Age

[CRC]

Nico de Jong mused:

>> It could be interesting to know the age"spread" of thist list
>> contributors, and how long we've had the computer virus under
>> our skin.
>>

Age: around 1700 fortnights...

First glimpse  of the deamon occurred relatively late in life (as 
measured by this crowd) when working on an Army missile project in '65 
which was the first to use PERT. Shoved in cards and got back reams of 
paper. The following year learned patch-panel programming on a punch 
card system in the jungle.

The real bug was caught in grad school when our department got a PDP-8. 
Spent one night with the beast and taught myself FOCAL. Shortly after, 
our group got a Nova 1200 attached to a pulse-height analyzer which one 
programmed by reading in tapes on a clunk-clunk and punching out 
results (editor in -> program out, compiler in-> program in-> assembly 
out, assembler in -> assembly code in-> object out, object in-> run 
program -- one did not make a mistake). Language was the Algol (with 
which DG wrote RTOS and RDOS).

And then along came a PDP-9 with 3 DEC tapes and 8 kwords of memory and 
my invention of the operating system - that is until I found out that 
the box came with one. Wrote my first GUI program in FORTRAN 4 on that 
box - a background fitting affair that used a light pen on the 
displayed data (can you say Chain...?). Read in the data from the Nova 
and printed a graph of the result. Beat feeding cards to the CDC6400 
and waiting a day to get back results.

Went on to gin up a data collection system on a Modcomp which we took 
on tour around the US collecting data from a U2 flying a laser. 
Subsequent work on a disertation used the system to feed data to a 
DEC10 which front-ended a Cyber on which I churned through many CPU 
hours (and $) crunching the data.

Escaped from academia and started a company in which we developed a 
automation controller using the National 32016 using a VAX730 as the 
development tool. That VAX ran 7 years with a down time of less than a 
week... Brought the beast home when the company folded, but adopted it 
out to a list member when I realized that I could only run it on winter 
nights with the doors open.

My first personal computer was a LISA. Real multi-tasking with a real 
GUI - (Oh Steve why did you stray from the true path....).

Current project is designing passive filters using a genetic algorithm 
(gasp!!) - the fitness function is fuzzy :-P

My current collection consists of a smattering of Macs of various 
vintage, a VAX3540 (used to be two 3520s), Sun 1000E, and an Alfa 
server which isn't up and running yet.

Hey, the game is still fun and I'm not about to quit.

	CRC