Posted on 04/01/2012 6:21:36 AM PDT by Stoat
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
It wasn't much at all but it was MINE!!
I parlay'd that into a college Comp Sci Class, then into a Comp Sci Major, then into a 30 yr computer consulting career!
Saw my first game, decided "This is for me!" switched from a genetics to a Comp Sci path and never looked back.
All cause of that little Timex Sinclair!
8^)
That’s Gov. Sarah Palin isn’t it?
I went to a computer programming school in 1966 on an IBM 360. We also had an IBM 1180 that used Fortran. The first job out of school for my buddy was at a feed plant (So. Cal.). The govt had a strict set of ingredients for cattle feed as well as how much of each was allowed. He wrote a program that accepted the latest commodity prices and then figured out what cheapest mix could be formulated and stay with the guidelines. Later he did that for an ice cream maker. That was when it hit me why we were head and shoulders above the rest of the business world.
I worked for the USMC PX at Camp Pendleton then and we had vendors who gave 30-, 60-, 90-days same as cash deals. I wrote a program to pay only the 30-day guys and keep the other monies in an interest-bearing account until the 60- and 90-day bills were due. I thought it was nickel-dime crap, but the accountants told me we saved a bunch of money that way.
I imagine there were a lot of breakthroughs like yours and mine in those days.
Bump.
I remember taking my shiny new 300 baud modem to the Atari users group meeting and they were mighty impressed because you didn’t have to stick the handset into the top or use an interface.
At the time a higher percentage of Atari users had modems than any other brand.
Well there was a t-shirt with MY WANG NEVER DOES DOWN.
I got that computer over 30 years ago as a kid... still is somewhere in the house. I remember when Cos was advertising it.
And RAINBOW magazine. Mrs p6 and I would spend hours...days...typing in hex code and three times that debugging, to make a smiling pumpkin for our kids for Halloween.
We were so jealous of the C64 that could do sprites....especially at Christmas. The Commodore Chistmas demo still ROCKS! Wish I still had it...
YEE HAW! That made my day! Of course it’s getting printed out and hung on my wall.
I had one of those too!!!
The first computer I ever programmed on. The Imsai 8080. Used an old B&W TV as the monitor. Storage was a cassette tape.
That was made by submitting the photo on this page to the URL at the bottom of the ascii art.
Actually, the ancient Egyptians were far more advanced than that. Did you know that the Great Pyramid of Giza was constructed by a fleet of giant robotic quadrotors? Unfortunately, due to a bug introduced when the engineers overeached, the marvelous machines all flew out into the Indian Ocean and deep-sixed themselves, and Pharoah ordered the engineers executed.
The technology is only now in the process of being rediscovered, as yet only on a limited, miniature scale ...
It's why I'm a software architect today.
Yes. I had to remove all of the text including the captions as well as a couple of the images from the Daily Mail article in order for it to be accepted by the Free Republic system. The UK Daily Mail has to be excerpted for FR, and excerpted posts have to be less than 300 words. Not sure why, but the remaining images that I posted were still being interpreted as 'words' by the system. Here's the caption for the Bill Gates photo, hope it doesn't get me banned ;-)
Hot shot: Bill Gates teamed up with Radio Shack in 1985 to promote computers carrying Microsoft Windows
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.