AGE/DEMOGRAPHICS/CAREER

Army was still using them in '92 when I got out...

486's with 5" HDD's were already available to everybody else. And dang you are old! I never actually got to touch a computer with all the input switches. Just read about them in the history books...

Byte

 

I learned to program on a trash80, with cassette tape backups and a floppy drive. Discettes were the new thing. I still have a remote discette drive.

 

I remember being taken to see one. We weren't allowed to touch it, not enough training. We were in 5th grade, I think.

 

Oh, that was YOU in the lab coat? Who knew?

 

Remember using 8 inch floppies. Then the new oh so new 5 inch ones. And programming in Fortran IV and submitting jobs on punch cards. Flipping toggle switches on the IMSAI 8080 and then wow, moved to assembly language programming on DEC PDP11 and then LSI-11 computers then into Intel micro-contollers with the 8051/8748 series. Oh yeah there was creating a computer and our own micro-code with I vaguely recall AMD ALU bit slice processors to create an 8 bit machine with an assembler that ran on the PLATO computer system. And in college there was fabricating semiconductor elements doping our own silicon wafers again using PLATO to compute the doping profiles and creating the masks and etching wafers in hydrofluoric acid and...

Golly you guys brought back lots of dusty memories.

Thanks.
AT