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

[John Bird]

BTW I still have that calculator and still use it, I did get the slide
switch fixed a few years ago as it had a bad contact.  All the others I have
seen come and go - Lincoln University gave away their Vax 785 for $1, no
more PDP's - in fact no more Digital, no more Sinclair.  But I still have
the Sharp calculator..

John

-----Original Message-----
From: Matthew Comb [mailto:matt at ferndigital.com] 

Geek :)

> 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
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Delphi mailing list
> Delphi at ns3.123.co.nz http://ns3.123.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/delphi
>
>
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