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@Susquatch continued discussion

Too cool! I was born big hairy and ugly. Still am.

Still use an HP15C (a real one) and I run a clone of the HP15C on my phone and pc too. My first HP was a 35. They were introduced the year I graduated. I used a slide rule before that.

No pictures of any of my old computers - that I know of. Maybe the bride will find some when I die. I'm not looking now.

Love the old green monitor. The only graphics mine did was characters arranged on the screen to look like a picture!
 
I just gave away a DEC graphing monitor I used on a PDP9 computer in '71 and '72. It wrote in phosphor and refreshed the image until you hit the 'erase' button. More of an XY oscilloscope than a display.
 
Susquatch said:
A few (very few) of the members know that I once entered an HP Calculator Programming Competition. I programmed one of those things (an HP41CV) to play chess. Not just moves and what not, but to play strategy with as many levels of depth as you could tolerate waiting for - which was about 7 levels. That meant analysing every possible combination of moves to 7 levels. It was MUCH faster at 5 levels and played pretty darn good chess. It was also brute force - no memory of positions or famous games. Just what I called raw strategy.

I didn't even place. Unbelievable. Guys won with stupid stuff like solving arrays, differential calculus, calculating Pi to 100 digits.

The guys I worked with theorized that the judges either didn't believe it could actually do that or.... They never played chess and had no way of knowing what that meant. I was a VERY SORE LOSER....... That took months to write that program. As an interesting side note, I actually wrote most of the analysis and the move logistics in Fortran and then wrote a compiler to convert each line of Fortran code into HP Programming Language.

As a young man who only needed a few hours sleep, I had a total blast. All moaning and groaning aside, it was even more fun to beat myself at the game with a program I wrote. The big difference was that the calculator didn't make stupid or emotional moves. It just sat there relentlessly grinding away till the clock limit or the set depth was reached.
Click to expand...
I started with the 33C (still have and use it), 41, 41C, 41CX, 41CV (still have and use it) and lastly the 41CV plus iPhone app (expensive) and use that everyday.
 
Raid arrays, I run one at home for storage. Which I back up to rotating single drives.

I've lost one drive (not raid) about 9 years ago, cost $1500 for data recovery, only one file lost. Luck it didn't need to go to the next stage at $25 to 50k.
 
During a particularly bad era in disk drives in the early 2000s, I lost 2 drives that needed data recovery. Work related stuff. The problem is that the drive and its backup were on the same machine (yeah, I know) so it required the $$$ recovery option.

With the extrnal sercers backing up to redundant machines, this seems the most reliable way to secure data, though not the cheapest...
 
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