Last year I weeded a bunch of old compsci books from our collection. The accompanying disks, CD-ROMs, or whatever had been stored in separate files behind the circulation desk, so I was thinning those out at the same time. Actual exchange with one of our student workers:
Student: What's that? Me: It's a 5 1/4-inch disk. It came packaged with this book on Windows 3.1. [The compsci collection hadn't been weeded in a LONG time.] Student: ...so that's why they're called floppy disks. I always wondered.
Except of course that 3.5" micro-diskettes are floppy too! Just peel 'em out of that shell and play with the medium itself to verify this.
I remember back when I was working for the Army, and a colonel (why were all the folks who gave me grief all colonels?) showed up with a floppy disk in his hand and wanted me to read it for him. Problem was, it was a floppy disk (8") not a diskette (5.25") and he Just Wouldn't Understand why I couldn't somehow squeeze it into a 5.25" drive somehow even after a few explanations.
No shit, I was there; this isn't a FOAF story. I was the one he was complaining to.
I finally got him to verify my guess that it was a Wang disk, and emailed a friend over at the Department of Labour who sysadminned a bunch o' Wangs to ask him whether he had any 8" floppy drives. He did, but getting the data converted into an MS-DOS-intelligible form and shipped back to one of my machines was a major headache.
To add insult to injury, the colonel decided that the resulting loss of formatting meant he was just going to have somebody re-type the whole thing anyhow. *grrr*
Another time, an officer (don't recall whether it was another colonel or not) came into my branch asking why his computer insisted that his (5.25") diskette was full when it "obviously" wasn't. He was (I am not making this up) convinced that it was only haf full because he saw a visual difference in the media surface about halfway out (there was more wear on the inner half than the outer half). He was, at least, easier to convince that I knew what the [expletive] I was talking about when I explained that you couldn't actually tell how full a diskette was by looking at it like that. But it did take multiple phrasings.
(Because of these personally-experienced episodes and similar ones, I'm inclined to give rather more credit to various user-support urban legends than to random non-tech-support urban legends in general.)
Come to think of it, there were a couple of GS-13 folks who were a bit of a nuisance as well, including the one who insisted that I return early from a trip to Georgia because my being the one to whomp up pie charts for a presentation to Congress was more important than not wasting the air fare to get me down there to install a computer and several terminals. (One of my two immediate supervisors (they had to share me) was with me on the trip, and she was quite put out by this. I eventually defused the situation by promising to go directly from the airport to the office on the day of my scheduled return and knock out the slides that evening so they'd be on the right person's desk before they got in the next Monday. Boss2 was still pretty peeved that somebody from another branch felt entitled to pull me back before finishing what I'd gone out to do. Especially since the problem wasn't that nobody else could make the slides -- it wasn't even supposed to be my job! -- but merely, "Glenn makes them prettier".)
But yeah, other than that one instance, the other non-colonel episodes failed to measure up to the annoyances the colonels inflicted.
Other than my trips into the Pentagon (which made for amusing reactions at the metal detector, but that's another story), I didn't talk directly to folks of higher rank than colonel all that often; when I did, they weren't a PITA like the colonels were. And when I had to deal with officers from other services (Navy, IIRC, and Coast Guard for sure), Boss2 ran interference a little bit. The most Overt Attitude I got was from a UNIX sysadmin at another site (she was Sysadmin Of Every System In Her Building and resented that we were installing a Xenix box that she wasn't Absolute Mistress of; we had to give her a root password on it anyhow), but once I pulled a stunt clever enough that she had to admit she was impressed, she warmed up to me (and, more importantly, to our project!). And she was more of a problem for my supervisor than for me, anyhow.
By the way, among the other memories this topic dredged up was the time that I was frustrated with how the graphics requests were always last-minute, always efuckingmergencies, and always known about much earlier by the people imposing on me at the last minute ... and decided to wear my button (http://nancybuttons.com/) that said, "Your lack of planning does not constitute my emergency."
I came in that morning, and immediately ran into my branch chief talking to my boss1 and somebody else. He glanced at me, then turned and stared at my button, and his face darkened.
