[kwlug-disc] 40 years ago?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Doug Moen (doug at moens.org):

> My dad got an S100/CPM/Z-80 system in 1977, which was a milestone in
> my life.  We skipped the IBM PC, and he got a Macintosh in 1984.  It
> was the Mac that was lifechanging for me. The PC with DOS (which I
> never used) was not that different from CPM.

Hullo, cousin!

I might be able to win this echo of the Four Yorkshiremen skit
by mentioning having been a member of the Homebrew Computer Club
in 1975.  I used to bicycle up from my high school to the Stanford 
Linear Accelerator auditorium to attend meetings. (Oh, forgot to 
mention; I don't have the distinction of being Canadian, though
my mother-in-law Cheryl, who lives in my house in West Menlo Park, is,
so we're a multinational household, in that way among others.) 

As the microcomputer revolution unfolded with all the cassette-tape
bootstrap loading, fuzzy, 40-column screens, and TinyBASIC (developed by
us Homebrewers after we were irked by a cheeky "Open letter to
hobbyists" by one asshat 20-year-old sociopath named Bill Gates of the
small partnership Micro-Soft in Albuquerque), I would play with my
friends' Altairs, but frankly the PDP8s and PDP11s at People's Computer
Company across town and the HP minicomputer at Menlo School / Menlo
College were a lot more interesting.

Microcomputers were, sadly, doomed to never go anywhere, and be 
stuck slowly running CP/M for eternity.  I'm so glad I figured 
that out, early on.  WATFIV (from U. of Waterloo) and SNOBOL were
clearly the wave of the future by the time I got to college at 
Princeton, and that's why we're all running those, today.

(Hey, anyway, greetings to Kitchener, ON from Silicon Valley.)

(Also, no, I am not mocking your national orthography.  I grew up
in the British school system in Hong Kong, RCC, where Dad was 
working as a Pan Am pilot.  You know, flying aeroplanes from the 
Kai Tak aerodrome.)

-- 
Cheers,                        My pid is Inigo Montoya.  You kill -9    
Rick Moen                      my parent process.  Prepare to vi.
rick at linuxmafia.com
McQ!  (4x80)