"Chuck" question

[Zane H. Healy]

At 11:21 PM -0700 9/29/07, Chuck Guzis wrote:
>A friend forwarded this message to me and I agreed to post it. 
>Please note that she's an archivist and not a collector:
>
>"I tried posting this elsewhere but other than one
>reply that some schools have old computers around,
>nobody's come up with a good explanation.

I think the best explanation is that American TV is absolute rubbish. 
The TV writers are hacks, who only write for the clueless brain-dead 
masses (which sadly seems to sum up the American public).  Trying to 
make sense of TV's portrayal of computers is a waste of time.  Just 
look at computers in any episode of CSI.  I have the misfortune of 
seeing most episodes of CSI, and it appears CSI:NY's set designers 
have decided to toss out any pretense of accuracy, and gone full on 
into Sci-Fi.

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.  This works best if he came from a 
background of poverty, which since Stanford is mentioned seems 
unlikely.

BTW, in this area, I've seen a grand total of 5 TRS-80's of various 
vintage.  Two of those the Library just received as part of the 
donation last week, one of those, a CoCo, might be the first that has 
enough pieces to actually be usable.  The only system I've found less 
possible to get up and running in any form are Atari Computers.

Zane


-- 
| Zane H. Healy                    | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary)    | OpenVMS Enthusiast         |
| MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet)           | Classic Computer Collector |
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