[Elecraft] Computers in the Stone Age

[Edward R Cole]

Kind of surprised in the longevity of this topic.  But then I guess a 
lot of us started out in the "stone age"!
First computer (1963) used no electricity as was made by Post and had 
a bamboo slide (sliderule, of course).  Still have it!

My first exposure (1965) was in college taking a Fortran course and 
punching IBM cards at the new computer center that had a CDC3600.  A 
year later I had a student job at the center handling those cards.

Next, was running a Silent700 terminal on a mainframe at JPL  (1971) 
and later a dumb terminal on the Univac1108.  In 1978 I took a 
microprocessor design class at CalPoly Pomona and had a 6502 lab 
learning assembly language - what fun!

1982 I actually worked as a programmer (as it was) with a IBM pc, 
dual-floppy, 128Kb running DOS and writing A-Basic for a small bush 
Alaska phone company.  I had no experience and had only the reference 
books and manual, so I self-taught myself and produced a program for 
the company to download CO data from each village and process it into 
a report on subscriber usage.

My first personal computer was the Commodore 64 (1985) and I ran only 
one program that displayed ham satellite data.  That one croaked 
after a couple years when I plugged the 5-pin DIN in crooked and let 
the blue screen out!

1996 I joined the "information highway" with a PacBell P100 16Mb, 
win95.  I added memory to reach 40Mb and it still sits on a dusty 
shelf.  Since then its been a trail of Dell computers with win2000, 
winXP, Vista (ugh), and win8.  I even have an ancient IBM Thinkpad 
P90 with win95 still in use (runs two DOS-based programs).  I still 
use the TI-35 calculator I bought in early 1980's.

And I'm not a computer guy.  My background is microwave engineering 
and two-way radio repair.

73, Ed - KL7UW
http://www.kl7uw.com
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