off-topic history (was Re: Startup Messages)

[David Auerbach auerbach@xxxxxxxx]

On Aug 5, at 12:32 AM, Carl Distefano wrote:
>  I suppose that means
> you're one of the few people left who actually used punch
> cards.)
Ahh. Fond memories. I was lucky enough to have a touch-typing class
in 7th grade. So by the time I saw my first key-punch machine (in
1965, in 10th grade) I was a demon typist on manuals and went crazy
on the electric keyboard of a key-punch machine. And, yes, I did walk
around high school with punch cards in my shirt pocket. We wrote
machine code for the IBM 1620 (a decimal machine!), assembler code
and an early version of Fortran. (The compiler was a stack of
punchcards that got loaded ahead of the program).

XyWrite happened to me in 1980.
Speaking of all these off-topic topics, this seems the right crowd to
ask: when did you get your first email address? I'm 1976 (maybe 1977).
P.S. I think John is composing his emails in XyWrite and then
printing to a file (that's probably why he mentioned generic.prn) and
he's leaving the offset non-zero. That's the left padding. ?




David Auerbach
Department of Philosophy & Religion
Box 8103
Raleigh, NC 27695-8103                  http://
slowfoodusa.org
auerbach@xxxxxxxx                  http://
slowfoodtriangle.org