(no subject)

[cellio]

I just walked through a door that is being held open by a computer. (Not the one named "doorstop", however.)

We joke about that sort of thing, but I don't think I've actually seen a computer doorstop since my CMU days. Mmmm... Perq -- doorstop and space heater rolled into one! :-)

(The Perq was a fine machine for its time; I had no complaints. Some projects tended to use machines far past their times, however, and that can be more challenging.)

Comments

[goljerp]

Hmm... when I was an undergrad, there were a series of corridors in the science building which had turned into the home for unused equipment. I think that there was a DEC PDP-11 or somesuch hunkering down there. Another corridor down in the basement had some really cool and old vacuum equipment. I'd walk down there whenever I needed to use the Chemistry department instrument room (or the VT-220 that lived down there... after I got a key, it was the only terminal that I had 24/7 access to.)

[cellio]

When I was a student the computer club had a PDP-8 and I think some other member of that family. I never learned how to program them, though. I used the school's TOPS-20 machines for most of my time there. (Eventually I got a job with the CS department and was introduced to Unix.)

[goljerp]

I was going to say that the first computer I spent any amount of time with was a PDP-11, but realized that's not true.

I did my first (Basic) programming on the Commodore PET (and PAL) at UMass. Later I played around a bit on the UMass mainframe (a Cyber?), and then a PDP-11. Ah, fond memories... (Actually on the PDP-11 I was more into writing content than programs, although I did some of that too... including an attempt to find the highest prime number, and a little batch job that sent a terminal message to Scott Stathis every 2 minutes and then resubmitted itself...