View Single Post
Old 14th August 2008
drhowarddrfine drhowarddrfine is offline
VPN Cryptographer
 
Join Date: May 2008
Posts: 377
Default

I don't know how I missed this thread.

My first real computer was actually a toy computer that had little sliding racks on it for calculating logic. My dad bought it for some reason when I was about 8. My first sight of a real one was in 1970 when I went to college and the geologists next door had an IBM something with punch cards. I just didn't get it but I was a EE major and had no interest cause I was going into radio/tv.

After about 10 years of the radio/tv (and film) thing, I went to work for a company that made one of the first CAT scanners. It was a completely TTL system. My first exposure to a programming language was MUMPS.

The first computer I owned was one I built from the brand new 8085 that just came out, saving me the trouble of the extra chips involved with an 8080. Eventually I put together one using a Z80. Assembly language was the highest I ever went, sometimes just using switches and, in a few cases, touching wires together . Saving programs to a cassette recorder was bleeding edge but the damn tapes sometimes took two or three passes before the computer would reload properly; if at all.

That was all around 1980. I worked on 6801s, 6809s, 8051s. Intel was the only hardware we bought. And if you were reading Byte in the 1980s like roddierod then you read an article I wrote.

I was starting to work more on applications by 1985 but still in assembly. I selected the 68000 (I was now project manager) but my damn MIT big shot sob of a boss made us learn this thing called 'C'. There was more cussing than you would expect out of a professional office. Most of us only used it until it didn't work and then just used assembly. It was all done on a PDP-8 but the thing couldn't handle the load of our compiles (damn HLL POS). I got a few of us together and we pitched buying a mini-computer from some new company called Sun Microsystems. They ran up against Apollo Computers, which I favored.

I then moved to Pixar. They sold hardware then that ran Renderman. I remember riding the bus back to the airport after my interview with Ed Catmull who was messing with the rendering engine on the bus. Later, I went to Silicon Graphics and used to occasionally eat lunch with Jim Clark.

Things get pretty boring after that, computer-wise.
Reply With Quote