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.
My first computer was a Commodore 64 back when I was four years old. It had those big floppy disks and we bought a box full of random shareware type games. I’d have to put the disk into the slot and manually load things by typing something like “L shift-O ,8,1” using the commodore keyboard the had some alternate keys than these days. When loading I’d have to use a finger to hold the disk in as far as it would go because the reader was wearing out. I played World Games and Summer Games, Crystals, Pole Position, Maxwell Manor, Pit Fall, Spy vs Spy and a zillion more. I was really intrigued by a graphic-less D&D game where you had to type in, “Hit troll with sword of fire.” Only I was really young and couldn’t spell and it didn’t like any of my commands. “Mom, how do you spell ‘steal gold from corpse’?” Early on my parents realized that grounding me to my room was no good because I could easily entertain myself with a rock or a marble in there and be happy even if toys were taken away. They found that grounding me from the computer was the real trick. They caught me trying to type with my toes once and I got grounded and was completely miserable. At some point we got a C128 and then after that we got an IBM I think. A couple more of those and then a long series of Dells.
I typed on my first manual typewriter in college while working for the archives. I had to ask a few questions and was intimidated with the lack of a proper backspace. I have to admit the clunk of the keys going down was way more satisfying than a keyboard.
One of the original IBM PCs with two floppy drives. After a couple of years I went hi tech and put a 20 meg hard drive in it. First game was Zork. I was eaten by a grue many times.
I had an atari 800 that I bought in my masters program. One of my professors had complained about my writing, especially my spelling as it wasn’t too professional. I got the computer and the word processing program and what a difference the spell checker made!
I was finally free to edit on the fly, was I ever liberated! My thesis was written on that old computer and a dot matrix printer.
TRS-80 Model I, 48K memory purchased in April 1980; came with a cassette player to save and load programs; had to make sure the volume was set correctly so it would work.
I remember when I ordered it at the local Radio Shack, the manager being absolutely flabbergasted at why I would need so much memory. What was I going to do with it? Had to pay mucho extra to get the memory. Had to get a bank loan to buy it. Remember talking with the loan officer about what I was going to do with it as well.
When I got it, I taught myself Basic and was taking some programming courses at the local college. Eventually bought a couple of 5″ disk drives for it. The OS took 10k so that left about 38k for the program.
Used the TRS-80 until 1990, when I bought my first Macintosh.
The first computer my parents got was a Super iXT – though, other than its nameplate constantly falling off, it worked much better than you might think from the name. It was a whopping 4.77MHz and had a whole MB of memory and an enormous 20 MB hard drive. Whee! 🙂 Remarkably, it could run Windows 3.1 though it was slow enough that if you played 2-player Tetris, spinning one player’s piece would stop both pieces from dropping. Thanks to that trick, I discovered that Microsoft used 16-bit integers for the Tetris score – when you got to 32767, the score flipped to -32768. (It was also unfortunate if the game ended when you had a negative score, since you wouldn’t make the high score list.)
My first computer wasn’t anything particularly special – some sort of no-name 386 from Costco. Its most endearing trait was the habit it developed later in life of sometimes deciding that it didn’t want to access the floppy disk but would much rather erase the hard drive.
My first home computer (1987 or so) was a Macintosh SE (same factor as the original Mac). Had 1 MB of RAM, a 20MB external hard drive, and two internal 800kb floppies. External 9600 baud modem. Printer was a dot-matrix Imagewriter. It was actually WYSIWYG. I’ve used Macs and PCs over the years, but have gone back to Mac for good. Linux tempts me a bit, but not enough to do more than fool around with it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Macintosh_SE_b.jpg
At work during that time I as a Vax/VMS system admin. Those were great systems.
My first game was Asteroids. My second was Star Raiders. I got really good at the latter. The neat thing was, you could begin to paint the ‘shape’ of your own ship by what *didn’t* get you hit, so you had a kind of a ‘body’ feeling about that game. I once ran up a score so high I felt like running to the neighbors: in those pre-internet days, there was just nobody to tell.
