33 lines
3.1 KiB
Plaintext
33 lines
3.1 KiB
Plaintext
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Episode: 703
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Title: HPR0703: My Computer History
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0703/hpr0703.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-08 01:12:01
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---
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Hello, this is Bob Evans, and this is the very first podcast I've ever made. I've been a podcast listener for about five years, listened to lots of Linux ones, and even some that aren't around anymore, unfortunately.
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And including HPR, I don't consider it a Linux podcast, but really just general geek stuff, and it's very educational.
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And recently, someone's been talking about early days of computing, and it's like the beginning of the PC days.
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But I'm a bit of an older guy, and my early days of computing go back to the 1960s, when they were doing time sharing in my high school, and they had a terminal there on this service called Rapid Data, they were doing Fortran.
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And that was something I had never seen before. I was like, wow, this stuff looks interesting.
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And I've been playing with computers since then. A couple of years later, I was still in high school.
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They got a computer as big as a desk, very, very unpowerful computer. I mean, 4,000 memory locations, what we might call a mini computer today.
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Did you act 3080, I think, was the model. And if you search on a search engine, you'll find that someone's got a webpage up describing that machine, and maybe even an emulator for that machine.
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And that's where I really got into programming, writing games. We used to use paper tape to store our data.
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It was quite primitive, but I had such a strong amount of enjoyment from it that I still have some of those paper tapes.
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On, later on, I got into the working world, and I used computers by digital equipment, mini computers, again, PDP 11.
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The digital had about 12 different operating systems for that computer. I had a 16-bit word.
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And it was actually quite powerful, but the high-end ones, you could have people on dumb terminals, maybe 100 of them hooked up.
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And the low-end ones was a single user computer. We used a lot for process control, as well as interactive applications, early point-of-sale terminal systems, things like that.
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I ended up, because I liked that computer so much working for digital, I spent 22 years in their employee, and as things were looking like digital was going away,
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and I knew their proprietary operating systems, RSX, VMS, VMS, very well. But there's got to be some life after death.
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Around the mid-1990s, I happened to be in a computer store, and I grabbed a book, which was like, you know, some discontinued book.
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And it actually had a slackware disk inside, and how to install and run slackware. And it's like, wow, I think this is very fun and useful to learn.
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It was kind of primitive, getting ex-going was a big, big challenge in 1995, but I've been playing with Linux more and more since then, and today finally I've got a job that's 100% Linux.
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So, I think that's all I'll share with you for now, and it's been a pleasure talking to you.
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I'll sign off from our visit today at the Northeast New Linux Fest.
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Thank you for listening to HACRA Public Radio.
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We are sponsored by Carol.net, so head on over to C-A-R-O dot N-E-T for all of us here.
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Thank you very much.
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