Yeah, lots of memories for me as well. My dad worked for the aerospace firm Lear Siegler. A California division of that company got into making personal computers in 1972-1973 (ADM-1). I can remember him paying almost $300 for a calculator with an TI chip in it that "had more capability than the Apollo space capsule". He had helped design and build instruments for Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, and as an electrical engineer - all the miniaturization got him excited. However, I needed a GUI to get excited about tech, and quickly began building computers for my kids. Best fun to speed things up for my kids was the "Duron pencil trick". All I had to do is draw a couple lines on the cut traces on the CPU, and their gaming computer went from 850mhz to 1.3 ghz.
AuntiPode wrote:
Ah, memories. The first program someone paid for me to write ran on a Poly-88 from PolyMorphic Systems... in late 1976.
The CPU was an Intel 8080.
So much water under the bridge, ... Ironically, come to think of it, the program was used to calculate and cost justify a water saving system!