I taught school in those days, a profession which required me to wear heels and dress up ridiculously much. I can recall causing a satisfying bit of a jaw drop among the 12 year olds in the game parlor when I walked in with heels and coiffure, paid for Star Raiders and proceeded to run the score to infinity and beyond. Maybe they weren’t as quick to judge a book by its cover after that. 😉
Osborne Executive, mid-80s, purchased after lots of research, company went out of business right afterwards (what can I say?). About the size/weight of a portable sewing machine. Two disc drives, one for the program and one for the “working” disc; a great advance, as one did not have to load the program, remove the disc, and insert a “working” disc. I loved it and felt very high-tech (and, back then, I was). Never did games much. Had an early version of a “therapy” program (I’m a psychologist) which was very Rogerian, repeating back your words in slightly different format.
Now I have Vista at home, 2-year-old HP computer; and Vista at work, computer probably also about 2 years old. The home computer is underutilized, mostly reading the news and email. Work computer has programs for qualitative data analysis as well as the usual word processing and spreadsheets.
No Kindle yet. I was thinking of it for a Canada train trip but my library had a book sale and at 50 cents for paperbacks it’s cheaper to buy the hard copies and leave them behind as I travel.
I first used a computer in a typing class where we were taught Word Perfect. Didn’t get my own till mid 80s when I went back to school for a Library degree. Then what I could afford was an old secondhand Commadore. My memory is real fuzzy on the details now but it sure made a big difference in the pleasure of graduate school. Like Spence loved my spell checker. Still do.
Used various machines while in the Navy, usually they were 8 bit machines, like an 8088 processor, or if we were lucky, an i286 machine, with a whopping 1MB of RAM and perhaps a 20MB hard drive. Depending on the function of the computer, and the level of classification of the material on it, you had a restriction on who could access it, where it had to be kept and safeguarded, etc. Nothing so high as Top Secret, but Secret was high enough for the machines.
My first personally owned computer was an i386DX33 with 4MB of RAM (at $65 per MB), and an 83MB hard drive ($365). We bought it from a shop in San Diego on the recommendation of some friends. The OS was MS-DOS 4.01, with Windows 3.1 installed. I got a color dot-matrix printer with it as well, all for the low, low price of $2700.00. We eventually put a math coprocessor i387, in with the CPU, but I don’t recall seeing a lot of difference, not until we increased the RAM up to 8MB. But then, the increase is logarithmic, and you get diminishing returns as you add more and more memory.
Once we learned how to use some of the applications, it was all right. I look back now and laugh that one of our friends came over to help us with setting up a menu, not realizing that we had Windows onboard, so didn’t need a menu. Still it was nice of him to do so, and he was amazed at how fast the thing worked. Now, I’ve got a Duo-Core Quad at 2.4GHz that often seems to just stop for a few seconds, as if it were dithering. Most of the time, that’s because McAfee is installing its daily virus signature updates.
IBM PC1 I bought in December ’81. It had 64K (gasp) and 2 floppy drives that took the 5 inch disks my cat pee’d on. I upgraded it with a new BIOS chip, the 8087 math processor, a memory board, modem and a 40 Meg HardCard. Eventually I stripped it all down and parted it out on eBay where most of it went to a computer geek in West Australia who wanted to rebuild the original PC1. The shipping was the most expensive part of that transaction.
My first computer was a Commodore 128—actually it was my second: that Christmas the ‘rents got me an Atari that no one in the family could figure out how to use for the lives of us, so it went back and we got the Commodore in exchange.
