[geeks] What's your computing history?

[Robert J. Slover]

[*Very* Long]

Okay, ...my computing history...I'll probably add
my current inventory in here too.  BTW, I'm 31.

I grew up very poor, so came to technology by way
of fixing things to earn money and/or to get a
thing that someone else threw away into working
order.  I fixed a shortwave radio for a friend of
my Dad's when I was 7.  Dad was a mechanic, and he
brought me home any type of broken electrical 
do-hickey he came across.  I did all kinds of things
with switches and relays...even figured out how to
build logic gates before I even knew what they were.

When I was 9, we moved out into the country (well, a
very small town).  Walking home from the bus stop one
day I was cutting across a yard and noticed a guy
fighting to align a homemade solar panel up against 
the side of his house.  He did all sorts of cool hack
projects, and I was over there a lot.  Dad worked all
the time.  This guy was some middle-level manager at
Eli-Lilly and at the time they were requiring people
in his position to learn programming in BASIC (on the
VAX?)  He hated it. I borrowed his books one night and 
went through the first dozen or so chapters, writing
out the code longhand on paper.  I soon began helping
do his 'homework' for him in exchange for the books.

Even after that was over, I kept writing code for the
fun of it.  I didn't get to physically touch any 
computer until I was 13, a freshman in high school.
We had Apple ][e's.  You had to take typing before you
could take computers, but I got in in the last year
that we had clubs and joined the computer club.  I 
already knew more than the teacher running it.  I 
wrote tons of code on the Apple II's and learned some
assembly on it.  I didn't get to buy a machine until
near Christmas of that year.  My two brothers and I
agreed that we wanted a computer and I located a used
TI-99/4a for sale on a local radio program.  We paid
$75 for it just around the time they stopped making 
them...this was our Christmas present, and the best
one I ever got.

By this time one other guy near my age (2 years younger
but near enough) moved into our town.  He was a gamer.
His parents bought him a C64 and I wrote games for him.
He never caught on to coding.  

When I graduated high school I went to college to study 
electrical engineering.  I went to a really good but 
very expensive school.  I landed in an honors 
programming class my first quarter...FORTRAN, and I 
hated it.  This was my first experience with PC's (IBM).
I much, much more enjoyed using VAX/VMS, on a VT-101 or
GIGI terminals.  At that point I'd have taken an 
Apple ][ over a PC any day.  I was there one year too 
late to use the card readers but did spend some very
enjoyable time on DecWriters.  I worked a slew of jobs 
to try to keep up with the cost of being there.  In one
class I wrote a simulation of NASA's Transportable 
Application Environment as an on disk 'ad' in HyperCard.
This let me meet MacIntosh, and that led me to a 
full-time job working at the local paper as a typesetter
on Mac II's from 1-7am.  First I fell in love with the
Mac, then I fell in love with the Graphic Artist I was
training to use them (who is now my wife of 10 years).

Meanwhile, I helped one roommate run the Crystal Caverns
BBS (ST-adel) and another friend run the Kingdom of 
Melnibone BBS (WWIV).  The fellow running the latter 
wrote tons of popular mods and utilities (Base-64 mod,
BasePack, etc.).  I learned Pascal and DCL on the VAX,
worked in the computing center, and had to give up in
the first quarter of my Junior year.  I didn't have the
cash and my work ethic is such that I can't leave with
a job unfinished even if I have to be in class :-(.  

A short while later I ended up quiting the paper, spent 
a year as a carpenter, then took a job as a typesetter 
doing ads for medical journals.  Here I learned much 
more about PC's, still loved Macs, and suffered through
DOS and Netware hell.  I loved GEM though and Ventura
Publisher.  I did some Macintosh and VMS consulting on
the side, picked up C programming, and subcontracted to
write some EGA video code that ended up in a commercial
card game, and some reporting code that ended up in a
commercial insurance package later bought by Prudential.  

I then took a job at a PC-clone shop and ended up 
writing custom database applications.  That was a 
horrible job but only because of the boss and his wife.  
Meanwhile I picked up a junked 386-20 and fixed the 
traces that the leaking lithium cell had eaten, and 
installed my copy of Linux 0.92a which was on a CD I got
in trade for helping create the artwork for the front.
My boss thought I was nuts to want to run Unix. (This was
my second personal computer after the TI.)

I stuck it out there for about 3 years before being hired 
by Applied Computing Devices to do documentation.  I 
never did any. When my new boss found out I knew Unix and 
SQL, I ended up as the DBA on a project that had to be 
completed in 3 months (starting from design).  The next
day the project leader arrived, that night he wrote the
initial design, and the next day I used awk to rip apart
a textdump of the word document and format the tables as 
SQL.  I loved that job.  My pay more than doubled, and I 
learned PL/SQL, Oracle Forms, Perl, and became familiar
with AIX and Ultrix development, as well as a bunch of
proprietary languages and environments.  The company
soon had hard times though when a single customer who
meant 80% of the yearly income decided to slow-pay on
a major project.  The company had borrowed on future
earnings and the day my daughter was born they let all
but 30 of the nearly 200 people go.  Luckily I was one
of the 30 they kept.  

