who here already worked with these ?

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Dec 15, 2009, C M Reinehr wrote:
>On Tue 15 December 2009 01:04:46 pm Michael Hipp wrote:
>> vu Pham wrote:
...
>I wrote my first computer program during the summer of 1965 in Fortran (Daniel 
>McCracken, of course) on an IBM 7094. Later, wrote a little Algol on a 
>Burroughs B5500. Then, a while later, wrote Basic on an RCA Spectra 70 (I 
>haven't heard anyone mention that one yet.

You beat me by a bit.  The first time I used a computer was in
February 1966 on the Bendix G-20.  Undergraduates at Hopkins in
the Physics and Math departments didn't get any computer time.

>The Spectra 70 bears a special mention. That was my first multi-user 
>experience. Instead of submitting a punched card deck at the operator window, 
>there was a room full of Western Electric teletypewriters, which we could use 
>to write & run programs in Basic. Backup was a roll of yellow paper tape & a 
>tape punch mounted on the side of the tty. (And, we thought we were _really_ 
>cool! ;-) We got good use of the backup tapes because the system would crash 
>about every 30 minutes.

The B-5500 was also multi-user, and I used it with the Comnet
time sharing service in Washington D.C. with the teletype, paper
tape terminals.  Comnet was formed by several sales people who
had been with G.E. Time Sharing, taking a good number of their
customers with them to Comnet.  These services were half-duplex,
and it was always a bit of a gamble to see if one could upload a
program on paper tape and save it before the time sharing
computer crashed.

We also did some time sharing on a system which ran on an XDS 940
(nee SDS before Xerox bought it) which was full duplex.  This was
nicer because (a) one could tell if the server went down while
uploading as the TTY would stop printing, and (b) it had a nice
editor that allowed interactive editing.

The phone company wanted big money to put a singple-pole
single-throw switch on the TTYs to switch between half and full
duplex, and I got in trouble when one of their techs came in to
see the one I had taped to the side of the box.  This required
educating the receptionist so that I was the only person who
could escort techs back into our secure facility, giving me time
to remove the evidence.

>My first experience with Unix was, actually, with Xenix on a microcomputer 
>powered by a Zilog Z80 (8-bit, don't you know), with a 5-1/4" floppy & and 
>something like a 5 or 10 MB "Winchester" hard drive.

My first *nix experience was in 1982 on the Radio Shack Model 16
which had a Z-80 for I/O and a Motorola 68000 main processor.
The first versions of Xenix would fit on an 8MB hard drive, and
fit on 3 640k 8in floppies.  The Development System was on
another floppy, and had essential things like the ``vi'' editor
so I made sure that all my Xenix customers bought the devsys as I
couldn't deal with ``ed''.

Bill
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