[AccessD] OT - For Arthur

Hey John:

As much as things change they stay the same. 

Instead of Z80 there is the ARM and ARM A9, instead of tape drives it is the
Cloud...now the youngsters are writing network and internet drivers,
building a NAS, writing their own languages, building server clusters and so
on...

The kids have Raspberry PIs...$25.00 for a computer (friend's son has three
and is building and testing a network) and for those, really flush, there is
Parallella, the parallel processing computer for $99.00. (they are sold out
for a while but I may bite the bullet by next fall): 

https://www.linux.com/news/enterprise/systems-management/692990-introducing-
the-99-linux-supercomputer

Its all Linux OS of course but to the kids its all easy fun.

Jim   

-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of John W Colby
Sent: Tuesday, March 19, 2013 3:46 PM
To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving
Subject: Re: [AccessD] OT - For Arthur

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.
>
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