On Saturday, 7 May 2022 21:41:33 EDT 황병희 wrote: > Charlie Gibbs <cgi...@surfnaked.ca> writes: > > (... thanks ...) > > If Microsoft disappeared in its entirety, I'd buy a case of > > champagne and invite my friends over for a _major_ celebration. > > ... > > That's a great idea! > > > I'm 71, and started my programming career in 1970, five > > years before Microsoft existed. The machine at my first > > job had a whopping 16K of memory. We were a service > > bureau, running things like payroll and accounts > > receivable for companies all over town who couldn't > > afford a computer of their own (i.e. most of them). > > > > So when someone tells me how many gigabytes of memory > > I'd need to do a job, I take it with a _very_ large > > grain of salt.
So do I. My first programming project in late '79 was an aid to an automatic station break machine at the tv station where I was then the ACE, back in the days when sony 3/4" u-matic tape machines were state of the art. With a quest super elf rca 1802 powered board with an s-100 backplane bus, with a $400 4k of static ram memory add-on and interfacing I built on s-100 vector boards including a 103 line tall 8.8 character generator, it ran a u-matic machine to find the first frame of video to be aired of a finished commercial, backed the tape up 12 seconds, ran it fwd and started recording a new digital count down leader from 9.9 down to 2.0 seconds, inserting an audio tone at the 5 second point for half a second which was the automatic station breaks synch tone, then put a second beep on the 2nd audio channel 5 seconds before the end of that commercial to start the next machine if there was one. If not it flashed a station id for half a second before switching back to the network. All this on less than 4k of self modifying code. And it was so stable it was used many times daily for 17 years, when the station burnt to the ground and had to start over. I still have a paper copy of that program along with an audio cart with several copies on it in a bag on the top shelf above my chair. Now I'm 87, 20 some years retired, and playing with 4 cnc metalworking machines I've rebuilt, and 3d printers in my dotage. And have managed to make the reaper blink first several times. > > We, the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the > > impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, > > for so long, with so little, we are now qualified > > to do anything with nothing.” > > > > -- Konstantin Josef Jireček > > Thanks! > > Sincerely, Linux fan Byung-Hee > > -- > ^고맙습니다 _布德天下_ 감사합니다_^))// > > . Cheers, Gene Heskett. -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940) If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable. - Louis D. Brandeis
