Post #3061203

2025-12-05 03:15 UTC

@asakiyume@wandering.shop @rgammans@dice.camp @janeishly@beige.party My first interactions with a computer were over one of those. 300 baud acoustic dial-up, on a briefcase-sized portable terminal that my father would take home from work in the mid to late 1970s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_700

Replies (1)

@DavidPenington@aus.social 2026-03-28 04:08

@mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz @asakiyume@wandering.shop @rgammans@dice.camp @janeishly@beige.party I think I used one of those, briefly, at school. 1975 I think. At that period my high school had, for a year, a 16k-word PDP-11/10 running BASIC on two teletypes & a VT52 CRT terminal. I've watched the blinking console panel lights & flicked the bootstrap loader (in octal) into the front panel switches, before it read the loader program & then BASIC interpreter from paper tape on the teletype - 45 minutes at10 characters per second! That's a slow program load time! I used the first 32 bit version of Unix in March 1980. I carried programs on boxes of punch cards across to the computer centre in 1980-81 summer holidays. I worked professionally on the old usenet/interconnected networks from 1984, while working at Melbourne University. When I was 10, I had a week with a PDP-8 at a nearby school. 4k of 12 bit words, FOCAL language. I worked with someone who was in the first Computer Science university intake in the world, the year I started kindergarten & was friends with a lecturer who worked with Australia's first computer, with mercury acoustic delay lines as main memory - a bit like "bubble memory" of the 1970s, but volatile & chemically toxic. I'm 64.

Open ##3061204