Alex wrote: > First, great conversation on the "historic" machines. My fondest > memory is of an 8080 CP/M machine I built with my dad that included > the cassette tape storage and later an 8" floppy drive. A very > rudimentary BASIC where we typed in sheets and sheets of code to play > a simple Star Trek game where '*' was the Klingons and '()' were the > good ships. There was no debugger, so when we entered it wrong, we had > to start at the top and read through the printouts to find the simple > typo. > I was trying to stay out of it ... but Star Trek dragged me in! My first computer exposure was with a teletype terminal connected from a cabin in Vermont to the MIT mainframe, circa 1969. We would spend our math class beta testing our teacher's (Mac Oglesby) Star Trek program, along with a few grad students (playing the Klingons) on the mainframe side. The game ended up being installed on HP calculators, where it undoubtedly played better than during our mainframe sessions. Talk about network latency! Fire a photon torpedo and wait about 5 minutes to find out if you hit anything. Good times. Sorry about the sidetrack ... carry on!
James Butler
