Downbelow Station was the book that convinced me I had to get into computers. First Don Wollheim (DAW) said it was too long and maybe I didn’t need all the scene-setting: you know that book has a lot of scene-shifts, some scenes only 10 lines long. So I rewrote it and took out all the setting and description. Don came back saying never mind the length, just put the stuff back in. But Betsy suggested time-stamps on the sections, and I liked that idea, so I did. But typing a book is about a 3 month operation even if you’ve already written it.
So after sending off the world’s shaggiest manuscript, the whole thing cut and pasted, and re-cut and re-pasted—I got a cellwriter. Mistake. It had about 120 cells (recording strips) on which you could write and it would retain it. But it would only play back one cell at a time, as you turned the dial, and heaven help you if you got anything out of order. You had to keep meticulous records of what scene was in what cell—ie, you were your own FAT table.
Now, my typewriters all met horrid fates. My speed and the pounding wrecked typeballs and sent letter slugs flying. I had to have cams repaired. And I didn’t trust the tech of that cellwriter.
So I went to a store and took a look at a 48 k Atari. It had little ‘cards’ or modules you shoved into one of two slots, to let it do basic. You had two disk drives, each about the size and behavior of a toaster. You put your program in one, your writing disk in the other (flat 5″ floppies) and you strung I/O cable from the computer to the interface, a unit about the size of a modern laptop, then another cable to the first drive, and then a cable from the first drive to the second drive, as I recall, and then one from the second drive back to the interface: or maybe not. Each disc could record about 30 pages of typescript. And adding scenes out of order meant creative numbering, like ForAd2b: that’s Foreigner part A disk 2 part b. So it was better than the cellwriter…
The whole wordprocessing program was about 14 k. That let you have 48-14=34k left to write with. Did I mention old LetterPerfect didn’t have a warning when you filled the buffer? It’d bounce, and you’d lose the last sentence you’d typed, to clear enough memory for it to actually save the file. Which would whirr and grind. Then you’d load another disk, label it, format it, and type your next bit.
There was no warning when you were going to close without saving. No Are You Sures? It just did what you told it. And yes, I lost an entire Thieves’ World story that way. I had to do it completely over. I lost a very key scene out of 40,000 in Gehenna and had to reconstruct it.
And let’s not even mention power backups (there weren’t) and power outs (there were. Edmond power went out when a particularly heavy pigeon landed on a line.) Thunderstorms. No battery. If it was too wild to plug in, you were dead until the storm passed.
CRT screen. Not only did I have a dot matrix printer, the screen displayed that way, too: you could see the pixels.
Eventually I got a portable…uh…luggable. It looked like a sewing machine and closed with a suitcase clasp. It weighed 30 pounds and had a really bad screen. It was a Sharp.
But I kept the old Atari going. I added a buffer that would let me load in a whole novel at once: wow! so I didn’t have to get up every 15 minutes all night long when it was time to print out, so I could change disks. And let me tell you, if we had a power glitch in the middle of loading a three inch stack of disks into that buffer, the air turned blue around me. The buffer slowed down my musical career: I’d taught myself to play the guitar while waiting for that Centronics printer. Multitasking? Ha. With 48 k you just feel grateful if it saved your file.
The first computer experience I had was in seventh grade, a BASIC class on TRS80 machines (aka “Trash Eighties”). Not very exciting.
In high school I sometimes used an electric typewriter at home. I powered the typewriter on one time and then realized belatedly that my kitty, who was sleeping next to the typewriter and who certainly didn’t care for it’s noises, should be relocated. I bore a 2 inch scar on my face for many months after that, which did heal/disappear after a couple years. The vice principal had a computer in his office that a few of us would use to type up our papers with deadline looming.
Even though I went to a tech college in the early nineties there were few students with their own computers. But Macs and IBMs were both available in separate computer labs. The company I worked for after college used PCs mainly, but my lab used Macs because the software for the laser equipment we used ran on Macs.
