Kerry Packer, Spider bite
My Kerry Packer Story: 1978, my first job in Aus, for Photoset, who did typsetting for a fancy optical gadget. Using a PGP 11/70 -a minicomuputer, precurser of the VAX. I studied the Assembler code at DEC in Nth Sydney. Later I studied Intel 8080 code in Manhattan, and I can say Intel got a lot of ops from DEC (Autoincrement, page address registers...)Anyway, I never got to do photo-typsetting, I wrote as distribution system for "Womans weekly" in Pascal.
AWWeekly the flagship mag for ACP, Packers outfit, but we were contracted, not salaried by the big man. He came by one day with his mother "I just want to show Lady Packer our computer" says he, which was rich, seing we were an independant company. I hit the road for SEAsia, eventually got to London many months later, so trail burnt that in a job interview for Reuters I couldnt recall how a 16 bit computer could address more than 64k of memory (page address registers!) Another brilliant career thwarted.
....
Christmas uneventful, got out on the bike every day despite heatwave, got to Bondi Beach.
Christmas night, got up at 4am, stumbled to the bathroom, discovered spider web strands all over me. Back in bed, got bitten in the bum by the spider. Not especially painful, a tiny weal, gone by morning. Like a lot of solitary men, I value my spiders, so I trapped this one under a glass, and released her on the leaf pile in the morning.
Kerry Packer Spider bite
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