From: Jonathan Berry (jberry_at_islandnet.com)
Date: Mon Dec 03 2001 - 14:09:37 EST
Our high school was the first in BC to have a computer. 1965?
It was a Monrobot XI. Input by keyboard or paper tape. You
could program in Machine Language (not to be confused with
Assembler), or QuikComp, a language which combined the worst
qualities of BASIC and Assembler. I never managed to write a
meaningful program and lost interest in computers. For the
first time.
Next year the school traded up to an HP. The bright kids were
programming and talking in Machine Language. In those days,
hexadecimal was 0123456789STUVWX. At least on that computer.
A couple of years later I failed to program the computer to
play chess and lost interest for a second time. That summer I
failed to write a program in Fortran IId to solve polynomial
equations using the Gauss-Jordan Iteration Method and lost
interest for a third time. Six years later I had to manage a
mailing list on 7,000 punch cards (each record had TWO
cards associated with it. If you happened to interleave cards,
or type up a new card with six lines in it, the program would
simply quit, and you'd have to find the offending cards by
hand...). I lost interest in computers for a fourth time, but
had to maintain the list for four years because it was part of
my job.
In 1979 I bought a Quasar Data Products (near Cleveland Ohio)
QDP-100 for US dollars $4,995 (plus terminal plus printer). It
had 64 K RAM, S-100 bus, no hard drive (if you wanted to add a
hard drive, you could write the routines yourself in
Assembler...), two 8" floppy drives (1.2 MB each), running CP/M
2.2, with CBASIC programming language. It was a fortuitous
choice for running a 3,500 person organization. Since then I
have had much much frustration, but have never lost interest.
And I have never thrown a computer against a wall.
Though if I had a cream pie in my hand and a famous computer
industry figure happened to be walking by, I don't know what I
would do.
None of the above was even luggable. My favourite computer is
the 701C (1995). 10 months ago I gave in and got a used 600E,
paying twice what it costs now, but am quite happy (thank you,
Bruce!). I prefer the form factor and engineering of the 701C,
but the speed of the 600E (366) is a huge plus. The 701C and
600E are both "better than your average TP" in both keyboard
and internal modem.
-- cheers Jonathan Berry http://www.islandnet.com/~jberry/ to know more than you want
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