The Early Days

I plan to focus this blog on computer related technology of all sorts. There might be some occasion to wander off this topic from time to time, but I’ll try to stay on target as much as possible.

Computer technology has come a long way since I first became involved with it in the early 1970s. My grandparents lived in the Berkeley hills and not too far from the Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS). For those interested in science, LHS was and still is a great place visit. They had a computer lab where you could get time on a time-share computer. It appears there is no longer a computer lab at LHS - at least a quick search of their website does not show one available. Of course, personal computers are more pervasive today then they were in the 1970s.

The LHS computer was a Hewlett-Packard 2000 and, using an ASR-33 teletype, you could play games or write and run your own programs. The attraction for me was a game that allowed you to command the Starship Enterprise. (It may have been Trek73.) Fighting Klingons on a continuous paper roll might not seem appealing today, but at the time it was a hot game!

It would be a few more years until I purchased my own personal computer. I’ll leave that to a future article.

I almost forgot - Happy Pi Day!

Tags: hardware, software, HP, ASR-33

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