[cpr]

Ah, memories. (Though I assiduously keep my beard off the lower reaches of my neck.)

I did start programming back in the days of punched cards/early timesharing on IBM mainframes (late 70's), but my first microprocessor experience was at a laser-printer start-up (TeX project spinoff from Stanford, Imagen), so we had the luxury of using the Sun-1 boards (the boards that Andy Bechtolsteim designed for use at Stanford, and which were the basis of the first Sun Micro workstations, the first Cisco routers, and the first Imagen image processors).

The Sun-1 boards had 68000 processors (no VM) with dual UART chip, so we actually could attach a terminal and interact with our primitive software that way (both for download & debugging). I had to write a real-time OS from scratch in our case, since we didn't couldn't really use the huge galumphing BSD Unix port that Sun was producing for future release.

Memories...