25 January 2012

Geekery

The SCSon and I meet with a local electronics group on tuesday nights.  Mostly we do radio stuff.  Tonight a member brought in an original 1981 IBM PC complete with the original green text monitor and keyboard (that should be registered with police as a lethal weapon.)

The PC power plug needed some attention and then some .  Once attended to, it eventually booted to some form of BASIC.  I suggested the operator demonstrate "Hello world" circa 1976:   Program it to count from 1 to 10.

"Those neurons have long since past"

I step up and carefully typed:


10 for i = 1 to 10
20 print i
30 next i

Those three lines were Greek to most present!

run

[result:]

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10


You probably heard the cheers when they got the 2.5MB hard drive to boot to DOS!

Heh... playing with stuff that rightfully belongs in a museum.  Does life get any better.  Anyone know where I can sit down at an ENIAC?  or perhaps a CRAY?  Mebbe I'll bring an Atari 800 (+games) next week!  48KB & maxed out, yeah!

Geekery 4eva!

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