[AccessD] OT - For Arthur

John W Colby jwcolby at gmail.com
Tue Mar 19 17:45:51 CDT 2013


Hmmmm

I don't remember the exact day but I built my first computer in 1977.  I had a year left in the Navy 
and the Z-80 was king at that time.  I ordered everything out of advertisements in the back of 
Popular Electronics.  It was an S100 based system with 32 kbytes of RAM though I only ever got 24K 
of that working.  It used a cassette tape to load Zapple Basic which took 3 minutes to load and used 
12K  of my 24 K so my program had to fit in the remaining 12K.  There were no programs (that I ever 
found) so I just wrote my own and used it to play around.  My only I/O was a dumb terminal and the 
cassette.

By 1983 I had built my 2nd system, a SBC (Single Board Computer) with CPM in ROM, an 80186 processor 
(full 16 bit internal and external) running at 16 mhz, with 512 KBytes of RAM.  I bought dual 8" 
floppies for $750, and Turbo Pascal which jump started my programming career.  With a modem, I 
dialed into BBS all around southern California and downloaded tons of programs.  I ended up owning a 
$16K graphics terminal that was an engineering prototype from Megatek which I used Turbo Pascal to 
write the drivers for and learned programming along the way.

The rest as they say is history.  Thirty years later!!!  OMG this must be an old boys club eh?

John W. Colby

Reality is what refuses to go away
when you do not believe in it

On 3/19/2013 1:18 PM, John Clark wrote:
> Arthur, I'd meant to send this to you on Saturday, I believe it was, but...
>   
> I'd recently started...again...reading Rocky's book, "From Program to Product..." and upon thumbing through it I found his interview w/you. I'd noticed that, in that interview you'd said you bought your first computer on March 15th 1983. It was only a few hours before this anniversary date w/I was reading this, so I thought I'd be clever and with you a happy 30th anniversary!
>   
> Like I said...just an attempt at being clever...myself, I still had a year of HS to complete after that.
>
> Notice: This electronic transmission is intended for the sole use of the individual or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential, privileged or otherwise legally protected information. If you are not the intended recipient, or if you believe you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any use, disclosure, copying, distribution, or the taking of any action in reliance on the contents of this information, is strictly prohibited. Niagara County is not responsible for the content of any external hyperlink referenced in this email or any email.
> IF YOU HAVE RECEIVED THIS TRANSMISSION IN ERROR, PLEASE NOTIFY THE SENDER IMMEDIATELY BY EMAIL AND DELETE THE ORIGINAL MESSAGE ALONG WITH ANY PAPER OR ELECTRONIC COPIES.
> Thank you for your cooperation.
>
>



More information about the AccessD mailing list