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"In Soviet Russia the state dates YOU!

That would probably be an improvement for most slashdotters, where you're more likely to be *ahem* "dating yourself ..."

I always enjoy telling people about my high-school experience with an Ohio Scientific Challenger II with 4K (!) of RAM. But I'm dating myself here. Plus, I'm a chronic frequent masturbator.

If the thought of a robot crawling up your ass scares you, wait till you see the battery!

I attended Niagara College last year for a computer engineering course, to my dismay they would not allow us to use computers to type out any in school work for fear of plagiarism.

I was extremely annoyed as I am one of those stubborn people with absolutely horrible hand writing. I was even using my laptop in math.

you'll go ape over the electromechanical central office switches they connected to!

*Laugh* In all my free time...

On a side note is there a good free (as in beer, and preferably as in freedom) sound editor out there for Windows that could let me do this?

I don't know...as the old saying goes "I don't do windows."

But more to the point, what you'd really want for doing this is a programming language. You could generate the values with a simple loop and then either pump them out to the speakers (/dev/something under *nix, not sure under mswin*), which would give you instant gratification, or write them to a file & play them back (which would be easier).

-- MarkusQ

P.S. It wouldn't have to be a WAV file, that's just the first hit I got from google.

Will there be an old guy counting down the seconds before it self-destructs ?

And will the disk start to smoke?

Here's a link to a site where a guy describes his plans to restore one of these classic machines.

It's a short read, but it's nice to see someone trying to restore one of thse boxes.

Ken Thompson used to have a link on his page to someone who was restoring one of these. But since he's retired, it's not there now.

It was built the late '60s. What else would they have been using?

isn't it obvious? Nixie Tubes of course!

• Stan Viet's History of the Personal Computer

The first computer I programmed on was in highschool in 1977 on a Processor Technolgy SOL-20 ... a cool machine with a wopping 32KB of RAM and dual 8" floppy drives the likes of which I have seen noplace else ... really weird motorized eject & insertion that quite often jammed. I learned BASIC, FOCAL and 8080 assembler on that box.

My first home system was an Ohio Scientific C1P that I bought in 1978 with money from a part-time job instead of a Car like the rest of my friends. Leaned 6502 assembler and FORTH on that box, and programmed several games and a "word processor". I also wrote an AI program that was like ELIZA, but on steroids and actually learned words and phrases and understood grammer.

For information on the SOL-20 and an emulator check here, and for information on the C1P check here or here.

GOD I FEEL OLD!!!

- subsolar

That sounds like the Monkey with five asses from Southpark.

Wierd dude, wierd...