[TriLUG] Old-n-Young Guy Stories

OlsonE at aosa.army.mil OlsonE at aosa.army.mil
Fri Feb 9 09:16:14 EST 2007


hahahahah! hp9000! you're never going to believe this (actually you
might).

at the last company i worked for (2003 - 2005), we were using a hp9000
(this thing was about a good 10-15 ft long). i dubbed it the 'deathstar'
because it made this really ominous noise when it was powering down (so
much -- in fact that it felt like the room got brighter when we turned
it off).

anyhow, in 2004 we took it offline. we also had a couple of dec alpha
4100s (running digital unix 4.0, which i later moved on to tru64). all
of the above were used solely for sybase. i miss those. they were ROCK
solid!

eric

-----Original Message-----
From: trilug-bounces at trilug.org [mailto:trilug-bounces at trilug.org] On
Behalf Of Roy Vestal
Sent: Friday, February 09, 2007 9:08 AM
To: Triangle Linux Users Group discussion list
Subject: Re: [TriLUG] Old-n-Young Guy Stories

Heh, "youngun's"...

I guess I'm one of the "tweeners" between the Jim R/Chris C./Glen H. 
group and the Olsen E./William S./Craig T./Alexis Z. group. Barely born
in the beginning of the 70's.

Wrote my first "program" (we now would call it a geneology db) on my
Atari 400 w/Left Cartridge Basic (pre M$ basic) and "membrane" keyboard
as a Christmas present for an Uncle (was a sw eng at Apple). Then for
fun, added peek/poke graphics and ported it to my C-64.

Attempted to play my first game(s) of mtrek on the school's HP 9000. It
didn't use a monitor, but a printout. Needless to say, I got killed as
soon as I logged in.

The first computer I learned "programming" on the good ol' TRS-80 Model
4 with *dual* 360k floppies AND a *green* screen (no crappy orange on
this baby!). It was one of the *10* that were used at the local High
School. My dad taught there and was one of the instructors that used the
computer lab. I would go in and play on that thing for hours after
school.

Then there was.... (/me has lots of stories)...



Alexei Znamensky wrote:
> On 2/8/07, Craig Taylor <ctalkobt at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Anybody else who was born in the '70s ever use their father's punch 
>> cards to build card houses? I found that they were much much better 
>> at supporting my larger structures and hung onto a whole stack of 'em

>> for about 7 years before they faded out of where I put them... (got 
>> lost / stopped caring).
>>
>> At high school before the Apple ]['s came in we used a teletype that
> 
> 
> call -151
> peek -16384
> 
> ... mind wanders...
> 
> was hooked up to NCSU where we could run a bunch of programs whose
>> main purpose I believe was to waste paper.
>>
>> I used to know all of the chip-level details (what each chip did), 
>> memory space, cycle counts etc for the Commodore. Now things have 
>> gotten so complex and only standardized through driver interfaces 
>> that I miss the chip-level type programming that you could do...
>>
>> On 2/8/07, William Sutton <william at trilug.org> wrote:
>> > Adding to the younger-but-older stories.  I was born in the
>> mid-70's.  I
>> > remember the punch cards, cradle modems, and line printers where my
>> father
>> > went to school.  In fact, I actually used the punch cards myself 
>> > (for bookmarks :-D )
>> >
>> > --
>> > William Sutton
>> -- 
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> 
> 
> 

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