On the home front, my fiancee at the time had a Mac, but eventually we got a Gateway PC, then a few constructs from cyberpower systems, one of which my hubby is still using (though I have added a newer hard drive and video card all by myself, patpatpat), and I have an e-machines currently, which I don’t particularly like but it is adequate.
An IT friend gave me a busted Mac laptop that someone had dropped which I keep and use to play the older Cliff Johnson games (“3 in Three” and “Fool’s Errand”). He recommends a Mac emulator program to run his older games on PC, but I had to reinstall my windows operating system (more than once) shortly after using it and I am wary of emulators now.
I think Google may have a bad rep here but I am fascinated by their idea for the future – a global open source OS designed with the internet in mind. They make the point that the current operating systems were developed before the internet and they have a new paradigm. This would mean changes and upgrades to the OS would happen simultaneously for all users (and presumably no more shelling out for the latest Win operating system). Unfortunately, they have to figure out how to get around the monopoly/antitrust issues, same as Microsoft.
My first home computer was an Apple IIe in 1984, costing $2500! I switched to Macintosh about 1990, and started using a laptop about 1994. Of course, I was working on a PhD from 1992…
My first real computer usage was in high school, on Apple ][. That’s the plain model, not the “e” or “c”. I was also able to tinker with Sinclairs, both the original ZX81 model and the Timex 1000. I was aware of TRS80’s and C=64’s, but I’d been spoiled (even then) by floppy drives, and felt them to be too clunky.
I did some BBS surfing via a Zenith terminal that had a built-in 300 baud modem, only *slightly* slow in an age were 2400 baud was top-of-the-line. That’s 2.4K compared to the 56K that most people scorn as too slow nowadays.
The first computer that I *owned* was a Sanyo MBC555 AT-clone, 8088 cpu, 512K RAM (that couldn’t be upgraded to the IBM standard 640K without major surgery), two 5.25″ floppy drives, DOS. In 1992, I got an Amiga 500. It was aging technology even then, but I loved that little machine, and I had it pimped out. “Fat Agnes” improved graphics chip, 4MB of ram (compared to the standard 512K), and a 20MB Hard Drive! The HD was added by sandwiching an IDE interface between the CPU chip and the motherboard.
Since then, I’ve been limited to cheap/used hardware, so I’m always at least a generation or two behind the bleeding-edge. Currently, my *best* machine is a 2.66 GHz Pentium4 (single cpu), and as of about three years ago, I’ve discovered and entirely gone over to using Linux.
IBM PC-AT “labtop” computer. Yes – LAB top. Had a 4 “color” LCD screen (various shades of cyan) which folded out from the body, after you’d removed the keyboard and plugged it in (it kept the monitor safe by snapping in in front of the monitor). Fabulous device. Had a whopping 30mb of hard-drive space, and was so tightly packed inside that the guy who built it put layers of film in between the cards “so they don’t short each other out.” I was 15, going to Georgetown University, and carried it on the plane (I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t let it on as carryon luggage today).
That computer lasted me through college. 30mb meant a lot, in those days. WordStar was the writing program: it resembled HTML, except that it used things like ^b for bold, rather than pointy-brackets.
I’m doing a PhD now … and can’t imagine having to do this any other way, simply because reorganizing a paper can be done so easily! To have had to write this thing on one of the IBM Selectric typewriters that we had when I learned to type … would mean lots more thinking. Hmm. Perhaps that’s not a bad thing?
Feeling old now. ‘Night.
