[NLRS] Who's the computer programmer in the bunch?

[Ford Peterson]

Jerry wrote:

...snip...

> Before I built my CP/M system, I built a school computer that uses a
> cassette drive and it still runs. Its a candidate for the state
> historical museum being the first computer built for elementary school
> kids to use. My second computer was for a weather company, a Z80 with a
> quarter mb of RAM that monitored a 1200 baud weather wire and let them
> search thee saved data  (and it saved on what they told it to save) with
> a terminal. It ran 18 years 24/7 with only 40 hours total down time. It
> wore out two sets of back up batteries and I had to change them with
> power up each time.
> -- 
> 73, Jerry, K0CQ,
> All content copyright Dr. Gerald N. Johnson, electrical engineer

I think you may have me beat on this score.  My first computer was purchased by Norwest for use by the Treasury dept.  Serial number 1014, and I think they started at 1000.  It had no floppy drive (none was available as an accessory), no hard disk (obviously) and used a cassette port.  The 16K ram had been upgraded to 56K as I recall, using the logic "who could ever use more than 56K of ram?"  The newer stuff came with 64K but you needed a memory card to get the originals past 56K.  We upgraded to the 128K floppies after they were available.  That would have been about 1980 or 1981 or thereabouts.  Bare bones cost was about $2800.  With monochrome (green) monitor, extra ram, and cassette deck it was well into the mid $3K as I recall.  Quite the deal at the time.  The only one in the company was on my desk because nobody else could figure out how to make it do anything other than blink "OK>"  There were no programs yet.  Only Bill Gate's "Basic"

Ah yes, the good ole days...  When you could make a computer add three numbers together, print them on the screen with the phrase "hello world," and get oohhhs and aaahhhs from the boss.

Ford-N0FP
ford at cmgate.com