I thought, "Uh oh. Tactical error. Pissed off the grand-boss."
After a few seconds of him staring and me sweating, he said, "Can I borrow that pin? I have a meeting with a couple of colonels and some other branch chiefs in a few minutes, and I think I need that pin."
I removed the button, handed it to him, and continued on to my desk with a sigh of relief. An hour or two later he stopped by my desk to return it and thank me. I don't recall at the moment whether he said he'd had the nerve to wear it or not.
So I guess I wasn't the only one the colonels annoyed there.
Yes, true! And I remember that guy with his diskette nearly every time I glance at the business side of a partially filled CD and notice that. (I wonder whether he ever figured out that what I told him about floppies doesn't apply to CDs.)
I snagged a few from a former employeer when they did a department move and tossed out a lot of old stuff. One of them was still in it's obnoxiously pink verbatim carboard sleeve.
Damn. If you had Model III Super Scripsit on 5.25", I'd want a copy.
Never managed to score any machines in the Model II/12/16/6000 series for my collection, alas, though I wanted on pretty badly. I do have a bare, hard-sector (I think), 8" floppy drive in my basement, and IIRC the Model III/4 floppy disk controller will talk to 8" drives, but I haven't tried to wire it up to my Model 4 yet. And I'm not certain whether the controller understands hard-sector disks.
Somewhere I've got a hard-sector 5.25" diskette just for show-and-tell, in case I ever need to explain to somebody what "hard sector" and "soft sector" mean. For similar reasons I have an acoustic-coupled 300-baud modem, a 4K-word core memory stack, and I won't sell my ASR-33 TeleType until I get really terribly desperate for money. Unfortunately the Tektronix storage-tube vector-graphic terminal is gone (*sob*).
Irrelevant: Something about the nailpolish just makes this picture for me. I have no idea why. It just catapults it into comedy gold territory.
More on topic: We never had an Apple or a PC that took 5 1/4 disks, but we lived and breathed the C64 for a looooong time. I still have a big old moving box full of C64 disks, many of which were trashed well before their time by stingy parents using a hole puncher to promote single-sided diskettes to double-sided...
I know what you mean about the nail polish. I think it's 'cause she's a pale-skinned redhead wearing a colour that is not only very dated (brown cosmetics = 90's) but also doesn't suit her at all.
The Elmo shirt over top of a striped collared shirt also adds to the whole 90's vibe.
The best Christmas gift I ever gave was the time I went in halfsies with a friend to give his girlfriend (later fiancee, now wife) a used Vic-20, printer, RAM expansion, cassette deck, etc. He typed in a word processor for her from a best-of-some-magazine book (I wound up learning 6502 machine language to help debug it), and she took it to university and wrote all her papers on it (including some that didn't fit on one tape, IIRC). She later said she didn't know what she would have done without it.
Years later, with a 386 in the house (so that 'years later' was still many years ago, now), she said she felt guilty for letting the Vic-20 gather dust on a closet shelf when it had saved her butt in school, but of course it could no longer measure up to even the shadow of her then-current system on a cloudy day. I wonder whether she still has it in her closet.
Yah, I was always worried that I was going to tug too hard and snap something, especially when I wanted to crank it through a many-clock-cycles program and was therefore impatient.
Once upon a time I had the wrist motion just right so that it wouldn't stick as often, but that was a long, long time ago. Despite its flaws, I really missed that sucker until madbodger spotted one at a yard sale and snagged it for me. If nothing else, now when I describe it to incredulous listeners convinced I'm spinning 'em a yarn, I can pull it out and show them I'm not bullshitting them. (Seems there are two types of people: those who had one as a kid and those who find it hard to believe such a thing existed.)
I always wanted to get a bunch of them and gang them together to make a computer with a larger word size. I wanted to be able to multiply nybbles on it. But now that I'm older and have a little more grasp of the mechanical issues, I think the flexibility of the plastic and the added drag of the additional layers would probably keep that from working.
