Ahh, memories...
The first computer I worked on was a Honeywell 200, 16K main memory, 8 tape drives,
holerith card reader, paper tape reader... Then I moved up to the 1401,
1410, 7010 and the holy grail, the 360
My first PC, I could turn on the power switch and listen for the jet engine disk
drive to spool up... I could walk down 2 flights of stairs, get coffee and a bagel,
walk back up 2 flights of stairs and it would finally be at the C:\ prompt. I still
have a 5 or 10 meg disk drive somewhere, I still have a couple of boxes of holerith
cards laying around and a 9 inch floppy disk from an old Teradata PC
Now that you mention it, I might still have a 640K memory add-on card for an XT
laying around somewhere.
My wedding present from my wife was a Heathkit H19 terminal kit that I had to assemble.
First time I ever used a soldering iron, it fired up on the first power on, I was shocked
Combined with the upgraded 300bps modem, it saved me many a night of going over to
the computer center at Rutgers while I finished my degree. Oh yeah, the modem wasn't one
of the new-fangled cable jobs, it was the old style where you had to put the phone handset
into the foam ear-pieces when you heard the other end answer with the modem tone...
If you take the better tour at NASA, you can go into the control room bunker where they
launched the mercury astronauts from... When you see the technology from back then, you
realize just how amazing it was they survived...
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