Re: For the fun of it

[carbide@egine.com]

Bill Heckel wrote:
> Post your current age and the first computer you ever used.

53.

I was an electronic tech at hp, and  I took a class at work. I don't
recall the title, but it was about algorithmic state machines. We got a
crappy little microcomputer with a keypad and LED readout to work with,
and we had to program it by entering hex on the keypad.  It was really
frustrating because the keypad bounced. Ironically, hp sold a quality
version in an attache case at that time, but our management was too
cheap to buy them for us.

We were assigned to program it as a function generator that could
output square, triangle, sawtooth, and sine waves.  I still have a
cassette with that program on it.

I know it was '79 because I also programmed it to write  A L I E N on
the screen of my oscilloscope.

I didn't buy a computer until the late 80's, when I bought a Coleco
Adam for $300. I used that a little, but it was pretty limited. My
first real computer was a 25 mhz 386DX in 1990. 
-Paul