[LINK] Computer science born in Australia 70 years ago

[Antony Barry]

>
> I wrote my first program in the late 70's :)
>

And so did my children and lots of their friends. I brought home a Radio
Shack/Tandy TRS-80 in 1978 based on a Z80 8bit CPU chip, 8K bytes of Rom
containing the "operating system" - a Basic interpreter, 8K bytes of Ram
and an audio cassette player for storage. Still got it too. It still worked
a decade or so ago.

Picked up a cut down Pascal compiler for it (integer arithmetic only), a
FORTH interpreter and an assembler. My sons all went into computing because
of it. One is the Deputy Director of Data61, another the principal software
developer for Oracle in Australia and the third decided to retire from DSTO
(after an initial stint in ASLIG) when he was around 40 and freelance. A
year or two before he left he had a trip to Alaska. When I inquired why he
airily said the US Air Force has some software they wanted to give to
Australia which he needed to look at. Decades later the penny dropped and I
realised what he had been working on.

I purchased the TRS-80 as a hobby for me. I almost had to book time on it
or wait till the kids had gone to bed!

It certainly changed their lives.

Tony

On Sun, Sep 19, 2021 at 1:47 PM Andy Farkas <andyf at andyit.com.au> wrote:

> On 19/09/2021 1:02 pm, Antony Barry wrote:
>
> > And 10 years later, also at Sydney University I wrote my first program
>
> I wrote my first program in the late 70's :)
>
> It was because my father worked with DEC that he was able to bring
> home a PDP-11/20 (including rack) with an ASR-33 TeleType. Those
> blinken lights were so seductive... and the paper-tape puncher...
> ...magnetic core memory - turn it off, when turned back on its all there!
>
> <sniffle> I'm getting old :( </sniffle>
>
> -andyf
>
> ps. the program was "Star Trek" written in FOCAL - you warped around
> the galaxy and shot down Klingons..
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Link mailing list
> Link at anu.edu.au
> https://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
>