[TriLUG] Old-n-Young Guy Stories

[Roy Vestal]

Heh, "youngun's"...

I guess I'm one of the "tweeners" between the Jim R/Chris C./Glen H. 
group and the Olsen E./William S./Craig T./Alexis Z. group. Barely born 
in the beginning of the 70's.

Wrote my first "program" (we now would call it a geneology db) on my 
Atari 400 w/Left Cartridge Basic (pre M$ basic) and "membrane" keyboard 
as a Christmas present for an Uncle (was a sw eng at Apple). Then for 
fun, added peek/poke graphics and ported it to my C-64.

Attempted to play my first game(s) of mtrek on the school's HP 9000. It 
didn't use a monitor, but a printout. Needless to say, I got killed as 
soon as I logged in.

The first computer I learned "programming" on the good ol' TRS-80 Model 
4 with *dual* 360k floppies AND a *green* screen (no crappy orange on 
this baby!). It was one of the *10* that were used at the local High 
School. My dad taught there and was one of the instructors that used the 
computer lab. I would go in and play on that thing for hours after school.

Then there was.... (/me has lots of stories)...



Alexei Znamensky wrote:
> On 2/8/07, Craig Taylor <ctalkobt at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Anybody else who was born in the '70s ever use their father's punch
>> cards to build card houses? I found that they were much much better at
>> supporting my larger structures and hung onto a whole stack of 'em for
>> about 7 years before they faded out of where I put them... (got lost /
>> stopped caring).
>>
>> At high school before the Apple ]['s came in we used a teletype that
> 
> 
> call -151
> peek -16384
> 
> ... mind wanders...
> 
> was hooked up to NCSU where we could run a bunch of programs whose
>> main purpose I believe was to waste paper.
>>
>> I used to know all of the chip-level details (what each chip did),
>> memory space, cycle counts etc for the Commodore. Now things have
>> gotten so complex and only standardized through driver interfaces that
>> I miss the chip-level type programming that you could do...
>>
>> On 2/8/07, William Sutton <william at trilug.org> wrote:
>> > Adding to the younger-but-older stories.  I was born in the 
>> mid-70's.  I
>> > remember the punch cards, cradle modems, and line printers where my
>> father
>> > went to school.  In fact, I actually used the punch cards myself (for
>> > bookmarks :-D )
>> >
>> > --
>> > William Sutton
>> -- 
>> TriLUG mailing list        : 
>> http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug
>> TriLUG Organizational FAQ  : http://trilug.org/faq/
>> TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
>>
> 
> 
>