[Xastir] Yet another old-time thing...

[Curt Mills]

On Sat, 10 Jan 2004, Bob Nielsen wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 09, 2004 at 08:42:27PM -0700, KC7ZRU wrote:
> >
> > Hehehe, maybe - just maybe I hold the DIS-tinction of being one of the
> > longest xastir users that hasen't submitted a single line of code.
>
>
> I probably have you beat there.  I think I installed Xastir within a
> few days of Frank's first public announcement.  I had been tearing out
> my hair trying to get aprsdos to run in dosemu and it came out just
> when I was ready to give up.

Looks like I'm within a week or so of the announcement, perhaps
less.  I found an email I sent to the local group asking if anybody
was running it, and had a positive response frm N7KMJ, so I know he
beat me.  Shortly after that I was sending e-mails to Frank.  I saw
an early message from you also Bob.


> IIRC, the only thing I ever contributed code to was K5JB's version of
> KA9Q NET (now that goes back a ways) and it was really a hack, since my
> programming days were spent with Fortran and I still don't know diddly
> about C beyond './configure ; make ; make-install'.  Not that I can
> program in Fortran anymore either--it's been nearly 20 years since I've
> done that.

Fortran?  Now we're going back!  Got into the JETS program in Idaho
(Junior Engineering Technical Society) and took a Fortran course at
UofIdaho in the summer of 1979.  Punched cards and a lineprinter,
never even saw the computer.  JETS was a program intended to steer
high-schoolers toward a career in Engineering.  Must have worked!

At the time I had my brand-new RCS Cosmac Elf 1802 board with me and
was programming in machine code.  It was the first computer I built
from scratch.  The other students got a real kick out of it 'cuz
they hadn't seen a personal computer before.  Nowadays we'd call it
an embedded system I suppose.  IBM PC's hadn't been invented yet,
DOS was still in its infancy stages (as CP/M, running on
8080/8085/Z80 systems only).

How many people know that Bill Gates and/or Microsoft didn't write
DOS?  That was written by Seattle Computer, and DOS 1.0 was
essentially a port of CP/M to the 8088 processor.  Seattle Computer
had the only other unrestricted license (besides Microsoft) to
distribute DOS, and they made a bunch of money off of it.  In the
Alcan 1990 rally, Tim Patterson of Seattle Computer was in a 1990
Porche Carerra 4WD car for the event.  I remember seeing that car
drive on ice.  I heard it was a $75,000 car, DOS must have been
quite profitable.

Then came the Windows years.

Now here we are with an assortment of Unix OS'es, some commercially
supported, some free, plus free compilers, free windowing systems,
etc.  Its nice to see computing going in a direction that allows
thoughts to flow freely again, and my money flow less freely.

-- 
Curt, WE7U.				archer at eskimo dot com
http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
  Lotto:  A tax on people who are bad at math. - unknown
Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates. - WE7U.
The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"