Sean LaFianza’s Neighborhood

Just wondering if I am the only person that tends to eat more when they are sick. It's like, I feel bad, so I go around the house eating whatever I can get my hands on hoping that it will be the magical thing that will make me feel better. In the end, I'm still sick and now my pants are tight too. 

Oh, well - I've forgotten the model numbers.  This is what happens when you take the time at a party to learn someone's name - you learn their name and make the whole evening special but you sacrifice some other random piece of information.  In this case, model numbers.

As far as I can tell, I used a PDP-10:

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(Taken by Ed Thelen of material owned by Computer History Museum under the non-commercial rule.)

Followed shortly by a VAX 11/780:

Vax11-780

Talk about good times.  I had access to these only because I was friends with the system administrator at school.  He set me up (I think I basically whined a lot until he did) with a user name and password.  My first user name and therefore email address ever was "tomato". I don't know why I chose that.  He said "What do you want for a user name?" and I spouted out "Tomato".  So I was known as "tomato" for a few years.  Whenever I logged in I'd hear "Hey, there is a Tomato on the system!".  I had email and was able to send/receive with a few friends that were online also - mostly right there at the school.

A few years ago a customer was walking through my company and he was talking about how he had made all of his money in the "internet" and how he had his first email address in 1988.  That's how he started his conversation.  It was like "How did you get rich in the internet?" and his first statement was "I had my first email address in 1988".  Obviously there was something else involved because I had my first email address in 1983 and I didn't make it big in the internet.  Of course, the internet wasn't really there yet so much back then.  I think there was ARPANET, etc - but I'm not going to go into all of that.

I didn't do anything really constructive on either of these systems at the time besides read newsgroups.  Later, maybe around 1987 I had to have a "real" account because I had a class on the VAX so the "tomato" account went away and I moved to something like just "wilso_d" or something else mundane.  At that point I was taking an operating system class and we had to write our own OS in something like C or Pascal.  It's all vague at this point, but none-the-less, this was my moment to both PDP and VAX systems.  Both were pretty good considering the time frame.  All text-based as I recall with dumb-terminals.  I think the world really was faster before the advent of fancy graphical user interfaces (aka Windows).

You can read more about the VAX here.

Is it "Write A Blog Every Day For A Month" again?  Because I'm already 10 behind.  So here is a post from about two years ago where I said "Oh, I'm going to post about every computer I've ever used!" and then I stopped, right after this one.  Lord Kalvan has been posting about a bunch of old computers and it reminded me of my original intent.

So here goes - I'm going to take a few posts to talk about the different computers I've used.  I'll start with the very first one.  This is the Commodore CBM-8032.  This came out around 1980 and had a massive 32k of RAM.  It had an 80 column by 25 line green monochrome screen.  The CPU was a 6502 2Mhz.

CBM_8032

This was owned by the science department at my high school.  1980 (10th grade for me) was well before the school had computer labs, etc.  This was the ONLY computer in the school and we found it in the back of a store room where it wasn't being used. 

It was beautiful.  I used this from 1980 through 1982.

The base model used tapes, but the school actually had a dual floppy drive for it.  I sent a letter to Commodore to see if they could send me any information on it, and they sent me a copy of their Commodore magazine.  It was cool because it was filled with source code you could key in and also had instructions on how to do things with the system - like print.  Yeah, this was before all of the magic we rely on today.  Internet?  Ha!  I don't think so.

My first program was in BASIC and said something like:

10 PRINT "DEWITTE"
20 GOTO 10

and I'd run it... and run it.. and run it...  There were three of us who started hanging around the back of the science room every chance we had - before school, after school, during lunch.  We'd write programs and key in games and play them.  One I recall the most is StarTrek (where you were a big E (for enterprise) and it moves around looking out for K (Klingons).  Ah, good times, good times.

I would send a note to Commodore and when I received a reply, it would come from a different address.  I thought something was up - they kept moving.  Eventually I think they went away, but that wasn't until after the Vic-20, Commodore 64, and the Amiga.  The only one of these I seriously used was the Amiga, but that's for another post.

I used to sit in the back of the classroom and just write mindless programs and listen to Supertramp on a cassette boom-box that I built (yes, built - and sad really because I don't have a single picture of it).

Sure, I've been sick for a week and a half now with a cold that is holding on like a pit bull. And swine flu has hit the kids' school (not my kids luckily). But there are the graces in life that make it all ok. 

Not liking:

So, we've been slackers. We haven't carved pumpkins since, oh, 2004. But that's ok. We did today, well, Steve and the kids did. And they are spectacular. 

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1 comment

Do you know how hard it is to decide which delicious Halloween cereal to have for breakfast after weeks of Activia yogurt mixed with granola? So hard I had to have a bowl of each. Franken Berry won hands down. Best taste and marshmallow to cereal ratio, in case you were wondering. 

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, originally uploaded by Theremina.

I have no idea what's going on here, but I love it.