chong

You're welcome, Beth. But again, gee whiz - you're talking Atari and Commodore, that's like in the mid-70's. And my kids were using those to play "that yellow thingie that ate those other thingies." Then came the "Mario Brothers"! Oh! I remember the yellow thingie - "Pac Man"!

Still want to feel much younger after that? What about my first computer - the mini - "Sinclair", huh?? I used a cassette tape recorder for my storage device! I actually programmed in Basic with that for heating and air conditioning load calculations. Though I don't know if I gained anything by doing that compared to doing it manually and with a calculator. Even with the TI SR-10 calculator, I think manually was faster than it. And the HP 350 and 450 would have been much, much faster even. But those HPs were beyond my reach.

In the early 80s, I worked with an engineering company in Anchorage that had the Carrier air conditioning software program that ran on, again get this, the TRS(trash)-80! At the time, an IBM PC would still cost $8K-10K, while the Trash-80 was around $1.5K and it was packaged with the engineering software program by the Carrier Corporation. Competitive programs from other companies utilized the PC but was inter-active with mainframe computers in their respective headquarters, requiring "very expensive" modems, and enormous fees. Carrier's was a stand alone system, though initially, it too, used a tape cassette for data storage device.

If you want to feel even much younger than that . . . . before they taught us computer programming, we had to learn how to "wire" the boards of the IBM Accounting Machines. And that, dear folks, was the "mother" of all computers as we know it today! That's where the IBM punch cards with one notched corner was first used. The first machines used vacuum tubes before being replaced by transistors in 1958. I could tell you that I worked as an Accounting Machine Operator-Programmer, but that would be a stretch!