The most significant computers in Dave’s life, and the associated memories:
DEC Alpha AXP: here I established my UNIX mind-calming mantra: ‘pwdls’, which is the emotional equivalent of spooning with your computer. Purchase price $5K and 1/20th the computing power of my MacBook Pro.
CRAY Y-MP: convincing PowerFORTRAN to unwind my nested loops to finish my simulation in less than an hour so I wouldn’t accrue the $100 surcharge for extra processing time. Purchase price $5 million and about the same computing power as I have now.
SINCLAIR ZX-81: each BASIC command had its own button, so that you didn’t have to type the name of the command. I remember that the ‘IF’ button got pretty unresponsive after a few thousand presses. I spent most of my time watching the monitor, waiting to see whether the button press had the desired effect. Purchase price $100 and about 1/1000th of my current processor speed.
Mac SE 30: using the hardware EJECT to get my disk out when I crashed the math co-processor running chaotic dynamics simulations. Purchase price $1500 and about 1/100th my current computing power.
SGI Indigo: with these machines I could sit for hours and just add and delete print queues–no need to do anything: the interface was such a joy to use. Purchase price $5K and about 1/30th my current compute power.
Commodore PET: typing LOAD 8,1 in order to play LUNAR LANDER. Purchase price $800, and about 1/10000th the compute power I have today.
Apple MacBook Pro: my most productive machine to date. What’s not to like? I feel like a spend a lot of time being ADD-boy, alt-tabbing between windows in the Microsoft fashion. It’s so zippy, and there’s always something more interesting in the next window.