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hpr0703 :: My Computer History

My Computer History

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Hosted by Bob Evans on Wednesday, 2011-04-13 is flagged as Explicit and is released under a CC-BY-NC-SA license.
computing history, vintage hardware, nelf. 4.

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Duration: 00:04:52
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How I got into tech.

Started by monsterb, this series invites people to share with us how they found Linux. It has become traditional for first time hosts to share with us their journey to Linux. Indeed it has morphed to be way to share your journey in tech right up to your first contribution to HPR.

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Comment #1 posted on 2011-04-13 14:15:47 by pokey

Best pronunciation of GNU I've ever heard.

Comment #2 posted on 2011-05-11 17:30:23 by Bob Evans

The digiac 3080 was a thrill

The https://home.att.net/~efelberbaum/digiac.htm web page dedicated to the digiac 3080 seems to be gone (except perhaps from the internet archive wayback machine.)

Viewing the picture in the show notes, the 3080 is completely contained within the desk in the foreground. The Selectric I/O writer and the switch/light panel atop the desk were two of the ways to load programs. There also was a paper tape reader and punch on the front side of the desk to the right of the man in the dark jacket. The 3080 I used also had a card reader but I do not see one in the picture.

The 3080 had 4096 words of memory, and each word contained 25 bits. There was no stack and program execution ran slowly, at about 1000 instructions per second. These machines were used for education; numerous hackers of my generation first got the thrill of a machine following our instructions on a digiac 3080.

PS:
I try to pronounce gnu with a silent G.

Comment #3 posted on 2012-01-04 01:09:27 by Bob Evans

Digiac 3080 info is online again

Ed Felberbaum has reestablished his Digiac 3080 Tribute page at Wordpress...

https://digiac3080.wordpress.com/

Ed has avid interest in any surviving Digiac 3080 artifacts.

Comment #4 posted on 2013-12-26 23:07:59 by Frank S

I remember you, Bob!

We spent quite a few hours in that third-floor computer lab. Learned a lot about under-the-hood computing. (Still not sure that sign-magnitude was the best choice for a teaching computer.) Having spent some time in the employ of big Wall Street firms, I'm still impressed with the stock-trading game you managed to shoehorn into 4K! Hope you are well.

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