Phil Conners

Does this count?



TI59, late seventies.  Programmable in a sort of assembler language.  With the attached printer it was almost like a real computer

Othewise my first was a ZX80 in the early eightees, followed by a Commodore 64, IBM-PC (the original 8088 with a whopping 96KB RAM and two 360K 5.25" floppy drives and monochrome screen).   After a year with that I landed my first computer job as COBOL programmer on ICL 2900 mainframes, initially running DME (think paper card readers for program control) for a large corporation.  Oh yes, those days you could get a job in IT if you could spell I-B-M.



Those "washing machines" held huge 12" disk platters with a capacity of about a hundred MB each.  I think our total online capacity at the time was 900 MB as I recall "almost a gigabyte, wow".  It was so futuristic, like working in Star Trek.  Ah yes, nostalgia

Sorry if that got a little off-topic, obviously this wasn't my home computer

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I think I paid around 25-30k for alarm+installation.

No, Thai burglars generally don't vandalize things "for fun" like in the west. They just take what valuables they can find and leave.

I don't know about the empty house theory. Several empty houses in our village but they're not being broken into. I think it's more about how well functioning the village is.  If residents and security know each other and care enough to keep an eye open you're almost there.

Indeed a bike topic. Moved.

In 10 years of living on the dark side (in 3 different locations) I've so far never been burgled.  

We've had a cat burglar at least once walk in through open doors while we were at home, but only a couple of small things were stolen.  It's a very common ploy, I've heard it happen many places. Usually a Thai girl, 25-35 years old walking in, if she is encountered she comes up with a story about how she is looking for her aunt who should live there etc. I encountered it myself once, before realizing the ploy. Next time it happens to me I'll hand her over to security and they can have their fun with her.

Never had a house with monkey bars, hate those things.  Our present house has a burglar alarm (Chinese brand, installed by a Thai company, has worked fine for 5 years now). Sensors on windows and movement sensor in the living room, coupled to a couple of very noisy sirens, flashing lights and telephone system (that calls me on the mobile).  The alarm has been triggered 2-3 times over the years we had it, but we're still not sure if it was false alarm or a burglar ran away before stealing anything.