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Old farts reminiscing about computers

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TRS-80 CoCo for me, 8 years old. I had a love for that thing. 300 baud modem eventually, the kind with the relay and not the coupling, which was pretty modern. Dialed into FIDONet BBSs, copied cartridges to cassette (had to put that little bit of scotch tape over the side), loved it all. Wrote lots of BASIC.

Over time, a few of the adults in my neighborhood got really into IBM clones, so I used to read the huge Computer Shopper cover to cover and find deals. We'd go to computer shows and they'd have me tell them what to buy, and I'd get something for helping out. I made the transition and stuck with them and MS-DOS for years, until going to Linux in the 90s. I built most of their computers and most of my own until the days of laptops.

One of the nicer things about computing back then (from the perspective of parenting a kid with one) is that if you wanted something, you mostly had to make it happen. And what you could do with a computer was confined within your walls. Setting an 8 year old loose with a computer today is a different story completely.

Still love them, and they're still magical to me. I hope that doesn't change.
 
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In 10th grade, science club went on a field trip to see the giant GE 635 time-sharing system that our school system was renting time on. The operator sat me down in front of the console and said "Son, why don't you sit down and try to beat the computer at tic-tac-toe." So I beat the computer at tic-tac-toe. And thought: "well, that's not right. I know nothing about computer programming, but I DO know I could write an unbeatable tic-tac-toe program." So I got the BASIC manual, read it cover to cover, started writing code. By the time the school system bought a Hewlett-Packard 2000 time-sharing system the next year, our school had a computer club and an active contest for who could write the "shortest" unbeatable tic-tac-toe program. (For some values of "shortest". As the number of lines shrinks, the average line length goes up. There might be a minimum acreage for a tic-tac-toe program.)

Learning to program in BASIC didn't permanently destroy my life. I discovered ALGOL, then C and LISP and Perl and HTML. Wrote a little article called "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal".

I've decide that I'm getting bored with learning new programming languages, and new text editors.
 
I am a little older than many of you, and got an early start with some older machines...

As a high school student, I was lucky enough to go to an NSF Summer Science program in the late 60's. There some computer science profs had a great program set out for us.

The start was learning to program a Bendix G-15, an antique even then. It was a tube computer with drum memory. Because there was a significant latency in waiting for a rotation of the drum, to optimize conditional jumps, the destination address needed to be a track or so over, and a little bit of an arc later on the drum. Great fun!

The next "computer" was a programable calculator, but it had descrete transistors and core memory. That was the a Wang Wang LOCI-2 with Nixie tubes for a readout.

By the end of the summer, we got to use a real computer, an IBM 1401. We got to use punch cards to program in Fortran (Formula Translation).

From there, I went to a private high school in New England where I learned Basic on a teletype connected via a 110 bit per second modem to the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, the world's first time share computer system.

That was a pretty good start for a 16-year-old in the 60's.

From there, probably the most notable computer that I got to program was an Intel 8080 in an Intel development system. The system only had dynamic memory, so to get it started, you had to use toggle switches to load a program into RAM that would load a program from the paper tape reader; so the boot up started...
 
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The funniest thing I did was when I was sixteen. I had gotten a summer job programming CNC machine tools for a small aerospace contractor. One weekend, my boss took me along as he visited the mainframe machine room of the aerospace company we contracted to. Well, what is a sixteen year old going to do in a giant corporate mainframe machine room? I had already learned a lot about IBM's punch card Job Control Language from the computer time I had, uh, borrowed from the local university. So while the boss was busy with the weekend shift machine operator guys, I took the opportunity to try to make a copy of a computer tape I had that had various projects on it. Find a blank tape, mount the two tapes, whip up a copy program on the punch card machines, run the program. Hmmm, some sort of security violation error. Oh well.

Monday rolls around and my boss is asking me what the heck did I do, the Monday morning operators got all these security violation reports. I didn't think much of it, but looking back, gosh, was I ever naive!
 