My current problem is that I don't drag it out often enough, so every time I want to show it off the rubber bands have rotted and need to be replaced. *sigh*
I should really get around to posting the short video syntonic_comma shot of it counting.
17 seconds, 25KB, counting down from 7 to 0 (1's digit at top). 2006.07.16-19.07.29.avi (http://bdchivers.home.comcast.net/lj/2006.07.16-19.07.29.avi) (I'm a bit behind in my reading....)
I used a TRS-80, and learned machine language on it (I eventually scraped together the $30 for an assembler, but by then the brain-damage from programming in machine code had already been done).
I often wished for front panel lights and a halt/single-step switch! (Hey, the minicomputer at university had those -- even if I never got to touch them -- so I knew what I was missing.)
I have a box of paper tape in the basement. A box of 9 track magtape. Several boxes of punch cards, including the old ACM ASCI art files.. Another box of DECtape (the original). At least one 7 track magtape. Multiple boxes of 8" floppy disks, at least on still in shrinkwrap. A large box of C64 5.25" diskettes. Another large box of Kaypro II/4 diskettes,
Machines: Several Kaypro II's, 4's, & 10's. Morrow MicroDecision. C64, C-128, 3 TRS Model 16/6000's, one with a huge 30MB drive... parts from everything to build a Z-80 box, several 8088 machines, A large box of 386 mainboards, etc. I shut down my last 486-based FreeBSD box several years ago & replaced it with an AMD K6-based system (blazing 200MHz cpu...)
I guess it's one of perks (?) of passing 50, when I talk about the "old days" to kids, I have the toys to prove it...
I didn't get my first chance to play with a non-mechanical computer until I was in high school, and I didn't build it myself -- I still don't have that level of hardware-geek-fu, and certainly don't get the "started at 13" bonus even in software geekery[*], though I'm comfortable with my retrocomputing and general-geek cred, even if I'm not quite in your league. I had friends who could whomp up circuits like that, and I kept thinking I should be able to, so when I was 16 I was more insecure about that.
My TeleType came already modded for RS232; I was originally planning to hook it to a scavenged Varian 620i, so I was trying to figure out how to change it back to current loop, but I wasn't able get the Varian working (or hold onto it through multiple moves), so it's just as well that my TeleType is RS232 now.
Though I'm having trouble getting modern versions of getty to a) slow down to 110 baud, and b) do the uppercase-login thing that older versions used to do (where the second attempt to log in in uppercase would cause it to stty the port to the mode where uppercase input is converted to lowercase and backslashes are used to indicate what should stay uppercase). Worst case, I'll have to get around to digging out the old Xenix 1.0 floppies just to have a box the TTY can log in on, but IIRC there's no Ethernet support in Xenix 1.0 so I'll have to connect to other machines on my LAN via UUCP or 'cu'. I back-burnered the project a while ago because I had more urgent stuff to do, but didn't actually give up on it. I want to post to a.f.c (news:alt.folklore.computers) from it someday, just to be able to say I'm doing so.
Before I got my own TeleType, I did use one -- and the paper tape reader/punch -- for one of the classes I took. The summer I took COBOL (because I'd already taken ForTran at UD (that's Dallas, not Delaware) and I wanted to take a class locally just to be able to have access to a computer while I was home for the summer), Bowie State was still using TeleTypes (and one DecWriter) connected to a Univac 1100-10 in Towson via acoustic modems (the ForTran class used punch cards). I think it was only one year later that Bowie State got a couple of Vaxen of its own and a terminal ward full of Gigis, but that first summer we were told to copy our files off to paper tape at the end of every week because our disk files were supposed to be purged on the weekends (but the sysadmins often didn't do that anyhow).
The fourth COBOL program I wrote, and the second one I ever typed in, took a file full of lines that started in column one and shifted them over, filling in line numbers on the left and a 'deck ID' on the right. The professor looked over my shoulder as I was entering an assignment and noticed that I wasn't spacing over six spaces. He asked about that and I said, "I got tired of doing that."
"Well what are you going to do when the compiler complains that you didn't?"
"Oh, this --" as I finished typing up that program and fed it to my hack.
