On Wed 11 May 2022 at 23:31:41 (-0700), Marc Shapiro wrote: > > On 5/6/22 19:16, John Hasler wrote: > > James H. H. Lampert writes: > > > I started with a TRS-80 Model I myself (and with high school > > > programming classes on an IBM 370/135 at the District Office, with > > > terminals connected over a pair of multiplexed phone lines [and a > > > maximum terminal speed of 300 Baud]). > > Punch cards and an IBM 1620 at university. The first computer I owned I > > built using a Z80 SBC demo board. Cassette tape mass storage, modified > > Selectric printer, OCLC crt terminal, homebrew OS. > > I starting in college with punch cards an IBM 360
I too started by learning Fortran on an IBM 360/44. We collected all our punched cards and lineprinter paper and sold it to subsidise the Christmas booze. We even kept the useless chad. Our jobs were run at the end of the working day because we were only borrowing the time from Theoretical Astronomy. It sat in its own detached building. We punched the JCL on special coloured cards. I think this was because the punch was unspooled, so if your program failed to compile, the operators needed to be able to see the end of your data cards, to clear them out of the stack of jobs, so that the next could run. When we moved to using the university's 370/165, which had a self-serve high-speed card reader, we had people searching for the coloured cards because they thought the reader wouldn't read JCL from ordinary ones! (The card reader was spooled with HASP, so it always gobbled up all your cards—until they started to get dog-eared.) > and a PDP 11/15 that > actually let me sit at a terminal. After I graduated I got a TRS 80 > Model III (Z80) with cassette tape for mass storage and 16K of RAM. I was fortunate in never using 8-bit micros at all. The first 16-bit I played with (not mine) was the Naked Mini/LSI, but most of my work was with the HP9845. It was far too expensive to own one; I recall the maintanance contract on it was £1000 per year in the early 80s, which would be more than £4000 today. Cheers, David.