So here's where I got my handle from. I've actually kept that July 1977 Popular Electronics magazine all these years.

popelect1.jpg


Inside was an article that discussed the Cosmac Elf microcomputer. A now long dead company sold a kit where you could solder together your own computer (shown bottom right below). I still remember my surprise and gratefulness when my dad agreed to buy me the $100 kit when I was 13. He knew what he was doing - it directly led to my successful career.

popelec2.jpg


By the way, computer monitors were expensive back then, so the thing to do was to buy or get a really old used black and white TV, and modify it slightly to allow you to inject a video signal directly into the TV. I had to learn all these tricks by combing through tons of computer and electronic magazines at the local library in those pre-Internet days...
 
I like to tell people that it cost 20 million dollars per gigabyte to upgrade the ram in our first computer.
( We had an Apple 2 and a 16K card was 300 dollars )

I frequently slip and say megabyte when I mean gigabyte ( or terabyte ) and the youngsters look at me funny.
 
I am also 50. First experience was mainframe at community college in 1980. That experience involved COBOL and 80 column punch cards. This was followed very quickly by the TRS-80 and Apple II.

The TRS-80 was at the local Radio Shack store and had all the cassettes that had programs on them. I played a lot of Hamurabi. As I got to know the manager and clerks there, and I was 15, after a while they seemed ok with having me around the store. One day, I brought blank cassettes and asked if it was OK to CSAVE the games to them. They said it was fine, and I wound up with all of the software that they had for sale. It was years later before I understood why it had felt like I had gotten away with something.

I eventually wrote an education program on how to use an SLR camera (f-stops, shutter speeds, lenses, different types of film, etc.) for the TRS-80, but with only 4K of RAM, it could only do two screens at a time before doing another CLOAD. Painful, yet magical at the same time. Keep in mind that other kids were playing Atari, Simon or Mattel pocket football with flashing LED's.
 
I guess I only qualify for semi-old fart.

I'm 37 now, and my first introduction to computers was a Commodore 64 in about 1983'ish. I distinctly remember that I was completely blown away by the fact that you could interact with something on a tv-screen.

I worked a paper-route and begged my parents for a C64 and eventually got one. Spend the first month playing games and then dove into basic programming and found my way to the 6502 chip later.

The one day a friend called and told me to come over and see his new computer. It was an Amiga 500. This was the second world shattering moment for me. The machine was pure magic and the images were stunning.

I hit the local library and reserved every book on the 68k chip and the amiga, at that point there was 3 books total I think.

Then back to working the paper-route and thanks to a generous donation from my grandparents I was able to buy a used Amiga 500 with kickstart 1.2. This must have in 1986.

My best friend for the next 5 years was the Seka assembler, AsmOne, TrashEmOne and Sas-C. I wrote everything from demos to small games to funny side projects. The Amiga 500 gave way to an Amiga 4000/30 and I loved every minute of it.

I kept the Amiga 4000 until 1998 when I switched to the PC and eventually BeOS/Linux.

These days I am on a Mac and I still love programming. The C64 back in 1983 started me on a path that would see my grades improve, my life changed for the better, get a degree, made the climb to a higher social class (and drag my parents with me) and has kept me interested for all those years.

Today I am still driven by the fact that I like to build stuff and computers are an important way for me to express that desire.
 
I'm 49, so "old" doesn't apply to me, like all you 'over the hill' 50 year olds, but I remember my first Atari computer; then all those IBM clones I went through; seeing my first Apple at a friend's house with a strange corded device and being told it's called a "mouse"; then years later buying a modem before the internet even came along so I could access some research databases that you dialed into directly. Then I found other places to dial into directly, where computers just linked to computers; then this thing called the internet or world wide web came along, and instead of registering business.com, commerce. com, etc. etc. and being retired now after selling them all, I played around on it, not knowing there was gold to be mined.

So off to work tomorrow...
 
The real geeks were building S-100 buss computers with Z80 processor back in '77. I remember wire wrapping dozens of memory chips on a 5"x10" board yielding a massive 16K of memory for my "super" home computer. Software was loaded from a cassette tape player of course. Total state of art hobby computing!
 
I'm 45 so not that old but still capable of the odd fart...

My first experience of a computer was a Wang mini 22 something. It was already dated in 1983 but I was blown away writing a few simple lines of code in Basic. By 1987 (at 17) I was teaching Wang Word Processing, Lotus 123, Lotus Symphony and Multimate Word Processing on IBM Dos, and then got myself a job as a data entry clerk where in my spare time I was able to develop business systems using an IBM 3038 mainframe and a planning tool called Artemis.

