[kwlug-disc] 40 years ago?

[Cedric Puddy]

Shout out to everyone!

Gosh, such good memories...

Frist machine I got to try stuff on was a Commodore PET (it was stored in
the back of my Grade 4 classroom, and sometimes a lunch chances to try
stuff on it would come around...) and a year or two later, we got Burroughs
ICONS at the school (which ran QNX; later, in high school, they found it
simpler to have a some of us help administer the ICON network than to keep
us out of it).

My first machine was (briefly) a VIC-20, but that was in 1986-87, and by
that point, VIC-20 was well known to be hella weak, which led to an
intense-and-thank-god-successful campaign for a C64 ... but all I got was
the C64, and still had to use the VIC tape drive; a literal eternity later
(2-3 months!!), my long-suffering father somehow scraped up the cake for a
1541 floppy drive and, later, a *colour* dot matrix printer and real
Commodore monitor (so much better than a crappy TV and composite -> RF
adapter dongle!).

I had no idea at the time how much work it took to come up with $200 for a
C64, or whatever all that other stuff must have cost (my folks kept bees,
sold honey at the farmers market, did odd jobs in the community and grew
veggies; cash was never a fire hazard in our home).

I also recall pestering my father into making board-level modifications to
the C64, and he seemed *really really* nervous about doing them; like
constantly asking "ARE YOU SURE", like he was afraid of breaking this
horrifically expensive device or something that he certainly could not
afford to buy a second time.  Adults sure are So Weird!

Scoring a 300 baud modem was thrilling, for about 10 minutes, by which
point I'd got upstairs, plugged it in, and then recalled that I lived in
rural Huron County, and the closest big centre, Wingham, was a
long-distance call, so... there was nobody to call.  Arrrrrrrrrgh.  Nothing
like combining a complete Tactical Victory with a complete Strategic Fail.

The neighbor down the sideroad, Peter, was a Spitfire pilot in the war and
was now the classic
cranky-older-guy-with-a-poorly-hidden-sweet-spot-for-inquisitive-kids; for
reasons he himself could never entirely articulate, he had a TRS Model II
(with built-in 8" floppy drives), and at some point, he just gave that to
me.  It was an interesting machine to compare against the C64, but clearly
less interesting.

Around '89, I got my first PC -- a 286, no copro, 83 Mb Seagate HDD,
Trident VGA graphics.  But news of Minix and Andrew Tanaunbaum came round,
and it needed at least a 386, which found me down at the other farm down
the road -- they'd purchased a PC to keep track of something dairy
farm-related, and the next thing they knew, they had me invading their home
& working on getting Minux going on it... I shudder to think of how
negotiations for that access would seem through the lens of history.  I
recall promises about how everything "would be fine".  (And they were!)

Shout out to Mark Steffen re: Coherent -- I've got install disks for
Coherent in the small collection of 5.25" disks that I've hung onto; I used
it briefly (and got the disks) during my time with MKS, but Linux (Kernel
0.99, I think.  According to Wikipedia, now "EOL"!)  ended up being a lot
more fun.  I recall spending the lead-up to March Break from school filling
a couple of boxes of Floppy Disks with Linux installation materials &
packages, then spending March break installing and exploring, and just
being amazed at how much was going on even at that time in the community.

It's shocking the diversity of computing that was going on.  What
incredible luck to be there in the thick of it.

Linux... now there's a gift that has kept on giving.

-C



On Fri, 13 Aug 2021 at 09:57, <rashkae at tigershaunt.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, Aug 13, 2021, at 9:27 AM, CrankyOldBugger wrote:
>
> I'm happy with all the responses that my posting provoked.  It seems that
> we're all a bunch of neckbeard Unix guys.. and no, I have no idea what
> "neckbeard" means..
>
>
> I think the word you were looking for was "Greybeard"... you can probably
> figure out what *that* one means :)
>
> _______________________________________________
> kwlug-disc mailing list
> kwlug-disc at kwlug.org
> https://kwlug.org/mailman/listinfo/kwlug-disc_kwlug.org
>


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