Kind of surprised in the longevity of this topic. But then I guess a
lot of us started out in the "stone age"!
First computer (1963) used no electricity as was made by Post and had
a bamboo slide (sliderule, of course). Still have it!
My first exposure (1965) was in college taking a Fortran course and
punching IBM cards at the new computer center that had a CDC3600. A
year later I had a student job at the center handling those cards.
Next, was running a Silent700 terminal on a mainframe at JPL (1971)
and later a dumb terminal on the Univac1108. In 1978 I took a
microprocessor design class at CalPoly Pomona and had a 6502 lab
learning assembly language - what fun!
1982 I actually worked as a programmer (as it was) with a IBM pc,
dual-floppy, 128Kb running DOS and writing A-Basic for a small bush
Alaska phone company. I had no experience and had only the reference
books and manual, so I self-taught myself and produced a program for
the company to download CO data from each village and process it into
a report on subscriber usage.
My first personal computer was the Commodore 64 (1985) and I ran only
one program that displayed ham satellite data. That one croaked
after a couple years when I plugged the 5-pin DIN in crooked and let
the blue screen out!
1996 I joined the "information highway" with a PacBell P100 16Mb,
win95. I added memory to reach 40Mb and it still sits on a dusty
shelf. Since then its been a trail of Dell computers with win2000,
winXP, Vista (ugh), and win8. I even have an ancient IBM Thinkpad
P90 with win95 still in use (runs two DOS-based programs). I still
use the TI-35 calculator I bought in early 1980's.
And I'm not a computer guy. My background is microwave engineering
and two-way radio repair.
73, Ed - KL7UW
http://www.kl7uw.com
"Kits made by KL7UW"
Dubus Mag business:
[email protected]
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