[Leica] First computer

[abridge at gmail.com (Adam Bridge)]

Oh I remember South West Technical Products well!

Those were wonderful times - full of fervent. We went to the 1st
Annual Dr Dobbs Computer Faire at Civic Auditorium in San Francisco.
(Remember Dr Dobbs Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia?
"Running light without over-byte"?)

I was just out of the Navy in those days, in Electrical Engineering at
UC Davis. Couldn't afford anything like the Altair or SWTP so I built
a COSMAC Elf from the plans in Popular Electronics, hand-wired the
backplane. Labored to punch in the first program (that moved a highly
pixelated version of the ENTERPRISE across a TV monitor) to which my
neighbor said "Is that ALL it does?" I could have killed her. Or my
wife when I was laborously making the smallest HP67 program I could to
solve a differential equation. After I'd been working for like three
hours she interrupted me to ask me to bathe our daughter. "Isn't that
working yet?" she asked. "Oh, it's working fine but I just know I can
squeeze out a few less instructions if I just..." That's when she
threw the towel at me, stamped her foot and I abandoned optimization
for a safer occupation. Now I cherish the memories of bathing the kids
but at that moment with all the details still vivid in my head I was
rather upset. Never DID get it any smaller either, just wrote it out
to a mag card and used it.

Ah the joys of "early days".

Adam