[geeks] What's your computing history? was RE: [SunRescue] Yay, I don't feel quite so freaking young anymore!

Sat Mar 10 01:39:14 CST 2001

What's your computing history? I'm 24 here, and heres the list of my
"interesting" machines...

BTW, I was poor growing up. I got most of these machines because my
grandfather was a local politician/bigshot lawyer and any time I had a
birthday or some other present giving event people who wanted to kiss up to
him would send me stuff. He told them I liked computers, so they sent me
computers. I got some others because of special programs in the school
system I was in.

Some of the memories I have of the order I got these systems are shaky.
Remember I'm thinking back 20 years in some cases so cut me a little slack
;-)

Most of these systems can be found on the Obsolete computing museum site at
http://www.obsoletecomputingmuseum.org
I would love to see any links for similar sites.

Anyway my first machine was a Commodore Vic 20. I think I was three or four.
That was followed up with a TI99/4a, TRS80 models 1,2,then 3 (yes I had the
big silver box with the built in monitor and 8 inch floppy drives, one of my
grandfathers clients was throwing them away so they gave them to me)

Then I got a Tandy CoCo3, a colecovision ADAM, and a C64 with a datasette,
two 1541 5-1/4" drives, an RGB monitor, a DPS810 8 pin dot matrix printer,
and my first 300 baud modem. I was 6, and my mom got me a compuserve
account, which was way cool.

After the 64, I got a c128c, and finally an amiga 500, in between somewhere
I had an ATARI 800xl and a Laser 128 (apple IIc clone
http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/lazer128.html). This would have been
in something like '85, and before anyone asks, no I don't have any of them
anymore. As near I can remember none of these machines had hard drives.

My first DOS PC type machine was a Kaypro 2000 (
http://wwwcsif.cs.ucdavis.edu/~csclub/museum/items/kaypro_2000.html or
http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/k2000.html), which was this really
weird laptop desktop hybrid. It was an 8088 machine with 640k of RAM
(expandable to 1 mb), it had a 4" high 10" wide non-backlit, monochrome EGA
lcd, a detachable keyboard, and a 3 1/4" floppy drive in the laptop part, a
5 1/4" floppy drive, an isa slot and a 10mb hard drive in the desktop part.
The laptop fit into a cradle of the desktop unit. It was a cool machine for
the time (I think it was '87 or '88), and I got it by trading a nintendo
system with a bunch of games for it. It was my first machine with a hard
drive, and man that 10M felt like an infinite amount of space.

This is also the time I got to use my first UNIX machine. I grew up in the
Boston area, and they had an accelerated learnig program for the
"exceptionally gifted" kids that let us take special classes at local
colleges. I think I was the only ten year old to have a login at MIT in '87
;-) Though I'll be honest, I never did much with it, and didn't play with
UNIX again until I got an early copy of Slackware in I think late '93 just
before I started college.

Around middle school time I also got a Tandy 1000 HX (it had dos built in to
ROM) and a tandy 100 (early laptop
http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/model100.html ) which I was actually
given as part of a grant to give gifted students computers they could use
during class.

Of course college was UNIX UNIX everywhere. When I was a sophmore I became a
sys-admin for my college and I got to work with everything from 2/390
systems, ULTRIX/DecUnix/Tru64/OSF1 or whatever they were calling it that
week, irix (the main web design platform was an indy), solaris, varoius BSD
and Linux types, and AIX

Since then it's been pretty much non-stop computing action. I opened my own
MIS business when I was in high school so I have had my hands on literally
thousands of pc's in the last 10 years, and ever since college I have owned
at least one UNIX system pretty much at all times.

Chris Byrne

Up next, what's your computing present and future?

-----Original Message-----
From: rescue-admin at sunhelp.org [mailto:rescue-admin at sunhelp.org]On
Behalf Of Bill Bradford
Sent: Friday, March 09, 2001 20:00
To: rescue at sunhelp.org
Subject: Re: [SunRescue] Yay, I don't feel quite so freaking young
anymore!

On Fri, Mar 09, 2001 at 08:52:19AM -0700, Will Jennings wrote:
> Well, for the record, I'm 19 (20 this month), so seeing there are people
> younger than me on the list is very comforting, heh. I've been using
> computers since 1984, starting out on a VAX 11/780, though I then went
many
> years without exposure to real computers, just vague memories of 386i's at
> my dad's work (I can picture the Sun screensaver to this day). My first
> machine was a Commodore 128, I still own it... And about 60 or more other
> machines...

I started out at age 9 with a TI-99/4A.  GOt it 2 months before they
quit making them. 8-)

I'm 26, BTW.  Been doing the Solaris/UNIX thing since 1995, before
that I was a hardcore VMS hax0r.  The first web server I ever set up
is still up - http://mercur.usao.edu. 8-) (VAX/VMS, even, back when
people thought "you have to have a Sun box to have a web server.." and
I was like "uhh, no" and setup one on the campus mini as a summer
independent study project... goofed off for 4 weeks, did the work in
one week, and got five hours credit for it...)

Bill

--
Bill Bradford
mrbill at mrbill.net
Austin, TX
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