On 11/02/2011 2:08 p.m., Richard Naylor wrote:
> At 10:43 a.m. 11/02/2011, Donald Neal wrote:
>>> This may not seem relevant to InternetNZ members today, but Ken
>>> Olsen came from the post-war generation of Engineers that gave us
>>> the computer industry and the Internet.
>> As did Richard Naylor (albeit perhaps post a slightly different war).
>> And without talking about snake oil.
>
> A child of the 60's. Over beer (to stay on topic) we can talk about
> turning 18 and having your birthdate in a "lottery" where the prize
> was a 2 year holiday in Vietnam courtesy of the NZ Army. Also about
> core memory machines and using logic analysers to debug DDCMP protocol
> at 2Mbps - looking at the bits coming out of the de-serialiser, byte
> at a time. But as I said, needs beer.
>
Ah, those were the days, and before then! When you started a computer
by toggling in the machine code bootstrap into memory from the console,
when the computer had a 39-bit word or had machine code in reverse
polish notation. Yes, needs beer.
Oh, and it was a friend in DEC who took a bottle of snake oil to Ken
Olsen in his office after that famous (and I believe) mis-quoted remark;
to bring the thread back to where it started