Hehe, I recognise Atari and some of the older IBM machines, but my first computer was a Palmtop 95 LX from HP, where my dad works. It was the cutest little thing, about as long as my hand is in adulthood, but for a first-and-second-grader it was somewhat bigger. It had Memo (for note-taking, with all those cute little alternate characters when you held down the ALT key and pressed letters and numbers), Lotus 1-2-3 (a spreadsheet program), Calc, Address Book, possibly some stuff I’m forgetting, and two games: Lair of the Squid (a labyrinth game with things to find and avoid, with the screen showing the view as if you were walking down corridors, not looking from above) and TigerFox (where you chased after a fox while trying to avoid the tiger, trying to travel over all of the fox’s dot-marked path, birds-eye-view). Our desktop at the time was an old PC running Windows, with a green-on-black CRT monitor… To boot up, you turned it on, waited for the blinking cursor to appear, typed “win” and hit ENTER. It had two games I remember: PacMan (maze with stuff to eat and not be eaten by, bird’s-eye-view) and LoadRunner (my dad programmed this one: you were a character in a pointed hat, and you had to travel through successively more challenging environments, going up ladders and stairs, burning through floors, collecting little bags of gold as you went; I think it had about 100 levels, but I don’t recall if my sister and I ever got that far…). Most of my time I spent outside with the neighborhood kids, though, playing our make-believe games as well as the classics: Kick the Can, Capture the Flag, and Predator-Prey (must be played in the dark with black clothing, hoods, and two flashlights for the Predators; an excellent game!). We girls also played with stuffed bunny dolls, making them clothes and houses, and tending to be rather destructive toward our Barbies. As they grew, the boys started playing video games, but I myself never got into them past the tactic of pressing as many buttons on the little console as possible, as fast as possible 😀 That’s still my technique, on the odd times that I am with video-game-playing folks who ask me to play. I do play the Myst cycle to this date (I started it in fourth grade at a friend’s house). They’re puzzle-solving games in which you can only die once, although you can wander about making no progress! Myst, Riven, and Exile I’ve finished, and I’m in the process of getting a PC to play Myst IV and V (Revelation and End of Ages, respectively). As far as my other personal cpmputers go, I had a laptop in middle-school, an Omnibook with a retractable mouse, running Windows 95, with a bunch oc great little games (Klotski, Maxwell, Jezzball, LifeGen, Asteroids, all those). Then I had some better laptops, and also a tower. It was big, but it beat the middle-school Omnibook, which had a plug-in CD-ROM drive with little cases to put the CD into and slide into the device… All my youth was spent in Windows, though, and I got to be quite good at troubleshooting it (to the point of booting up from the CD drive in a Windows-like emulator and getting files off of the hard drive).
I switched to Macs when I went to college (and am on my second, new last year, running OS 10.5.7). I do miss some of the menu-bar shortcuts from the PC, but not much…
And out in my parents’s garage is a cardboard box labeled: “Digi-Comp II: A Binary Computer You Can Program in Minutes!”
It’s a funny thing, growing up in a houseful of comp-sci grads, one of whom has great access to laptops 🙂 And I ended up using the old Palmtop 95 LX in high-school as an engineering-style graphing/eq-solving calculator because I hated RPN so much! Still do, although I now have a Dashboard app I can use instead of a tiny little computer…
And my little sister chats to my older sis online and plays games on my mom’s iPhone… I have absolutely no idea what computers will be like when she gets her first!
Wow. That was a really long comment!
Heh. I’ve still got my first computer, a lovely tan Commodore 64. Now I’ve spent the last six years or so fixing computers professionally, and I believe that it is downright criminal that a device you’re paying the best part of a thousand dollars (or more!) for no longer comes with even a simple manual! I’ve still got the system manual and programming guides for the C64, and they instruct you on every aspect of the machine. Spending half my day telling people how to undo some minor setting they’ve accidentally turned off because the manufacturer didn’t bother to document anything is rather frustrating to say the least.
My first computer was the infamous Vic20 with the ultra high speed casette recorder (Ie: slow…) . I did finally upgrade to the C-64 then to the C-128 . Then I was addicted , I actually purchased (at auction) a D.E.C. lsi-11/23 with 8″ floppy drives 😉 . Twyl.