!) and bought my first 5.25" floppy drive for $1000. And you try telling the young people of today that ... and they won't believe you!! Cheers, Laurence Bevan Master Business Systems Ltd P O Box 467 Feilding _______________________________________________ Delphi mailing list [email protected] http://ns3.123.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/delphi __________ NOD32 1.1454 (20060321) Information __________ This message was checked by NOD32 antivirus system. http://www.eset.com _______________________________________________ Delphi mailing list [email protected] http://ns3.123.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/delphi