"What do you want to learn instead of COBOL," the professor asked. "If you help the other students I'll teach you what you want instead, since I'm obviously not going to be teaching you COBOL."
"Uh, Algol?" I suggested.
BTW, the editor on the Univac sucked. I'd gotten used to the one on the HP3000 at UD (running MPE), and oh was the editor under Exec-8 abysmal in comparison! No wonder my father (who used to use a Univac 1108 at work) stuck to punch cards for so long.
[*] My geekery, but not my geek-fu, started earlier in that I was counting in binary, octal, and hex long before I learned long division, could read a punch card just by looking at the holes not much later, and understood how magnetic core memory and vacuum tubes worked. But I wasn't programming or building stuff until high school. Lack of access, mostly. I'm just old enough to remember the time before pocket calculators; programmable pocket calculators and digital watches with LED displays were still novel when I was in high school. My first access to a computer I was allowed to program myself (not counting the programmable calculators) came in 12th grade -- a TRS-80 Model I at school.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 06:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 06:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 06:21 pm (UTC)Last year I weeded a bunch of old compsci books from our collection. The accompanying disks, CD-ROMs, or whatever had been stored in separate files behind the circulation desk, so I was thinning those out at the same time. Actual exchange with one of our student workers:
Student: What's that?
Me: It's a 5 1/4-inch disk. It came packaged with this book on Windows 3.1. [The compsci collection hadn't been weeded in a LONG time.]
Student: ...so that's why they're called floppy disks. I always wondered.
Hee.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 10:16 pm (UTC)I remember back when I was working for the Army, and a colonel (why were all the folks who gave me grief all colonels?) showed up with a floppy disk in his hand and wanted me to read it for him. Problem was, it was a floppy disk (8") not a diskette (5.25") and he Just Wouldn't Understand why I couldn't somehow squeeze it into a 5.25" drive somehow even after a few explanations.
No shit, I was there; this isn't a FOAF story. I was the one he was complaining to.
I finally got him to verify my guess that it was a Wang disk, and emailed a friend over at the Department of Labour who sysadminned a bunch o' Wangs to ask him whether he had any 8" floppy drives. He did, but getting the data converted into an MS-DOS-intelligible form and shipped back to one of my machines was a major headache.
To add insult to injury, the colonel decided that the resulting loss of formatting meant he was just going to have somebody re-type the whole thing anyhow. *grrr*
Another time, an officer (don't recall whether it was another colonel or not) came into my branch asking why his computer insisted that his (5.25") diskette was full when it "obviously" wasn't. He was (I am not making this up) convinced that it was only haf full because he saw a visual difference in the media surface about halfway out (there was more wear on the inner half than the outer half). He was, at least, easier to convince that I knew what the [expletive] I was talking about when I explained that you couldn't actually tell how full a diskette was by looking at it like that. But it did take multiple phrasings.
(Because of these personally-experienced episodes and similar ones, I'm inclined to give rather more credit to various user-support urban legends than to random non-tech-support urban legends in general.)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-07 04:07 am (UTC)This is bringing back memories I haven't visited in a long time
Date: 2008-05-07 06:33 am (UTC)But yeah, other than that one instance, the other non-colonel episodes failed to measure up to the annoyances the colonels inflicted.
Other than my trips into the Pentagon (which made for amusing reactions at the metal detector, but that's another story), I didn't talk directly to folks of higher rank than colonel all that often; when I did, they weren't a PITA like the colonels were. And when I had to deal with officers from other services (Navy, IIRC, and Coast Guard for sure), Boss2 ran interference a little bit. The most Overt Attitude I got was from a UNIX sysadmin at another site (she was Sysadmin Of Every System In Her Building and resented that we were installing a Xenix box that she wasn't Absolute Mistress of; we had to give her a root password on it anyhow), but once I pulled a stunt clever enough that she had to admit she was impressed, she warmed up to me (and, more importantly, to our project!). And she was more of a problem for my supervisor than for me, anyhow.
