I am a REALLY old geek, but I cut my teeth on the Z80 processor running in a TRS80 model III. You can pick them up on EBay for next to nothing compared to the original asking price of $1999. You could even step up the the model 4 with 64K of RAM for about the same price. Don't know if you can still find it, but back in the day, you could get a version of MS-DOS that would run on these beasts.
I personally coded a nice BBS on one of these. It was faster at processing information than most of the Apples and C64s of the time.
Worth a look
Idol
I get my Network World every week like clockwork, and they seem to accumulate somewhere around my desk in a little pile. This article caught my eye, and I read it from start to finish twice. It was really quite fascinating. I understand routing, and while it is fairly simple these days, I can't imagine trying to code the first one. There was nothing to base anything on. He didn't just write the code, he invented the theory, tested it, and proved it could work.
By the way, the whole issue is one that everybody should read, even if only for the timelines. Most issues have at least one interesting article in them, although this is by far the most interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
I am a REALLY old geek, but I cut my teeth on the Z80 processor running in a TRS80 model III. You can pick them up on EBay for next to nothing compared to the original asking price of $1999. You could even step up the the model 4 with 64K of RAM for about the same price. Don't know if you can still find it, but back in the day, you could get a version of MS-DOS that would run on these beasts. I personally coded a nice BBS on one of these. It was faster at processing information than most of the Apples and C64s of the time. Worth a look Idol
I get my Network World every week like clockwork, and they seem to accumulate somewhere around my desk in a little pile. This article caught my eye, and I read it from start to finish twice. It was really quite fascinating. I understand routing, and while it is fairly simple these days, I can't imagine trying to code the first one. There was nothing to base anything on. He didn't just write the code, he invented the theory, tested it, and proved it could work.
By the way, the whole issue is one that everybody should read, even if only for the timelines. Most issues have at least one interesting article in them, although this is by far the most interesting.
Just my 2 cents