OT: Humor

[tfreeman at intel.digichem.net]

On Wed, 8 Mar 2006, bill perkins wrote:

> Anne Wilson wrote:
> > On Tuesday 07 March 2006 23:00, jludwig wrote:
> >   
> >>> Anne
> >>>       
> >> If they have your email address you go to the bad place!
> >>
> >>     
> > Hey, that was my first email address, a compuserve one, so I don't think it 
> > would be much use to them now ;-)
> >
> > Anne
> I had one of those, too- 72245,710 was my user ID. Can't believe that 
> nobody has mentioned Heathkit here- my first two computers were a 6800 
> SBC and an H-89 (2MHz Z-80, 64K ram, single 5 1/4" floppy). Also worked 
> on a DEC-10 system in college, ASR-33 teletypes, paper tape... the good 
> old days!
> 

<<sigh>> The old H89 running cp/m. Never did get around to trying H-DOS or 
whatever it was called, although I think it was pretty advanced for 
running on Z80. If configged properly, as I recall, you could run 1 5.25 
disk internal, two more 5.25 disks external, a 5 meg external hard drive 
(I think it was 5 meg although it was about 8 inches across), and I 
_think_ you could even get an external pair of 8 inch floppy drives with 
something like 256K capacity.

Now the DEC-10 was another story - what with the computer science types 
mucking with the OS, while the University was too cheap to get a good UPS 
system as thunderstorms wandered through the area. And the cluster line 
printers which you just connected to being at another location...
Trying to get a thesis to print off on _that_ system was an exercise in 
creative frustration. (Although, in retrospect, much of the difficulty was 
not the sytem's "fault" as such, just the university asking too much of 
it.)


 -- 
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If you think Education is expensive
Try Ignorance
                   Author Unknown
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