[wplug] OT: Down Memory Lane

[Diana A. Clarion]

<waves>

Hi, Terry!  I do believe that we're aquainted (through Western PA Mensa)...

I did a quick check on slide rules and turned this up:

http://www.sphere.bc.ca/test/cheap.html

I've got one around here somewhere, that I found at a used book store what
used to be on 8th Ave. in Homestead.  What I want is to get my hands on my
father's bamboo slide rules (I hope they're in good shape.  They've been in
an attic for 45 years.)

Being from the same era, our experiences are similar.  That HP 2116C talked to
a set of ASR-33s through acoustic couplers.  Then, at Marietta college, one
of the machines I fooled with was a PDP 11/40, running RSTS-V05 (the other
machine was the IBM 1130 I mentioned earlier)...

DAC

On Fri, Oct 14, 2005 at 11:11:00AM -0700, terry mcintyre wrote:
> My first machine was a teletype in the basement of
> North Catholic High School, connected to a timesharing
> machine - a Honeywell mainframe of some sort - running
> FORTRAN and BASIC. That was back in 1971 or
> thereabouts. In college, I played with the Digital PDP
> 10 and 11. 
> 
> First computer I owned was a Radio Shack TRS 80, Model
> I, with 48K of RAM and a cassette tape mass storage
> device. One had to tinker with the volume control of
> the $29.95 tape recorder to be able to read data
> reliably. That would have been 1978, I think. My
> friends had soldered chips to Cromenco motherboards
> and so forth, but I'm not patient enough to do all
> that fiddly stuff with a soldering iron, so I waited
> for 
> a plug-n-play system. But I did have a few small
> mechanical computing gadgets, lol. Dunno where they've
> gotten to. The one I miss most is a slide rule; don't
> know if one can purchase slide rules anymore.
> 
-- 
Diana A. Clarion, Goddess of the Network
http://www.fnordnet.net/~dclarion