Re: [PLUG] Old computers and stuff

["Keith C. Perry" <kperry@daotechnologies.com>]

That was definitely a nice trip down memory lane.  I didn't know that many people also had a Unix or VMS background before Linux.

I had mentioned my Timex Sinclair 2000 during the conversation.  Since most people were not familiar with, I figured I would show pictures from a post I did on G+ awhile back.

https://goo.gl/photos/AJSH9UyvjzFx1maS9

Oh and JP, that bubble sort brought a tear to my eye.  Also circa '90 - '91 when I was tutoring engineering and comp. sci majors in Pascal.  I had it in high school but figured I would take it again in college (to have an easy class one term).  Longer story short, I generally did better than the teaching assistants on tests so my door room would be packed twice a term :)

The bubble sort was one of the mid-term tests- fun times!


~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 
Keith C. Perry, MS E.E. 
Owner, DAO Technologies LLC 
(O) +1.215.525.4165 x2033 
(M) +1.215.432.5167 
www.daotechnologies.com

----- Original Message -----
From: "JP Vossen" <jp@jpsdomain.org>
To: "Philadelphia Linux User's Group Discussion List" <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>
Sent: Tuesday, November 17, 2015 1:42:30 AM
Subject: [PLUG] Old computers and stuff

At the 2015-11-16 PLUG W meeting Tom mentioned an event coming up next
April with really old stuff, Tom please add details.

Anyone not at that meeting should probably skip the rest of this since
it will be really boring.  Come to think of it, it'll probably bore
those people who WERE at the meeting too...  :-)

Anyway...we talked about old computers and code some, so when I came
home fired up my 1989 Zenith 181 laptop, and it and the various 720K
3.5" floppies I had with it all still work, including a copy of Lotus
123 from 1992.  I also have the old BSR 386SX-16 that I first ran Linux
on.  That also fired right up from 3.5" DOS floppy, but it has no hard
drive.

I also went looking for some of my old source code, and I found my circa
1991 Pascal and COBOL programs for VAX VMS.  Including...wait for it...
-----
$ head -n6 /home/jp/...../Pitt/vms/pascal/bubble.pas
program bubble_sort (input, bubble, output);

{  SUMMARY --
This is a pretty boring program that demonstrates a bubble sort.  It
takes a list of words from a file, prints the list so you can see it's
not sorted, tells you it's gonna sort it, then prints the sorted list.}
-----

I also turned up my old Unix (Ultrix.32) "plan" file which is far too
horrible to post and lots of other crazy stuff.  What I can't find, and
it's really annoying me, is my box of OS/2 Warp stuff, and my 1991
strip.c source code.  Before you ask, I do have the strip.com file, and
it strips control character out of old Word Perfect files, what did you
THINK it did?

I ran the floppy disk recovery service (yes, really) for Pitt for a
couple of years, and that was one of the tools I wrote for it.  Between
various Norton and Mac rescue tools I could usually get files back, but
they'd have bits missing and Word Perfect for DOS 5.1 (IIRC) would barf
on them, so I'd strip out everything lower than ASCII 32 and higher than
127 and at least get the text back.

OK, shutting up now...  :-)
JP
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