OT: Humor

[bill perkins]

tfreeman at intel.digichem.net wrote:
> On Wed, 8 Mar 2006, bill perkins wrote:
>
>   
>> Anne Wilson wrote:
>>     
>>> On Tuesday 07 March 2006 23:00, jludwig wrote:
>>>   
>>>       
>>>>> Anne
>>>>>       
>>>>>           
>>>> If they have your email address you go to the bad place!
>>>>
>>>>     
>>>>         
>>> Hey, that was my first email address, a compuserve one, so I don't think it 
>>> would be much use to them now ;-)
>>>
>>> Anne
>>>       
>> I had one of those, too- 72245,710 was my user ID. Can't believe that 
>> nobody has mentioned Heathkit here- my first two computers were a 6800 
>> SBC and an H-89 (2MHz Z-80, 64K ram, single 5 1/4" floppy). Also worked 
>> on a DEC-10 system in college, ASR-33 teletypes, paper tape... the good 
>> old days!
>>
>>     
>
> <<sigh>> The old H89 running cp/m. Never did get around to trying H-DOS or 
> whatever it was called, although I think it was pretty advanced for 
> running on Z80. If configged properly, as I recall, you could run 1 5.25 
> disk internal, two more 5.25 disks external, a 5 meg external hard drive 
> (I think it was 5 meg although it was about 8 inches across), and I 
> _think_ you could even get an external pair of 8 inch floppy drives with 
> something like 256K capacity.
>
> Now the DEC-10 was another story - what with the computer science types 
> mucking with the OS, while the University was too cheap to get a good UPS 
> system as thunderstorms wandered through the area. And the cluster line 
> printers which you just connected to being at another location...
> Trying to get a thesis to print off on _that_ system was an exercise in 
> creative frustration. (Although, in retrospect, much of the difficulty was 
> not the sytem's "fault" as such, just the university asking too much of 
> it.)
>
>
>  -- 
> =============================================
> If you think Education is expensive
> Try Ignorance
>                    Author Unknown
> ============================================
>
>   
Yup, I ran HDOS- it wasn't bad, and the source was available; I bought 
the books when they were discontinuing them. HDOS was written for the 
8080, though, not a Z80 instruction in sight! I added a patch to map 
some reserved space to RAM, wound up with 56K RAM and 8K ROM thereby, 
and another patch to allow the modem to tie in directly to the terminal, 
so I could access the system from work. I got to show my boss what an 
actual assembler could do, as opposed to typing hex codes into an EPROM 
burner. My boss went to up to the Pres's office and snagged the only PC 
in the building, bought a cross assembler for Z80, and the rest (for me) 
was history.

-- 
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"The two most common things in the	| Bill Perkins
 universe are Hydrogen and Stupidity."	| perk at iag.net
					| programmer-at-large
		F. Zappa		| ALL assembly languages done here.
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