26 lines
1.3 KiB
Plaintext
26 lines
1.3 KiB
Plaintext
Fido was originally the name of a computer I had in the late<74>
|
||
70's. I was working for a friend's consulting company (Microft Inc,<2C>
|
||
Falmouth MA) and we were using my computer, which was in a four foot<6F>
|
||
high rack: 18 slot chassis with 14 cards (4MHz Z80, CPU 64K memory,<2C>
|
||
bootstrap ROM card (six cards so far\dots), 8" floppy ,DC-300 tape<70>
|
||
drive, and a BASF 6172 8-inch Winchester tape drive which was as fast<73>
|
||
as it was unreliable. (It had a progressive and degenerative disease<73>
|
||
we called "the whoops"; the voice-coil head positioner make the<68>
|
||
customary chirping sounds; the BASF's favorite failure mode was to<74>
|
||
lose track of where it's head was at (quite literally) and instead of<6F>
|
||
the familiar chirping sounds as it seeked up and down the disk, it<69>
|
||
made a sort of whooping sound, like a falling siren, followed by a<>
|
||
KLUNK as the positioner hit it's backstop. You had to power it down to<74>
|
||
reset it. Most annoying.) The rear door was a rack of fans to keep it<69>
|
||
all cool. It was extremely large and complex, and when it ran (most of<6F>
|
||
the time) quite powerful. It ran PDOS (a rather nice CP/M-80<38>
|
||
compatible OS) and we did "C" (BDS and Whitesmiths) and assembly work<72>
|
||
on it.
|
||
|
||
It had so many parts\dots{} I called it a mongrel. I had taken to<74>
|
||
calling it "Fido". Debbie took a business card, whited-out the name<6D>
|
||
and wrote in "Fido, Office Computer".
|
||
|
||
The name stuck.
|
||
|