"Chuck" question

[Liam Proven]

On 30/09/2007, Zane H. Healy <healyzh at aracnet.com> wrote:
> Not knowing the show (and not caring to), my hand-wave of an
> explanation would be the guy had the computer around when he was a
> little kid and took it to college with him.  He might have written
> software for it just for fun.

That's what I did, going up to the University of London in 1985, with
a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K in a full-travel keyboard and a small
black-and-white TV. At first, outside of playing, it did some basic
stats for me. Chi-squared and so on, written in BASIC. A year or so
later, it had a 5.25" floppy drive, a printer port and I was writing
essays on it. This made me painfully cutting-edge for the time; AFAIK
I was the only person in my year to have their own computer.

I also had an account on the college's cluster of twin VAX 11/870s, on
which I learned Fortran (which I thought would be useful, but wasn't)
and things like email and BBSs and comms (which I didn't think would
be useful, but was).

-- 
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