[DUG] You say potatoe I say....

[John Bird]

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: delphi-bounces at ns3.123.co.nz [mailto:delphi-bounces at ns3.123.co.nz] 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


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