Farther off topic
Date: 2008-05-07 06:44 am (UTC)I came in that morning, and immediately ran into my branch chief talking to my boss1 and somebody else. He glanced at me, then turned and stared at my button, and his face darkened.
I thought, "Uh oh. Tactical error. Pissed off the grand-boss."
After a few seconds of him staring and me sweating, he said, "Can I borrow that pin? I have a meeting with a couple of colonels and some other branch chiefs in a few minutes, and I think I need that pin."
I removed the button, handed it to him, and continued on to my desk with a sigh of relief. An hour or two later he stopped by my desk to return it and thank me. I don't recall at the moment whether he said he'd had the nerve to wear it or not.
So I guess I wasn't the only one the colonels annoyed there.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-07 11:36 pm (UTC)Assuming you remember whether they are filled from the outside in or inside out.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-08 09:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-13 10:10 am (UTC)Kinesis keyboard love!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 07:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 07:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 10:24 pm (UTC)Never managed to score any machines in the Model II/12/16/6000 series for my collection, alas, though I wanted on pretty badly. I do have a bare, hard-sector (I think), 8" floppy drive in my basement, and IIRC the Model III/4 floppy disk controller will talk to 8" drives, but I haven't tried to wire it up to my Model 4 yet. And I'm not certain whether the controller understands hard-sector disks.
Somewhere I've got a hard-sector 5.25" diskette just for show-and-tell, in case I ever need to explain to somebody what "hard sector" and "soft sector" mean. For similar reasons I have an acoustic-coupled 300-baud modem, a 4K-word core memory stack, and I won't sell my ASR-33 TeleType until I get really terribly desperate for money. Unfortunately the Tektronix storage-tube vector-graphic terminal is gone (*sob*).
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-07 01:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-07 06:46 am (UTC)Ok, I'm old. I admit it.
Date: 2008-05-06 07:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 07:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 08:03 pm (UTC)Barely.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 08:10 pm (UTC)More on topic: We never had an Apple or a PC that took 5 1/4 disks, but we lived and breathed the C64 for a looooong time. I still have a big old moving box full of C64 disks, many of which were trashed well before their time by stingy parents using a hole puncher to promote single-sided diskettes to double-sided...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 09:28 pm (UTC)The Elmo shirt over top of a striped collared shirt also adds to the whole 90's vibe.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 08:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 08:32 pm (UTC)I only owned, like, two Atari games, but man, the ADAM was fun.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 08:53 pm (UTC)A Coleco ADAM will not run with a 'Beach Boys' cassette tape in it.
The poor thing was never quite the same after that...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-07 01:11 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-07 03:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-07 07:06 am (UTC)Years later, with a 386 in the house (so that 'years later' was still many years ago, now), she said she felt guilty for letting the Vic-20 gather dust on a closet shelf when it had saved her butt in school, but of course it could no longer measure up to even the shadow of her then-current system on a cloudy day. I wonder whether she still has it in her closet.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 09:47 pm (UTC)(Once. After that I lost interest.)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 10:30 pm (UTC)One of my friends had ... uh, either an Elf or a Super Elf, I forget which. I don't think he had flopy drives either.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 10:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 10:52 pm (UTC)Once upon a time I had the wrist motion just right so that it wouldn't stick as often, but that was a long, long time ago. Despite its flaws, I really missed that sucker until
I always wanted to get a bunch of them and gang them together to make a computer with a larger word size. I wanted to be able to multiply nybbles on it. But now that I'm older and have a little more grasp of the mechanical issues, I think the flexibility of the plastic and the added drag of the additional layers would probably keep that from working.
My current problem is that I don't drag it out often enough, so every time I want to show it off the rubber bands have rotted and need to be replaced. *sigh*
I should really get around to posting the short video
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 10:58 pm (UTC)You're actually one up on me. I owned a DigiComp, built it, played with it a little, got bored, put it back on the shelf.
