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A comment on The void left by the parallel port. Parent comment

Re:The void left by the parallel port by lokedhs on Thursday May 05, 2016 @09:23PM (#11641046)
That's really neat, and one of those things I wish I was able to do. I would probably just have gone out and bought an Atari ST just to get my hands on an actual computer with an M68k.

It does make me wonder what made you go all of this instead of doing that? It obviously wasn't just your need to program on an M68k. I think you are more of a hardware genius than you want to let on. Either that or you are just good at everything.

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Re:The void left by the parallel port by billforsternz on Thursday May 05, 2016 @09:48PM (#11641136)
I think back in the day it was normal for an average young embedded software dev like myself to know my way around the basics of digital hardware. Nothing unusual about it then, maybe a little different now? Not sure. As for buying an Atari ST, it would have been quite a big purchase for me at the time. I am in New Zealand, I was probably making about $NZ30K from memory, and a computer like that would have been maybe $NZ1.5K (probably at least double whatever it cost in the US). The age of ubiquitous, super cheap consumer electronics hadn't yet arrived, especially in NZ.
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Re:The void left by the parallel port by fit2rule on Thursday May 05, 2016 @11:54PM (#11641582)
>Nothing unusual about it then, maybe a little different now? Not sure.

Like you, I cut my teeth in the 80's .. never trust a coder with a screwdriver, amiright .. but it seems that a rejuvenation of this ethos is upon us, with the Arduino and Maker crowd producing plenty of young developers who know how to burn their fingers ..

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