My 1st computer (was: 'My favorite platform')

[Tom Buskey]

Heh.  I grew up near Dartmouth College & they gave out accounts to 
local high school students on their Honeywell running DTSS (Dartmouth 
Time Sharing System).  Birthplace of BASIC.  Named pipes.  And I think 
runoff.  Did you know the 1st remote terminal was from Dartmouth to 
Bell Labs in the late 40s?

Anyways, I had a TI Silent 700 terminal & could dial in from home - at
300 baud. Thermal paper for it was hard to find (Fax machines were
uncommon in 1980).

I used to spend about an hour a night in the xyz conference with college
students across the east coast.  They were like today's IRC and instant
messaging chat rooms.  I also taught myself BASIC on it.

I later got an Apple ][+ with 64k and 2 floppies.  Great for games, word
processing, programming. Applesoft BASIC was different from Dartmouth
BASIC.  I missed the chatting I had on the terminal (which I still
used).  I didn't have a modem for the Apple ][.  Apple Pascal was 
interesting.  It had a built in bugger.  If your code had no bugs in 
it, the p-compiler would helpfully add some.  So just recompiling would 
sometimes get rid of a bug :-(

My intro to Unix came in college when my roommate showed me rn on a 
gould.  There was a time when you could read every post on usenet :-)


Ed Lawson said:
>On Mon, 12 Aug 2002 21:15:57 -0400 (EDT)
>My first computer came with 8 Kilobytes as standard and I bought it with a mon
>nster
>memory board which brought it up to 24 kilobytes.  Also had a single 5.25 flop
>py which
>provided all of 80 kilobytes of disk storage.  OSI MF4P
>
>Then the IBM PC came out.  I remember booting my first PC and looking with awe
> at 640K memory showing during the boot sequence.
>
>Ed Lawson
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>

-- 
-------
Tom Buskey