Thanks for the nice anecdote.
I faced some problems in the old world of computers, but none as fun as this. I've always felt that computing was a lot more visceral back then because we were operating much closer to the machine.
Nowadays, software development is mostly about struggling against other humans: trying to undestand other people's mental models when patching libraries and APIs together. Back in the day, it was man vs machine.
Similar story, a bit later - my parents had a TeleVideo 1603 system that ran CP/M - I remember my father making a custom cable to connect a Daisywriter letter quality printer to it.
sorry to hijack your thread but this brought up something i hadn't thought about in a while.
when i was a kid getting into computers, say around 96/97, and for a while after that, i always felt a sense of missing out for not having been born earlier in the personal computing revolution, to really get access to what i felt was the ground floor of computer technology.
but then i got older and realized there's no way my single, non-technical, minimum-wage-earning mom could have paid 70s/80s hardware prices for machines.
given the situation i was born into, i now think i was extremely lucky - just early enough to be heavily influenced by early modern computing, but with relatively modern used hardware becoming more accessible to more people.
A few years later my dad decided to buy an Epson MX-80 for his computer. The daisy-wheel and the plotter at work (he worked at SRI) just didn't cut it, I guess? This required buying a serial card for the S-100. In order to get that printer to work, he had to first, wire up a cable because the data lines from the card were on different pins in the printer. I believe there was a version of the MX-80 that came with a serial port instead of a parallel port which made some things easier. I was recruited as his assistant. Then he had to modify and recompile the BIOS. Then he had to also make some changes to CP/M. This was a process of trial and error that lasted for weeks. I remember I was away at summer camp and he sent me a letter he printed out on that printer. He was so happy that he finally got it to work.
Anyways, this resurfaced that memory and I thought I might as well share it. I still have the printout he sent me somewhere.