0 50jahre 1 Wind 2 Morgen 3 Sim 4 Und da 5 Komplexe 6 Lügen 7 Deppen 8 Rand 9 Links 10_Schwer 11_Gast Well, 50 years ago, the world looked very different. In 1975, private ownership of gold was legalized in the USA. Unbelievable today. And today, things are happening there that were unimaginable back then. Can we please have the gold ban back? The Vietnam War was still going on.

The first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club took place in California, bringing together fans of home computers. At that time, there were mainly game consoles, but as early as 1975 there was a MITS Altair kit, which is considered the first home computer. Apple is in the starting blocks, but not quite ready yet. The "Germain," the programming manual for IBM DV systems, is in its fifth edition. It now covers the /370 system, whereas the first edition in 1969 still focused on the /360 system. Things are not developing that quickly yet. At VW in Wolfsburg, this very /360 system was still in use at the time. The first version of S/360 had a remarkable 4KB of RAM, which could be addressed by one of the 16 universal registers. The addresses in machine commands consist of two bytes, of which four bits are used for addressing one of the 16 registers and an offset of 12 bits is added. And with 12 bits, you can address exactly 4096 addresses. In 1975, the System/370 was launched with an impressive 512KB of memory. At that time, the monthly maintenance costs for the technology were estimated at $12,000 per computer.

Three years earlier, the Club of Rome had published its report "The Limits to Growth." As someone who had the excellent Hermann Münzel as a teacher in my advanced religion class, this was required reading. This study concludes that within the next 100 years, it will be over. So until 2075, let's wait and see. Because not much will change. Well, for me it will—I won't be around to see it anymore ^^. Hermann shaped my thinking and continues to do so today. Priests like him could unite the world. If that were desired. In sports, Muhammad Ali was at his peak. And the Helsinki Accords were signed, which were intended to improve relations between East and West. And that with Brezhnev in office, who was then General Secretary of the CPSU. An apparatchik who was actually supposed to be bad news for Helsinki. However, he was popular with the people, a kind of "party uncle."

In 1977, I had a TI-58 from Texas Instruments. Somehow, I had managed to persuade my father, who worked hard to support our family on his modest income, to give me the 400 marks I needed for this toy. Just how little I knew about the requirements of such a system is shown by the fact that the TI-58 had no magnetic memory. So every time you turned it off, you had to retype everything. And yet it could store 480 program steps . The TI-59, which worked with magnetic cards, cost more than twice as much, which was beyond my means. I was tied to TI for a while, because in 1981 the TI99/4 came out and – already earning my own money at the time – I had to have it. But I couldn't share our chief programmer's enthusiasm for this system. It wasn't until I bought a Sinclair QL in 1984 that I really got started. And that was mainly because of the Motorola 68008 that was built into it.