Old farts and new Linux

Fritz Whittington f.whittington at att.net
Tue May 4 14:45:14 UTC 2004


On or about 2004-05-03 16:14, Don Levey whipped out a trusty #2 pencil 
and scribbled:

>fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com wrote:
>  
>
>>On Mon, 2004-05-03 at 15:58, Charles Curley wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>A bunch of tadpoles on this thread. IBM 360s, PDP-11s, all new
>>>stuff. _I_ worked on the world's first silicon based computers, in a
>>>project on what is now called Salisbury Plain, England, about 5,000
>>>years ago.
>>>
>>>So there.
>>>      
>>>
>>And here I thought that at 36, I was an 'old fart' when it came to
>>playing with computers. By the sounds of it, I'm still wet behind the
>>ears :)
>>
>>I've been doing this since my first computer, a TRS-80 model III
>>(cassette tapes for storage, 48k of ram (that was the upgrade) and
>>hexeditors were my favorite toys).  I was shown linux for the first
>>time by a friend of mine the same day I passed my last mcse exam.
>>I've long since let the mcse lapse and haven't used anything other
>>than linux in years for both desktops and servers.
>>
>>Ron
>>    
>>
>
>I am very much wet behind the ears.
>I started with a TRS-80 model II (with the cassette), along with a PDP-8E
>(paper tape reader).
>I graduated to a PET, and quickly to a Commodore CMB - the big guys had the
>machines with 16K RAM.
>Ah, the days of PEEKS and POKES.
>
>When I got to college, my roommate had a PC, with an external Winchester
>10Mb hard drive.  We figured, at the time, that this would be enough to last
>almost forever.  We were also able to dial into the campus Vax and "chat"
>with people on the other end of the state.
>
>My first machine at home was a dumb terminal, with a 300/1200 baud modem in
>1987.  In 1990 I got my first "real" machine, a 386sx.  Up until then I had
>done BASIC, Fortran, and even COBOL on a TI-990.
>
>But I've only used Linux since 6.1.
>
> -Don
>  
>
The mention of the TI 990 caught my attention.  In 1977 I (thru TI) got 
hooked up with Ken Bowles and the UCSD p-system.   I ended up writing a 
p-code emulator for the TI 990 computer, which (after many alterations) 
became products for the TI 99-4A and the TIPC.   Alas, they never 
produced a lot of revenue.

As another aside,  the TI 990 had, IMHO, the best insrtuctions for 
testing bits in the I/O space of any CPU at the time (or since).

-- 
Fritz Whittington
TI Alum - http://www.tialumni.org

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