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LoC #54 with She
On the latest episode of Land Of Confusion, the member show for members, by members where we interview members, we finally sit down and interview She.
We start as we now do with our members questions and learn a lot of information on the state of the wool industry in the USA and the culture of southern PA. We then learn about She’s growing up in Nigeria, under the adventures of her colonial administrator father, and the life of a free roaming child in that West African Nation.
We then travel to the USA and learn about her time in school and living in the wilds of the heart of major PA city.
Then She talks about her life at the frontier of micro computing and how she helped bring about the introduction of word processers to that corner of the world and her love of the Atari 800.
Be sure to watch it all, and we will see you in the comments.
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Published in General
I just don’t think it could possibly have been as easy/convenient/intuitive/etc for front-panel machine-language programming. Granted HPs never were meant for that, but PDPs were. And they started coming out in 1959 with the PDP-1. HP’s front-panel design wasn’t very useful for machine-language, rather like the KL-10 “mainframe” which just used a PDP-11/60 for the “front panel” and had only a 16-bit internal arrangement whereas the actual PDP-10 was 36-bit.
I know about HPIB too. :-) In fact I have a GRiD portable computer that uses it for the external floppy drive. Nice unit with padded case and stuff.
Have you ever tried a mechanical keyboard? They are rugged and don’t miss keystrokes.
Really interesting conversation, and I love the slight British accent without going full Poppins.
In the olden days, N-Key Rollover was just a dream in an engineer’s eye. You’d see ads for computers/keyboards with 2- and even 3-key rollover as if it was a really big deal. And at the time, it was!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollover_(key)
The “console terminal” for the PDP-1 was actually an electric typewriter with some additions allowing the computer to read the keyboard and type back.
Mylar tape? Ooooh, fancy!
Thanks. My family thinks I have an American accent….
Yes. But not for decades, and I’ve never really thought about keyboard technology all that much, although once I find a decent keyboard, I tend to hold onto it and move it from computer to computer.
Yes it is. I don’t often get to do it, and it’s one of the things I’ve enjoyed most about meeting Ricochet members IRL and having a chance to talk at length. There’s an extraordinary reservoir of wide and keep knowledge to be found among the members of this site.
Yesterday, I’m afraid Don had me at “NBI,” and it was off to the races for me from that point on…If we’d kept going, sooner or later, I’d have made it to one of my heroes, Augusta Ada, Countess Lovelace, and the Analytical Engine, and Jacquard looms, and weaving, and knitting, and spinning…and I’d have got round to sheep and wool again.
Because I always do.
Thanks again, everyone.
I have an Atari 800 and 130 XE in the basement, along with a 2600 game console.
Me too! In one (or more) of these boxes, here somewhere….
You kids get off my lawn.
Mid-Atlantic dialect.
You mentioned the War of Northern Aggression and how there were Pennsylvanians who were Southern sympathizers. Most people have no idea where the Mason-Dixon line is, but it’s right there at the bottom of Greene County, not too far from you.
That’s right! It’s about 50 miles south of me. That surprises many people who, for some reason, expect it to be much further south.
Edit: that’s driving. I’m sure it’s much closer as the crow flies.
I was appalled to see “Florence Y’all” on a watertower in KY just south of Cincinnati. I turned to my wife from Ohio and said “Kentucky is the South?”. She responded “It is to Ohio”. I was like, where am I from? “The Deep South”.
Funny what people think. Of course, Loony Tunes got the north-south presented in a funny way:
One of my great-great-great-grandfathers served in a Confederate cavalry regiment from Kentucky. He had been born in NC on that side of the NC/VA border, but his family moved west and a touch north to KY. Kentucky was originally part of Virginia.
My Great-Great Grandfather, Nathan Bryan, served in the Confederate Army. Arkansas.
I had two great-great-grandfathers who served from Alabama. Also, I know that one of the Alabamans, Philip Madison Shepard, Jr., had a number of brothers who served. All of them were physicians. (So was their sister.) Their father had started the first medical school in Alabama.
This exchange is fascinating! It’s making me think we need a program that consists of a panel of, perhaps three or four, ricochet members, with a specific interest or background chatting to each other about it. Could be a regular feature, or a separate show?
See if we could get @robertelee to participate. It could be fun. Just don’t invite the Yankees. They spoil everything.
Reminds me of this:
I remember being on the back end of one of those, too.
My GGGF Rufus Fabius Temple also served, North Carolina.
OK. You’re on the panel.
Who else?
(Don’t look at me. It should surprise no-one that none of my ancestors (AFAIK) served on either side of the American Civil War.)
Bless you all. You’re such guys.
Get yourself a few of these:
Or these:
Put them to work. And then sit back and enjoy a beer.
I had five direct ancestors in the war. (But don’t mention two of them.)
My family broke hard for the Union. Only one Confederate that I know of, and he was always no-account anyway.
The DECtape/LINCtape systems were random-access, block-oriented data storage that worked like a disk drive (formatted sectors, etc.) just not as fast, but far less expensive. The tape media also allowed for changing setups in ways that fixed hard drives didn’t. (Removable disk packs were not a thing early on.) And, to re-emphasize, MUCH LESS EXPENSIVE. Even schools could afford them. (Although my High School didn’t. We only had the PDP-8/L with an ASR-33 teletype that had paper tape reader and punch, 10cps.)
I’d be all for doing that.
Do you mean the first one?
Huh, I can’t find much of any mention of NBI on the modern day interwebs. Not even a Wiki page.
So, with these olde computers and systems… there was a very sharp division between between industrial and consumer markets. Where the industrial markets cost about 100 times the price of the home computers.
And an enormous hole in between.