[OT] More tape drive stories

[Fred]

At the "tender" age of 18, I wrote a driver for a mag tape transport for the 
Data General line of computers, back in 1980. It was a 9-track, and it was 
pretty fun stuff. Also wrote a driver for the hard drive that used platters. 
The drive itself was the size of a washing machine, and looked pretty cool 
for its time. If I recall correctly, it could only handle a mere 190 
MEGAbytes! 

Ah, the good ole' days.

>Most of us have that first piece of computer equipment 
>that we fondly (or not so fondly) remember as 
>the "breakthrough" for us....the Kim-1, the Commodore, etc. 
>DEC TAPE was certainly in that category for me.
>
>Warmest regards,
>
>maddog

For me, it was the Apple ][, and the amazing thing is that people were paying 
me to write programs for them on it, even before I got out of high school.

One such program was a graphing/plotter to draw on a plotter the results of 
experimental data for the Immunology department at the University of Alabama 
(yes, I did spend my high school years in Alabama -- hard to believe, I 
know). I wrote the thing in AppleSoft, and one of the students there took my 
code and rewrote what I did in 6502 assembler.

When he showed me what he did, and that it was *considerably* faster, I was 
both blown away and dumbfounded. It was doing everything my code did, just 
at 10 times the speed. I felt better, though, when he showed me he based 
everything on what I had written -- he had printouts, etc. After that, I got 
real interested in assembly and, well -- wrote those drivers along with an 
operating system for the DG Micronova and Nova 4X a year and a half later. 
Far be it for me to ever be outdone! :-)

Good ole' days, indeed!

Getting hooked on Linux after years of Windows development was in many ways a 
kind of "coming back home", where doing nearly everything from command-line 
and compiling drivers and kernels are routine.

-Fred