"Wayne.B" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 30 Oct 2007 01:29:17 GMT, Short Wave Sportfishing
wrote:

Proably the most fun computer was the VIC-20 and when I upgraded to
the Commodore 64 I was in hog heaven - man, could I do some stuff with
that. It still runs.

Yes, and it was a great glass teletype for logging onto Compuserve and
some of the early Bulletin Board systems. Those were the days. Look
how far we've come and how little has changed. :-) I once caught
something resembling a virus on the "64".

There used to be a company that offered a service close to universal
connectivity. You dialed into one number and from there you could
connect to a variety of different systems. Can't remember the name of
it but at the time it seemed like a great concept. Old stuff to those
on the old ARPANET I suppose.

My first system was an NCR 315. 6 microsecond clock cycle. 10K decimal
memory. 12 bit machine. Mag cards and tape and paper tape an punch cards
input. Online bank system with 110 baud lease lines. When they first
demonstrated a 9600 baud modem and the 1966 Fall Joint Computer Conference
in San Francisco, we were stunned. First personal computer was a North Star
S100 computer. Then the first IBM PC was about 1982. A few versions of it
later and I still have a ROM Emulator that plugs into the XT Bus. Then
worked on a DEC 11/34 as the interface to a $250k laser printer that hooked
into an IBM 360 I/O Channel. Emulated an IBM 3800. The 370 had 8 megabytes
of memory. Designed disk controllers with Mote 6800 and then a 68000
processor. The early code was done on Tandy 68K running SCO Unix. Then
converted to SUN workstations. As my wife says the first computer I showed
her that I worked on filled a large room. And cost $150k in 1960 dollars.
Lots more power in my desktop $500 and my $1000 Dell laptop. Except for the
I/O channels.