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This month I will turn 66 years old. You could consider me to be a dinosaur. My first programming classes were done on a university IBM 360 or 370 series machines, with punch cards. Access to terminals came much later for the students.

My first programming project at home was to write an assembler development system on a MOS KIM-1.

I ended up having two audio cassettes, reading source from one tape, and writing to another, with relay control.

Coded the whole mess byte by byte in hex at the teletype, single stepping as I went. lol.

Not clearing the ram to zeros before I started was a mistake, as well as not saving many scraps of paper with notes about source code.

I joined the Navy for a few years, and was a computer operator on an aircraft carrier (CVN-69).

The computer I operated wrote to and read from flight recorders for S3A Viking ASW planes.

(ASW is Anti Submarine Warfare. They fly around dropping microphones in the water to listen to mostly Russian subs).

While my job was not strictly programming I ended up writing some Fortran code on the embedded Nova 820.

But the biggest thing was when the cassette drive that loaded the novas (yes 2 of them) broke and there was no spare.

(made in China -- kind of a disparaging remark back then)

I wrote a bootloader system to transfer a memory image over parallel port from one nova with a hard drive to the one that had only the cassette drive before. Got a letter of commendation, which I am trying to request from national archives, since my original burned in a house fire.

But NOW -- my latest computer is a shiny RISC-V SBC from China, with the IP for the processor core being made by SiFive, and manufactured by company named Star Five. RISC-V is an ISA originally developed at UC Berkly around 2010. Is now a teenager lol.

I am an individual member of the Risc-V foundation, though I am essentially retired from an injury in the Navy which now gives me a disability income. The only actual programming and sysadmin job I had was for a non-profit in Houston TX where I set up a database to keep track of statistics (student scores and hours) for the agency which taught adult literacy and ESL.

The system was done on a Vaxstation 3100 from DEC, and the vax line is not being sold anymore as DEC ceased to exist.

VAX/VMS was the name of the os, and VMS has been migrated to X86 systems.

But you can sometimes pick up used VAX on Ebay. I also had bought an Alpha server ES40 on ebay. I believe its still being stored in a trailer home in Texas.

Huge and heavy piece of aluminum. but now 64 bit code in a similar risc style is done on a $100 RISC-V chip.