Anyone remember the Tano industrial computers? I picked one up at a General Electric blind auction for 10 bucks back in '86, before I could afford a PC. The thing had an integrated 13 in black-and-white (text only) screen, and a 160K floppy drive. I had no software for it except for the OS. BUT it had a command line to switch the console over to the serial port. I'd hook it up to a 300 baud acoustic modem (auction price: $5) and dial the local BBSs. The fun was that in order to change data bit / stop bits / parity bits settings for each BBS, I would have power down, pull the serial card (about the size of an AT motherboard), change the dip switch settings, put it back, etc. etc. It got served me for a year before I could scrape up the cash for a Leading Edge Model D. By the way, you may want to check out the Large Array of Stale Technology parody at my site. It's pretty relevant to this discussion, I think.
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Anyone remember the Tano industrial computers? I picked one up at a General Electric blind auction for 10 bucks back in '86, before I could afford a PC. The thing had an integrated 13 in black-and-white (text only) screen, and a 160K floppy drive. I had no software for it except for the OS. BUT it had a command line to switch the console over to the serial port. I'd hook it up to a 300 baud acoustic modem (auction price: $5) and dial the local BBSs. The fun was that in order to change data bit / stop bits / parity bits settings for each BBS, I would have power down, pull the serial card (about the size of an AT motherboard), change the dip switch settings, put it back, etc. etc. It got served me for a year before I could scrape up the cash for a Leading Edge Model D. By the way, you may want to check out the Large Array of Stale Technology parody at my site. It's pretty relevant to this discussion, I think.
APL? Alleged Programming Language?
Damn. but I hated that language. Made no sense unless you read Greek like it was Hebrew.
At least the stuff at my site has something to do with computers. Sometimes.