@KeithWalker

I had a problem with my iBook. I coud not get past the gatekeeper. Apple believed they made no mistakes, apparently..

If you sent a plain-text email containing ATH$, the modem would hang up very time. I'm not sure if the +++ was needed, but the second guards were missing. It may have been +++ATH$. Only <waut longer than 1s> +++ATH$ should have hung up the modem. I had to wait a year for a fix.

 

My first exposure to programming was learning BASIC via a teletype model 33-ASR at the Laurence Hall of Science in Berkeley.
A few years later I got an HP-29C programmable calculator, then an Apple II+ which lead me into assembly coding for the 6502.

 

1802: What totally surprised me was the lack of GOSUB and RETURN and any register could become the program counter.
I still have the hand written copies of my GOSUB/RETURN routines.

I had an Amiga 1000 computer. It kinda knocked the socks off the IBM PC at the time that we had at work. The annoying part was the printer pinout was not the IBM standard. Of course, during that time frame IBM stood for "I'm Becoming a Mac"

I managed to purchase an iBook clambshell running OS9 at the latest. I though the browsers even worked better the Firefox of today. The websites of today just mess up text.

What did I have at home that was really odd: dial-up wireless 802.11b. My internet provider was work with a PPP connection.
For a while I was able to use a Z-29 terminal to connect to Unix hosts. I could at least read mail without a browser using pine.
That option went away when telnet wasn't allowed anymore and you needed a VPN.

Work did something really cool. If you connected a computer to the network that wasn't registered, you would get a 10.x.x.x address. That would only allow you to connect to the host that everyone had access too. Once you registered your computer, you would get a DHCP address.

I bought a really cool clambshell 132 column dot matrix Genicom printer. It actually had font cartridges. I might even be able to get ribbons for it. I don;t have the heart to throw it away.

I got my hands on a Diablo Spinwriter too. Haven't looks for daisy wheels or ribbons. Never used it at home.

 

6502 on a hand-built "computer" in a 19" rack in my garage, using LEDs and bit switches to program it until I made a board with TIM (Terminal Interface Monitor) sold by MOS Technology. A 6500 family part and a 2716 were used in my first commercial design using a microprocessor shortly after and then went through several controllers looking for the best fit for a medical film recorder in my next job.

That was so much work and board space connecting the processor, program memory, and RAM years later when single chip microcontrollers with flash came around those are the only thing I will bother myself with. I don't even own an UV erasing light anymore!