I remember how advanced the PDP11 was at work in 1977 that had twin cassette tape drives to load the operating system after you had put the binary bootstrap program in on the switches. It ran the automated testing of the multistage transistor amplifiers on the MARECS satellite – the first satellite not to use valves. Over lunch we programmed it to play Star Trek. The 6800 I was building in the evenings had 256 bytes of RAM.

PDP11! That's modern crap. Back around 1980 I was making punched tapes for a Marconi Elliot 18bit computer used on British Railway's Healey Mills Train Describer. To make it fun I was writing machine code to do this on an HP 16bit ferrite core memory mini-computer. And then the Union Official complained about the punched tape drive's noise in the office keeping their members awake after lunch and I was promptly shut down.

That's one of the reasons I ended up in the Oil Field.

My Roland CAMM-3 CNC's just fine with it's 4MHz Z80.

The company I worked for were first to offer a 10MB drive for under a thousand pounds. The disks were fine it was the interface card trying to run on that IBM edge triggered interrupt. Remember that IBM edge triggered interrupt?

Got a Sinclair ZX Spectrum in working order, and an old Toshiba Satilite lap top with W 95 on it, this computer is said to have cost $NZ 5000 when bought new, it was the NZ Heart Foundations first computer, and I got it after the Foundations building was flattened in the Christchurch earthquake. The Sinclair cost $NZ 5 at a garage sale, I'v got some info somewhere to use it on a CNC lathe or mill.

Ian S C