That thing lasted me almost 10 years before I convinced the ‘rents to get me a new one. We got a Macintosh TV off the Home Shopping Network, believe it or not, but back then Macs didn’t come with *anything* so when the ‘rents saw a PC advertised in the paper from Circuit City that came with a tonne of software they packed up the Mac and we got that instead. It was one of the first Pentium machines—I even came with that lovely floating point error—a Packard Bell with a 60 MHz processor, with a 450 MB hard drive and 8 MB RAM, running Windows 3.11.
After that I had a couple home made machines until 04 when I got my current computer, a 17 inch PowerBook. I love this thing to death but it’s getting a little long in the tooth so I’ll probably be getting a new MacBook Pro sometime before the end of the year.
I always get a kick out of sci fi without computers in it. Like the early Asimov stuff where he would describe scenes where ship captains would literally get out paper star charts and slide rules and rulers and compasses and spend days or weeks calculating hyperspace jumps manually. It’s so incredibly hard to imagine anything in the future, much less space flight and robots and galactic empires without computers.
Even in some sci fi with computers—like the early Foreigner books, for instance—written before computers really became so ingrained in the household and our every day lives. The descriptions of Bren’s computer seem so primitive compared to the fact that the humans are supposed to have a huge presence in the galaxy and especially when compared to computers now.
It’s incredible to see how far we’ve come in just the last decade much less the last fifty years or so.
… didn’t have my own computer until I got a “Pentium classic” … a 346 that was remanufactured (I was poor). However, “Educational Technologies” at my college consisted of word processing on an Apple 2GS – monochromatic screen and two floppy drives (one for the program and one for your saved work). That made sense because computer class in my high school was programming in BASIC.
My favorite old tech story is telling young folks about the tape drive computer my best friend had (who was a hacker then) – accessed information and saved on cassette tapes of all things.
As I read this thread, “those were the days, my friends” keeps running through my head …
Between my brother and me I believe we have a complete Apple museum from 1980 to 1995 or so. After that there got to be so many simultaneous Mac models that our record is spotty.
Most of my grad school papers were typewritten; the computer came in only at the last. And I don’t recall a spell-checker for my first version of Appleworks, my first word processor. Maybe it was there but I didn’t use it, as proofreading was never difficult for me. But the ability to do revisions, and to move sections, was a total revelation. Before that, I always turned in virtual first drafts. I would do all the research, make notes on cards, sort through the cards and put them in the best order, with or without a written-out outline to go-with, and then sit down at the typewriter. Consider the outline and the top card, write, maybe put in a quote, go to the nekt card, lather, rinse, repeat. Changing it would require retyping the whole thing, and I never left myself time for that (this usually being done the night before the paper was due). It worked; I got good grades. But I think my writing improved a good deal after I could make revisions without retyping 😉
The first whole-family computer that we had was a Compaq luggable, which was much smaller than my father’s refrigerator-sized office computer. (He was a programmer.) We got that when I was about seven (1987). We didn’t have games for it, but it had its programs on the machine, which was an innovation as compared to the school Apple IIe machines. I can’t remember whether it was black and amber or black and green. I think it was black and green.
The next machine up was a family Mac, in 1994. She was a Quadra 660 AV, and could speak and had voice recognition capabilities. My sister and I had some fun with those. I dubbed her Majel, for the obvious reason.
Then there was the Gateway 2000, the next year, running Windows 3.11 — my father wanted to upgrade to Windows 95, and set me on the task. I cheerfully did, and then I tried to use the thing. He returned home to me informing him that for his pleasure and convenience, I had returned the machine to Windows 3.11, and if he wanted that damned OS on his machine, he could jolly well install it himself. It remained on 3.11 until the advent of Windows 98.
My own first computer was a Dell Latitude CPt laptop. The three things I needed before moving out on my own were a car, a computer, and a rice cooker. She served me well until I bought a newer model with a wireless card.
