Thursday, October 09, 2014

LGBT History Month (Part2)

I remember when…

Back in the late 90s at work we just got PCs and hooked up to the internet.

Now I have worked with computers back in the late 60s. The first computer that I learned to program was an IBM 1620 on which I learned FORTRAN. That was followed by the IBM 360 and BASIC. A couple of years later I bought a single board computer called an Rockwell AIM 65 where I learned Assembly Language for the 6502. That was followed by an Apple II+ and I was connected up to a network called Tymnet Delphi through a 300 baud phone modem. I was more interested in the hardware and the computers were becoming more of a black boxes that just ran programs so I started losing interest in them. One of the programs that I found interesting was a program called VisiCalc. I had made a circuit that measured the temperature in the house and outside and I wrote a program that took the data and recorded in a file that could be read by VisiCalc.

One day at work my boss delivered a bunch of boxes to me and say, “See what you can do with this!” Awhile later it was hooked up to the internet and my boss said for me to find a replacement transformer for a circuit board. So I typed into AltaVista, Excite, and Lycos search engines “Transformers” and lo and behold what came crossdressers and transsexuals and transgender!

Whoa! I nervously looked to see who was able to see the screen and if anyone saw the results.

Within a week I had a home PC and connected up to the internet and searching the internet.

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