Just a few months later I took a job as a programmer at 
the same college I had to leave just 5 years earlier.  
Within a couple of months I was the SysAdmin for the 
Administrative VMS cluster and about 200 PC's (as well
as a programmer).  I was there 5 years and helped see 
the transition from a custom in-house flat-file 
administration system to a COTS Oracle application.
When our VP retired, I really did not like his 
replacement and left.  I'm now back at the smaller of 
the two buildings that use to be ACD, with the same 
group of people, but now part of a huge international
corporation that is second in the world in most of 
their markets.  And again, I love my job. 

Computer Inventory:

1 TI-99/4a, in mint condition :-)

1 Sun SS20, 128M Ram, Dual 150Mhz ROSS CPU's, with
  1 2GB, 1 4GB, and 1 40GB hard disks.  This is my
  current desktop machine.

1 Pentium 133, 192M Ram, 18GB ATA hard disk, headless,
  running Linux.

1 NeXT Turbo Cube with Dimension board & Color NeXT 
  monitor.

1 NeXT Color Slab

1 NeXT Turbo Cube with Mono monitor

5 NeXTStation slabs not in use, without monitors.

1 IBM RT, with 20" Color monitor, running AIX 3.2.x

1 TI 1500 M68000-based Nubus Unix machine, running
  TI Unix.  Unfortunately, no ethernet and Y2k issues.
  3 terminal concentrators and 1 TI terminal with it.

1 DecStation 5000/133, 128M Ram, 2GB HD, running NetBSD

1 DEC Alpha 3000-300, 128M, 2G, running OSF/1

1 DEC Alpha 3000-300, 128M, 2G, running VMS 6.2

1 DEC VaxStation 3100-M38, 24M, 1GB, running VMS 6.2

1 DEC MicroVax II, 12M Ram, 300M disk, running VMS 5.5
  in tall, narrow, 'space heater' case.

1 DEC MicroVax II, 12M Ram, disks currently toast, in
  larger, 'coffee-table' enclosure (but not the one 
  with the wooden top, unfortunately).

1 VaxServer 3400, with companion disk pedastal but
  non-working front panel serial interface, so I don't
  know what else is there.  Does have DSSI though.

1 Macintosh Quadra 900, 128M/1GB.

1 Macintosh Plus, 20MB HD

3 Macintosh II's, each with 5M Ram, 40M HD, and a
  copy of Interleaf Publisher for each.

1 Macintosh IIfx, non-working, with 21" Apple Mono
  monitor and FWB SCSI Jackhammer card.

2 Macintosh IIsi, each with ~12M Ram and 100Mb HD

1 Power Macintosh 6500/250, just acquired and not
  yet working.

1 Power Macintosh 7600/132, 96M/5GB, my wife's 
  machine.

1 Mac IIci, 64M/200M, my daughter's machine.  (She
  wrote her first program at age 4 in Logo.  It drew
  a cat :-) ).

3 AT&T Model 360 XT clones.  My favorite XT's.  Full
  doc set including BIOS dumps.

2 AMS Soundwave laptops, 486-75's, with 20M ram each
  and 300M hard disks.  One has linux installed.  The
  other has Windows on it, (for now).

10 Miscellaneous 486-sx/dx machines in a stack in my
   garage, not yet triaged.

5 VAXen and DECStations I haven't yet brought home
  from work but are mine.  I haven't turned them
  around from the wall yet to know how many of each.  

Oddities: 

1 DEC InfoServer, the rack mount one with several
  CD-ROM's in it...can't recall the model.

1 ACD (the same ACD I worked for) Universal Gateway
  Controller (custom Motorola based unix box with 
  custom OS).

1 MIPS 2030, missing hard disk and RAM.  I can stick
  a hard disk in it, but have no idea where I could
  get an OS for it.  The memory it takes are SIPP's
  (like SIMMs but with pins on them instead of a card
  edge).  I'd love to get this going...  Have a MIPS
  branded mouse with it too...but no keyboard. 

1 IBM XT/3270 Terminal.  I'm not kidding.  It is both.
  It has the 3270 keyboard (with the screw-on 
  connectors) and a monitor which both tie into the
  3270 adapter board (one 3-slot card, I kid you not).
  The monitor is color, but has high-persistence green
  phosphors...the green lingers on the screen while in
  PC mode, which is really wierd.

2 'Victor' CPM machines, complete Doc sets and Digital
  Research CPM programming tools.

90+ NeXT Slabs and Cubes.  Mostly slabs.  In storage,
  more machines than monitors...probably have about
  70 monitors.  Co-own these with another guy, who
  helped me cart them out and would like to sell 
  them. 

Networking:

1 Synoptics LattisHub 2813, 16-port hub
1 RM356 Netgear 56K Modem/Router/4-port hub
5 DecServer 200M (A couple of which I've agreed to 
  let my wife sell on E-bay).

Worst losses:

1 My Kaypro II, in perfect condition, met an untimely
  end before I managed to smuggle it home.  A buddy
  was keeping it at his business until I found a way
  to introduce it to my wife <grin>, someone broke in,
  stole his cash-box, and burned the place down.  He
  had ~2.5M in damage (not counting the Kaypro).

1 My PDP-8, acquired at a time when I had a tiny place
  and could not keep it.  I had to reduce it to a pile
  of parts, most of which have since found homes.

I'm sure I've left something out (well definitely the
various terminals, VXT's, etc.).

--Robert

(Whose Mac inventory is feeling sorely depleted after
 giving 7 of the best away to a local school)