Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

Oh yeah, those were the days!!!


I think I bought my Teletype around 1977-1978 for about $1000 (about $3600 today). Man, what a great thing to have! It allowed me to do some of my work (programming on CDC 6600 Mainframe Computers) from HOME!!! The word "telecommuting" hadn't been invented yet, and personal computers were barely starting to show up, and quite expensive.

I built my first computer shortly after that, I really tricked it out with a whopping 32k of RAM!

Anyway, for those who have never heard of a Teletype, it was a printing terminal, the Model 38 could do upper and lower case, 132 columns wide at 10 characters per second! It had no electronics other than switch contacts, a motor and a single transistor. The "ASR" option added a paper tape punch/reader that allowed you to save data and re-enter it by making and then reading the tape! Really great for common/long sequences you had to load often. In the picture below, the tape unit is on the left side.
Man, I miss those days... NOT!

I had an ASR-33 with an acoustic coupler good for a screaming 110 baud. And then I was impressed when I got my first 2400 baud model- QPSKeying seems so Star Wars!

So now I'm so jaded that a new iPhone only gets a "meh"!

I learned to play Star Trek with one of those and a tape unit in 76 in high school. Wow! Memories...

I got my first PC in 1984. An IBM PC/XT portable. It was the size of a large suitcase, had an 8086 processor, a 4" amber screen and two 5 1/4 floppy drives, 64K Ram and came with MS-DOS 1.1. You loaded the OS, then removed the OS floppy and inserted a program floppy (Lotus 123 or BASIC in my case) in the A: drive and a data floppy in the B: drive. I wrote a boiler maintenance logging program with it. The keyboard doubled as the cover for the monitor and drive bays. I think it weighed around 30 lbs. Portable! Along with the walkie talkie sized cell phone, i had a full pick up truck with gizmos...

bitzerguy wrote:The keyboard doubled as the cover for the monitor and drive bays. I think it weighed around 30 lbs. Portable!

My brother had a Compaq portable computer similar in description to this, pretty cool, at the time, really, I thought.

johnnysain wrote:

Well that is firmly in the GOOD catagory!

Anybody YOU know?

Ummm.... No, can't say it reminds ME of anyone...

For any who are curious as to what my day job might be like, here's an overview which spends some time with my boss, Tom Matano, the Designer of the Mazda Miata and 3rd gen RX-7:

Cool video! Kinda makes me wish I'd gone into that instead of EE/CS...

It's lots of hard work...and FUN. Most of the students you see have been in my class at one time or another. The shop facility is my area of responsibility...

I take it the area the classic cars are stored/displayed is the first floor of the building? I recall a whole lot of cars stuffed in there when Shari & I were there in 2007.

Yep, except that there are 215+ cars now (there were about 60 in '07). There are 65 displayed in my building, and the rest in other venues throughout SF.

Here's a puzzler:

Cool!

THE HOMER!!!