DigiComp I - the movie
Date: 2008-08-25 01:56 am (UTC)(I'm a bit behind in my reading....)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-07 07:10 am (UTC)I often wished for front panel lights and a halt/single-step switch! (Hey, the minicomputer at university had those -- even if I never got to touch them -- so I knew what I was missing.)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 10:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 10:19 pm (UTC)I win.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 10:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-06 10:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-07 01:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-07 07:11 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-07 07:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-08 02:52 pm (UTC)Machines: Several Kaypro II's, 4's, & 10's. Morrow MicroDecision. C64, C-128, 3 TRS Model 16/6000's, one with a huge 30MB drive... parts from everything to build a Z-80 box, several 8088 machines, A large box of 386 mainboards, etc. I shut down my last 486-based FreeBSD box several years ago & replaced it with an AMD K6-based system (blazing 200MHz cpu...)
I guess it's one of perks (?) of passing 50, when I talk about the "old days" to kids, I have the toys to prove it...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-08 10:40 am (UTC)My TeleType came already modded for RS232; I was originally planning to hook it to a scavenged Varian 620i, so I was trying to figure out how to change it back to current loop, but I wasn't able get the Varian working (or hold onto it through multiple moves), so it's just as well that my TeleType is RS232 now.
Though I'm having trouble getting modern versions of getty to a) slow down to 110 baud, and b) do the uppercase-login thing that older versions used to do (where the second attempt to log in in uppercase would cause it to stty the port to the mode where uppercase input is converted to lowercase and backslashes are used to indicate what should stay uppercase). Worst case, I'll have to get around to digging out the old Xenix 1.0 floppies just to have a box the TTY can log in on, but IIRC there's no Ethernet support in Xenix 1.0 so I'll have to connect to other machines on my LAN via UUCP or 'cu'. I back-burnered the project a while ago because I had more urgent stuff to do, but didn't actually give up on it. I want to post to a.f.c (news:alt.folklore.computers) from it someday, just to be able to say I'm doing so.
Before I got my own TeleType, I did use one -- and the paper tape reader/punch -- for one of the classes I took. The summer I took COBOL (because I'd already taken ForTran at UD (that's Dallas, not Delaware) and I wanted to take a class locally just to be able to have access to a computer while I was home for the summer), Bowie State was still using TeleTypes (and one DecWriter) connected to a Univac 1100-10 in Towson via acoustic modems (the ForTran class used punch cards). I think it was only one year later that Bowie State got a couple of Vaxen of its own and a terminal ward full of Gigis, but that first summer we were told to copy our files off to paper tape at the end of every week because our disk files were supposed to be purged on the weekends (but the sysadmins often didn't do that anyhow).
The fourth COBOL program I wrote, and the second one I ever typed in, took a file full of lines that started in column one and shifted them over, filling in line numbers on the left and a 'deck ID' on the right. The professor looked over my shoulder as I was entering an assignment and noticed that I wasn't spacing over six spaces. He asked about that and I said, "I got tired of doing that."
"Well what are you going to do when the compiler complains that you didn't?"
"Oh, this --" as I finished typing up that program and fed it to my hack.
"What do you want to learn instead of COBOL," the professor asked. "If you help the other students I'll teach you what you want instead, since I'm obviously not going to be teaching you COBOL."
"Uh, Algol?" I suggested.
BTW, the editor on the Univac sucked. I'd gotten used to the one on the HP3000 at UD (running MPE), and oh was the editor under Exec-8 abysmal in comparison! No wonder my father (who used to use a Univac 1108 at work) stuck to punch cards for so long.
[*] My geekery, but not my geek-fu, started earlier in that I was counting in binary, octal, and hex long before I learned long division, could read a punch card just by looking at the holes not much later, and understood how magnetic core memory and vacuum tubes worked. But I wasn't programming or building stuff until high school. Lack of access, mostly. I'm just old enough to remember the time before pocket calculators; programmable pocket calculators and digital watches with LED displays were still novel when I was in high school. My first access to a computer I was allowed to program myself (not counting the programmable calculators) came in 12th grade -- a TRS-80 Model I at school.
LOL
Date: 2008-05-06 10:44 pm (UTC)I did at this.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-07 10:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-12 05:41 am (UTC)