That, and you were learning programming in FORTRAN or Cobal.

^^^^
Commodore vic 20 with 16k expansion and a Sinclair ZX80!

Peek and poke baby!!!

With my Commodore 64 I was looking for like minded friends and attended a local C-64 users meeting. I struck up a conversation with a guy that was younger than I was but he was into cars like I was. He was brand new at computers and his C-64. He had only bought his a few days before. He was wanting to learn about his modem.

I got his phone number and we each went to our own houses. I had told him I would call. I gave him three lines of code to carefully type in. He hit enter and I told him to hang up and when the phone rings to flip the switch on the modem to allow it to get the call. His computer accepted a program I sent him that would run his modem. The 300 Baud modem came with no decent software.

When he received the program I hung up and called him back. I told him how to save that program to his floppy. He was beside himself with how cool that was. I sent him a list of local BBS phone number to call.

He said he forgot to go to bed that night playing with the BBSs. He ended up going to work for a local company MPI. They were bought by several companies and Seagate ended up buying them. He was writing the firmware for the hard drives and was moved to Ireland to help set up a plant there.

I just LOL'd because on my first resume that I had typeset after graduating, they misspelled COBOL, and I didn't catch it either :D.

FORTRAN was indeed the first programming language when obtaining my degree and yep, I had to take that pussified crap they called COBOL, but never used either ever again after those classes. Our 2nd course was the "weeder" intended to eliminate folks like Bob :p...I think in my class of around 30, I made an "A", another a "C", and the rest had incompletes that later turned to "F". I was the "curve killer" in most of my courses. Pascal was actually the language most used in college....from writing compilers, to systems simulators, but I never really wanted to program for a living, so I didn't...unless it was tweaking the guts of the OS or something. Started on punch cards...college had Burroughs and VAX computers with our 370 IBM mainframes located in Research Triangle Park. First job was in IBM's Advanced Communications Division working in microcode development at RTP, and I knew I'd found my career...systems/networking, and I loved it until I became burned out on corporate bs....retired at 48, and have never looked back ;)

Damn...that was a long time ago...sorry for the walk down memory lane....64k worth anyways...SmileWavy

Arrivistes

I had the 5th Apple II made. No solder mask, some jumpers and cuts on the board and I had to set HIMEM every time I booted up. Used a Radio Shack cassette player for storage.

It replaced the SDK 80 I soldered together in January 77. Had to go to the local computer store (yes, there was one, as I was in Silicon Valley) and hook up to an ASR 33 Teletype in order to input and output instructions. the 1.2K (bits) of onboard RAM allowed a grand total of 10 lines of instruction in TinyBASIC.

Almost bought a Lisa because of the graphic interface; went to the Mac unveiling and held out for 2 whole weeks. I remember later upgrading RAM in my Mac II - $1500 for 1 MB.

...but then I'm older than most of you newbies.

I'm serious, Wow. You found your thing.

Advanced accounting was kinda like that for me. However, I got the C with a 79. Top dog 89, the rest were in the 60's and below. Jeebus, it was hard.

I studied all the time but still had lots of sex. On occasion, with a partner.:D

I remember my Physics 201 class - lecture hall of a couple hundred people. The prof intros himself and says "look at the person on the left and the right of you. One will be gone in two weeks and another in another month. Now lets get started". The only thing scarier was Calc 301. I flunked that one.

I don't remember what the first computer was, something dos and a 5 1/2 floppy drive, might have been a commodore 64.

We had to take a computer class in high school to graduate, win 3.1, I think. I liked to play solitaire so much so I got into trouble. One day she told us she had removed solitaire from all the computers, I responded to her "no you didn't". C:/run/sol

Win 95 should run at lightspeed on the new hardware

Which means you can reboot after the blue screen of death quicker than ever.

Actually, most programs are so RAM and video intensive, Win 95 wouldn't have the RAM needed to run anything by today's standards.