The first computer on which I wrote at any length was a UK-specific beast, a “BBC Master Series Microcomputer” that was my pride and joy in my grad-atudent days, and which controlled my experiment as well as letting me write up my thesis. I think it had 128K of RAM altogether, with the operating system, BASIC, and a rudimentary spreadsheet and word processor built in on ROM chips. A separate plug-in ROM cartridge let me use some math symbols and design any others I needed on an eight-by-eight grid; for one of the chapters of my thesis I had to switch home-made symbol sets half way through a chapter. Each chapter of my thesis — which was about twenty thousand words altogether — was split over two or three files, which lived on a 5.25″ floppy, and printing the whole thing out, in “Near Letter Quality” on a dot-matrix, took me about eight hours.
The first computer I owned myself, in 1989, was an Amstrad PCW-8256; also, I think, a UK brand. It had a monochrome monitor with the processor and highly non-standard 3-inch (not 3.5 inch) floppy drive built in; it could handle files of maybe five thousand words if there wasn’t anything else on the floppy, and took several minutes to do a simple search-replace on a file that size: no spell-check, of course. It was a good machine for a would-be writer, though, in the sense that it offered far fewer temptations and distractions than a modern PC. I’d go up to the study and type of a summer evening while it went dark outside, leaving me working by screen-light until I shut it down and found myself sitting in the dark. When I finally retired it in favor of a real PC, I had to mail off my floppies to be converted to a format compatible with the rest of the world.
LOL…I seem to be much newer to the computer scene. I have only vague memories of printing out my first novel attempt in junior high on a dot matrix printer. The computer screen was black with orange or green lettering (don’t even ask me what model of computer it was, I didn’t care at the time).
Wow…ya got me. I can’t remember. I know my first Windows machine was the SuperCow (Gateway…came in those wonderful cow-spot boxes) It was a 386, I think, running Win95 (couldn’t pay me to run any of the previous Windows…I was quite fluent at one point in DosSpeak ..can’t remember any of it now) I broke down and moved over to Win95 all because I wanted the original Poser program…then I almost never used it. I’ve still got the stiffies it came on…pre-CD drives… Sigh…I’d love to get my hands on the modern version!
Before that….I just remember lots of floppies…I’ve still got a floppy drive down in the basement. Anyone need one? 😀 I think I used an Atari when I worked for WaRP Graphics. Or maybe it was an Apple. All I remember is it used a regular black and white TV for a monitor.
Sheesh…for someone who ended up building her own computers, I was sure ignorant about my equipment!
My programming classes in college used punch cards… does that count as antique? I helped a couple of companies make the shift over to computerized ordering and inventory…I remember some machine that used something like ticker-tape for sending the orders for processing and receiving the orders back for printing…little holes in a very long, very thin paper tape. What did they call that thing…Shoot, I’m terrible. Once I quit using something, it disappears from my brain.
Besides, I didn’t really learn about computers until the Flood That Ate My Computer…
My first home computer was a ZX Spectrum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zx_spectrum). I don’t think they ever made it big in the States. It was about the size of a hardback book (or the Samsung netbook I’m writing this on :)) and had little rubber keys on the built-in keyboard. It hooked up to a cassette player to load games and used your tv screen as a monitor. My sister and I wasted hours of our lives playing the Horace games (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungry_Horace#Hungry_Horace). Eventually my mum upgraded us to an Amiga 500. That was more like a real computer. It had its own monitor and used 3.5″ floppy disks, though it still had the keyboard built in to the CPU. It’s always amused me that the early seasons of Babylon 5 did their CGI on an Amiga. A bit better specced than mine I’m sure, but even so….
My first real job as night shift comp operator, I had a variety of systems to play with but nothing to play. Eventually we got a DG MV8000, this was.. around 1980? and someone had hidden “Adventure” on it, the predecessor to “Zork” and I played that at night while the printouts were running, eventually I got to take a terminal home once in a while and showed my friends 🙂 heh..
First computer I ever had at home was a TI99a with 16k of glorious RAM. I wanted a TRS80 but the TI was a gift so… 🙂 Then eventually the Atari. 800?