[SunRescue] Offerings

[Wallace Owen]

>Just for fun, when was everybody born?
>4/26/69
>
>Tim

Circa 1954.  Sunk my teeth into an IBM 'self-teaching' boolean
logic book at age 8 (our neighbor lady down the street was one
of IBMs first programmers - she programmed on some sort of peg-
board with jumper wires).  Programmed on one of those Wang uber-
calculators (the card reader was a 2-d array of leaf springs
that mechanically read the entire card in parallel).  Next box
was a bare board 'Super ELF', which used the RCA 1802 8-bit
micro, which had a 32-byte masked rom monitor, upgradeable to
a pair of 1702 (512x4bit, I think) EPROMS that let you enter
code from a hex keypad.  128 bytes of RAM.

Bootstrapped my CP/M machine while working the nite shift,
borrowing the LSI-11's two 8-inch disks (full-width, double
density!).  Wire-wrapped a Z8000 S-100 board (Boy, I thought
that chip was going places.)

My first Sun was a 3/60 with 24Meg and a 150MB hard disk that
would seize up whenever the machine was shut off - I had to
pull it out of the shoebox, remove the circuit board and grab
it's flywheel and twist to get it unstuck - I think the bearing
grease must have turned into some sort of glue.  The compiler
was still bundled with SunOS3.6, but I wanted to play with C++
so I grabbed the 1.37 G++ compiler.

I found myself in need of a Sparc machine to run some special
software for which the source wasn't available, and thanks to
this mailing list got an SS-2 in trade for some old VME hard-
ware.


  // Wally