John Colby
jcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Sun Sep 14 16:03:27 CDT 2003
By building my own SBC with the 80186 (12 mhz) and 512 kbytes of memory, I had a far more powerful hardware platform that most of the Mini-computers like the PDP-11. Of course I couldn't afford a hard drive for it. The dual 8" floppy I bought was $700. But it gave me (2) 1 mbyte storage platters which was way more than I really needed back then. The VAX on the other hand was a truly powerful mini. I actually got into programming by trying to get a star trek game to run on the Data General mini that we used for troubleshooting the graphics systems - I fixed hardware back in those days. This machine only had 16kb of ram and the star trek game was 12kb which didn't leave room for the basic interpreter. I printed out the game on the old yellow teletype roll of paper, about 12 linear feet of code. The biggest spaghetti mess you have EVER seen. Of course I doubt that Basic even had function calls back then so it was all GoTo. Yech. Back then I couldn't even spell programmer... now I are one. John W. Colby www.colbyconsulting.com -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com]On Behalf Of Steven W. Erbach Sent: Sunday, September 14, 2003 1:08 PM To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving Subject: Re: [AccessD] Info: Free Windows Fortran 77 Compiler John, >> And I DREAMED of having a VAX of my own. << Heck, for a while, there, in 1983-84 I dreamed about owning a DEC Pro 350, a PDP-11 in a desktop case. I worked at that time for a company that developed DEC software. The VP of the company was one of the diehards who still worked on PDP-8s. He even made revisions to the operating system...by himself! Regards, Steve Erbach Scientific Marketing Neenah, WI If architects built buildings the way programmers built applications, the first woodpecker to come along would cause the end of civilization. _______________________________________________ AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com