I miss the days when everybody looked at me in awe because I was a teenager with few prospects, no education beyond 8th Grade, but I actually understood these machines and none of the graduate engineers did...lol.

Alex
 
IBM1130
IBM360
Altair 8800 <--- first "PC" I used. We played Kill the Bit. The goal was to flip one of the bit toggle switches when it was lit.
Apple ][
Commodore Pet

The latter two were when I worked part time selling at a small computer store while I was in grad school. Later at Mostek, we wire wrapped from the Apple ][+ schematic, debugged (there were errors) and then produced a circuit board. I built two clones.

While selling the Apple ][ (still have the Red Book manual) I had a question. This was on a Saturday. I called Apple and Steve Jobs answered the phone.

As for languages, good to see someone mention APL and LISP. There was also SNOBOL and COBOL but I didn't like COBOL. My programming, however, was mostly BASIC and later PASCAL.
 
Ahh... a fun thread. I saw half a dozen posts that struck a chord that I wanted to respond to directly... but seeing as how the forum software will just concatenate them all anyway, I'll just try and cover several here...

I'm also not as experienced as some of you gents... I'm 44 and and missed out from the mini-computer computer age and earlier. (Although I do find myself fascinated by what was accomplished in the 50-70's era leading up to the micros... I read as much as I can about it).

First exposure to computers was the Apple ][+ in 4th grade. 48K, color TV monitor, cassette tape loading (Lemonade and Oregon Trail!) once you got the volume right, BASIC, lo-res & hi-res graphics, machine language, shape tables, etc... Had Apple's in the classroom up through the computer classes in high school.

Folks saw that I had bu for computers, and bought me the US version of the Sinclair mentioned earlier: The Timex-Sinclair ZX-81 in all it's 1K RAM glory. Until I bought the 16K RAM wobbly pack. Membrane keyboard! Fast mode that blanked out video updates to save CPU cycles. The one we bought was a kit version that you had to build yourself.... my dad and I put it together.

Started hanging out at the local mall Radio Shack and playing with the Trash-80's and CoCo's...

Worked for some folks Apple clones & accessories at computer shows & swap meets at places liek the Alamdea fairgrounds (in retrospect clearly illegal knockoffs)

Some time later my grandparents bought me a C= 64, complete with 1541 disk drive. Slow, so of course I bought an Epyx Fast-Load cartridge to speed up the disk access routines... did the mod where you could add a reset button to the cartridge, as the main console didn't have one. Played, programmed, and used the heck out of that thing. PaperClip word processor was awesome, until GEOS came along, and brought GUI to the micro world...

Eventually ended up with a 1581 3.5" drive, Okidata OkiMate20 color printer, 1200 baud modem (Quantum Link!) 512K Berkeley Softworks RAM PACK, and finally a Schnedler Systems 4Mhz accelerator (complete with finicky "T" connector to allow the RAM pack and accelerator to share the expansion port)

Friends had bought the original Mac & ImageWriter, and knew that machines would forever change.

After high school ended up working for a company as a PC tech. The place had a IBM System/36, and the MIS manager was a mid-ranger, and didn't really do much with the PC's and Macs scattered about except set up the latter to share printers via AppleTalk, and install TwinAx cards in to the PC's to allow them to act as 5250 terminals.

I actually was the one to suggest installing a real network. There was as strong preference for TokenRing (IBM) and NetWare (the safe leader). They took a chance on me and my recommendation to go 10BaseT Ethernet and Windows NT Server. Got to set that whole thing up from scratch... figured out this TCP/IP thing, and off we went. Eventually set up email, connected to the internet, set up their global sales offices for remote access, etc... An incredibble experience.

Been a geek ever since... now a project manager for an IT contracting firm in the DC area... but I miss those heady days.

For mkjayakumar: That must have been fascinating work at DEC. If only they had stuck with Alpha's grand-dad Prism earlier and let Cutler & the boys finish Mica for it rather than building it for Gates (and renaming it Windows NT in the process), perhaps the computing world would be a very different place...).

Oh, and a quick shout-out for Gemco! (CA Bay Area native...)

-sc

PS- I have a good reading list I've collected over the years on computing history/development if anybody is interesting in it, and or has their own recomendations...