Atari 1040ST, a 16 bit processor on a 32 bit bus, way ahead of its time.
Posted on 03/06/2016 5:44:12 PM PST by John W
Raymond Tomlinson, the inventor of modern email and selector of the "@" symbol, has died. He was 74.
Raytheon Co., his employer, on Sunday confirmed his death; the details were not immediately available.
Email existed in a limited capacity before Tomlinson in that electronic messages could be shared amid multiple people within a limited framework. But until his invention in 1971 of the first network person-to-person email, there was no way to send something to a specific person at a specific address.
Here are five things to know about Tomlinson's invention:
1. The first email was sent on the ARPANET system.
(Excerpt) Read more at pennlive.com ...
Here is Ray on RFC 561 (eventually obsoleted by RFC 822):
https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0561.txt
I sent my first email message in 1978! :-)
We used Leading Edge.
Get this: It was the latest thing.
RIP Raymond Tomlinson
My Dad had an ELF, and wrote a small game for it. He bought an Apple II+ when it first came out. That was my first experience with computers. An IBM PC followed. He talked me into waiting on a Commodore Vic 20 because they were about to come out with the more advanced Commodore 64. I bought a clone XT when they became available. 640K and a 32MB drive (20MB and an RLL controller).
5.1... The last wp I liked.
I always wondered why no one designed a keyboard with a separate @ key instead of always using shift 2.
Wordstar with all those left side control keys for cursor position. Still use the 1993 Quattro Pro spreadsheet by Borland. It runs fine on XP and still does everything that I need.
First real machine was a North Star and CP/M. Hard drive was too heavy to come ups, came by truck. 15 meg and a 3 minute spin up time. Hooked in through the parallel port. Ran with 48k of system memory.
Played those games as well. Remember what a big deal it was to go to the computer store and buy a copy of Windows 3.1. Had lived with DOS for years.
Back in the early ‘80s, I worked for a rent-a-rig oil company as a programmer and was handed an interesting task.
We had a couple of BIG rigs in the North Sea and when the chopper arrived for a crew change, they also picked up a bag of invoices that were then carried from Scotland by courier to the accountants in Houston.
My job was to figure out a way to email them to the home office (no such thing as attachments then) and save all kinds of time and money. When done, we gone a letter from them singing Hosannahs for the job.
One of the many interesting/innovative projects I was involved in.
Mine was in the 80s in the form of a profs note.
NEENER NEENER I WIN THE OBSCURE WORD PROCESSING PROGRAM WAR!
Whatever. My fist word processor was Super Scripsit, for the TRS-80.
Atari 1040ST, a 16 bit processor on a 32 bit bus, way ahead of its time.
The first computer to come with a megabyte of RAM for less than $1000.
I had a 520ST Hand upgraded it with an extra couple meg of ram, with a soldering iron.
Yes. That is where that first salesman and I parted company. I hated the appearance of that dot matrix printer. I told him I wanted to type letters that looked like “a NY Executive Secretary”.
He replied, “What kind of games do you play?”
“I don’t want to play games.”
He responded, “Then, you are not ready for a computer.”
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