I got hooked on computers in 1963 using FORTRAN II when "Graphics" consisted in sending a comand for a 35 mm camera to take a black and white picture of a CRT display and the output (from an IBM 7094) came back to you as a 35 mm film strip. I used FORTRAN and ALGOL-60 till sometime in the 1980s when I bought a Sinclair for home use (with extra 16K of memory!), then a Commodore and then a scratch built XT. They did not get office PCs at my job until the mid-80s and we had a series of research computers such as an HP 7000 and other mid-size computers. Before I retired we used desktop WINDOWS applications along with connections to several UNIX machines. All along I have just been a programmer/user and although I modified my first XT it is only this year that I have tried to build my own system and found I have a lot to learn about the hardware. I am trying to build a small 8-core Beowulf using four PC boxes with duocore CPU, but I see the way the hardware improves/changes rapidly so it will be obsolete in a year but still a good learning experience and maybe my son can use it as a "Lab" while he works on a part time online MS. I am hoping to get this system running while the cold weather holds so I can get back to the roadster when Spring breaks here.

Don Shillady
Retired Scientist/teen rodder