Quoting Manny <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> On Tue, 31 Aug 2004, Miguel A Paraz wrote:
>
> > So, when was the first time you used Linux? I was using the Ateneo's
>
> A very long time ago (around 1980-81) I got to play on the computer
> system at the Ateneo College. I was using a terminal, and I have no
> idea what OS the large computer was running. but it sorta looked
> like Unix.
In 1979 I was a newly hired assistant instructor at the Mathematics
Department of Ateneo. We had an S-100 box with a Z80 card and 16K ram
card. The machine had a tape drive which accepted regular audio
casette tapes (with a Basic interpreter). There were toggle
switches out front. You wrote your program in Z-80 assembly language,
hand assembled the thing, and used the front toggle switches to
deposit/deposit-next into memory. You read the results of your
computation using the monitor lights of the front panel. Dr. Prof.
Larson and wife Dr. Prof. Hay of University of Illinois (Chicago) were
our teachers of Z80 assembly language, and our text book was a two-
page pop sheet. Of course everyone knows that it was the U.I.Chicago
group that completely catalogued all the finite simple groups, the
first difficult problem in Mathematics that was completely solved in
our lifetime, and the Larson-Hay tandem was teaching us Z80
assembly language because they believed that mathematicians should
know how to program computers, aside from knowing their Group
Theory well.
In 1980-81, Ateneo acquired a Compucorp 625, which had a 5-1/4 in
diskette drive, a paper tape printer, a five-inch screen, 64K ram
and a Z80 processor. And this one had a bootstrap ROM and booted
an OS with a Basic interpreter. It was a glorified single user
calculator that is Basic-programmable. A.Q. Kapauan (son of the
late chemist A.K. Kapauan), Fr. William Kreutz, and myself programmed
the thing using bubble sort to process the Ateneo College entrance
tests for these years
Also at this time (80-81), I was teaching computer programming
(Fortran IV) to Mathematics (MST Math) graduate students of Ateneo,
and the whole class would commute from the Katipunan campus to
TRC in Buendia Ave. extension in Makati, to do our hands on exercises
on the Univac 1100 mainframe there. From our coding forms, the
keypunch operators at TRC would punch IBM cards for our Fortran
programs. We paid by core-block-hour of usage, and our fees would
come up to P5.00 per run per student. We never touched the Univac.
We just looked at it from outside through glass walls.
At this time, Adlai de Pano, fresh from France with an MS degree
in Informatique, started the BS Mathematics, major in Computer
Science.
In 1982-85, Ateneo bought a few Apple II microcomputers
with 5-1/4 in drives, running Apple DOS. We used these
machines for our students of BS Mathamatics, major in Computer
Science, for their UCSD Pascal programming classes. Later, we bought
a room-full of Japanese branded Z-80 microcomputers, running
stand-alone CP/M. These machines had 5-1/4 in floppy drives but
no hard disk. We were running Microsoft Pascal compilers on these
machines. The one-liner program:
PROGRAM HELLO; BEGIN WRITELN("Hello, world!"); END.
took 20-25 minutes, because MS Pascal consisted of several passes
and several intermediate files were written out to disk. Most of
the time was spent on disk i/o. Turbo Pascal, which came very much
later, is heaven, and this one is really hell!
Much later, Ateneo bought a Zilog microcomputer with removable
10-inch 10MB hard disk platters. This was a 4-user system running
multiuser basic.
In 1986, the computer science department of Ateneo moved to
Faura Hall, and acquired SCO Unix for Intel386, running on a network
with a terminal server, and a roomful of Wyse terminals. These
were probably the computers that Manny was talking about.
During this time, we also got various other Unix machines:
a few Suns/M68K, a few DEC Alpha2000, and SGI box, etc.
In 1992-93, I was experimenting on the early releases of Linux
(version 0.99-pl??), and in August 1993, I installed Linux 0.99-pl13
on an 8MB i386/PC at our computer science lab for use in C programming,
over the network, accessible from the Wyse terminals.
In 1994, shortly after ph.net connected UP-Ateneo-DLSU-SanCarlos
to the Net, I registered at the Linux counter.
I am sorry for this long post, but I just thought that this is the time
to put down stuff, before I get too old to remember.
PMana
P.S. My 1968 experiences at the IBM/1620 Fortran II system at
UPLB, using punch cards, will be in another post.
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