[AccessD] OT - For Arthur

John W Colby jwcolby at gmail.com
Tue Mar 19 21:57:19 CDT 2013


Cool.  We can run Wine on it and slow it down to the speed of my 1989 Windows 3.0 system.  Or eschew 
Windows and...

How about we build an UnRaid emulator with a billion SSds,  for a petabyte SSD SAN, performing 
Folding at Home in the background?

John W. Colby

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

On 3/19/2013 8:35 PM, Jim Lawrence wrote:
> 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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>>
>>



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