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.
Oh, I got this thing in the mail about the Webby Award nominations. We should recommend this site when the nominations start, get it out there. http://webbyawards.com/entries/closed.php
Lol! lil ol’ us? That would be neat!
Mine was a BBC Micro 32K. How useful that machine was! If you plugged in the (EPRON??) chips into a socket cut – yes literally cut with a stanley knife! – into the plastic casing you could run good basic word processing and spreadsheet programmes.
We later upgraded it to 64K and ran the entire 1987 Worldcon programme from it!
Another BBC-model B 32k I think, none of those flashy Spectrum style soft keys and multi-functions. It ran Basic which I just about learnt to program- ish. And loaded games off a cassette recorder, waiting 30minutes+ for a version of Frogger to load, and then getting Block Error and having to restart. Argh! 5.25 disks were a luxury when they came in!
I had to get special permission to write school essays on it, as it was very novel at the time.
1st: ITT 2020, a licensed Apple II clone intended for Europe, I happened to work for ITT at the time. They kludged the graphics (an extra bit, as I recall) so that a program intended for the Apple II would run, but typically would display vertical bars on screen.
2nd: TRS-80. Not actually as good, or as useful, as the 2020. I recall programming “Life” on this, in Basic. It. Ran. Slowly.
3rd: BBC Model B with 32k and a disk interface. Whoo! You had fun with one of those, cramming programs into all the little nooks and crannies of available, unused memory. But it did have a nifty way of using ROM or EEPROM to quickly – almost instantly – load a program, such as a word processor, which I haven’t seen on any other computer other than a games console.
3rd: Atari ST. Good for games, and I didn’t use it for much else. Actually, didn’t use it much at all, come to that.
After that, until now, a whole series of “IBM PC” types. I’ve gone in the reverse direction to Jane: I used to know how to build a computer and all the bits & bobs involved, but I’m now hopelessly out of touch.
Oh, yes, you knew all about efficiency in programming when you had 32K or 48K to shoehorn it into. Now they have gigs, and throw in the kitchen sink, just in case somebody might want it! (Not that I ever learned how to program after I left behind my Apple ||c. I fell in love with the Mac graphic user interface the first time I ever dragged an icon to the trash instead of typing “delete correctlyspelledfilename”, but I never learned to program it. Miss that, sometimes.)
My first experience with programming was with an HP 29C programmable calculator in the mid-1970s. It worked with Reverse Polish Notation (I still prefer this), it had red LED numbers, and 4 registers, and you could program about 100 key-strokes. There was simple branching and loops. It had a heavy battery which lasted only an hour or two. I have very fond memories of it.
http://www.hpmuseum.org/29c.jpg
The first real computer program I wrote was in 1977. It was written, believe it or not, on punch cards. It was in FORTRAN, on an IBM mainframe. You typed in a line of code on a punch machine and it punched holes in a card accordingly. The program consisted of a stack of cards which you then fed into a card reader. A couple of minutes later the result of the program would be printed out on a nearby printer. Soon after I moved to black and white terminals.
The cards looked like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Punch-card-5081.jpg
I worked for some time in the early 1980s on HP 3000 ‘mini’ computers. Mini meant that it had a *small* air-conditioned room of its own and two cubes, each about the size of a washing machine. Backups were done on tape drives.
http://www.hpmuseum.net/images/3000-70_filled-37.jpg
I remember the first IBM PCs. They had what seemed like huge hard drives – a whole 20MB. When they brought out 40MB drives I wondered why anyone would need so much. A *large* program meant more than about 50k. Floppy disks held 360k.
I used MS-DOS for years. I sometimes still amaze people by opening up a command window in Vista and typing DOS commands when it’s quicker to do things that way. I clearly remember the time when someone told me he had been trying out a new OS called ‘Windows’. He thought it was the wave of the future. It must have been Windows 3.0 or 3.1. I never got into Macs.
Games… ‘Moon Lander’ on the HP29C, ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Adventure’ on IBM mainframes. ‘Zork’ on HP minis – I had pages and pages of elaborate maps. Later the Space Quest series, which was really innovative at the time. The first screen savers were fun – remember ‘After Dark’?
Before the Internet there were bulletin boards. You dialed in on a phone line using a 2400 baud modem (later 9600 and 14400). 2400 baud was 300 bytes/second (0.3k/sec). They had forums, messaging systems, games, etc. but the board was like a single web-site, not connected to any other.
Now I’m feeling old… but I’m currently writing desktop software compatible with Windows 7, and online databases in PHP and MySQL.
Moon Lander on the HP – YES!! My brother got one of those around 1972, maybe – he had it at Christmas and all the cousins did nothing else but try not to smack down on the moon with the fuel running out 50 feet up. And the only “graphics” were that if you turned the display upside down it would spell out a word in inverted numerals!
I too still prefer RPN. There are a few of them on the web — http://www.naveen.net/calculator/ for example. Sadly HP has given up the line. Still a few on ebay.
There’s a good HP41C emulator available from or It’s a lot better than the Windows calculator!
My links didn’t work – they are
http://www.hp41.org
http://www.educalc.net/326089.page
I got my PhD in 1979; my doctoral dissertation was written out by hand and then typed for submission on a TYPEWRITER. You know how old folks talk about “when I was young, I walked to school, and it was uphill both ways”? That sort of gives the flavor of the task.
IBM PC Convertible. 8088 with two, 720K 3.5″ floppy drives. DOS 3.3 the latest operating system. The 14lbs. door stop is still in the basement. As a co-worker used to say, you would turn it on, go get a cup of coffee and it was still loading. (He was making reference to an FTP, but it fits.)
It was a laptop at the time. The screen covered the keyboard, and only about that size. It may have been a blue screen with white letters.
I own an external 3.5″ floppy because I’m sure there are old photos from my Sony Mavica in the house, and papers I wrote for classes that I want to keep. I enjoyed doing the research and the papers were interesting even though I disliked the subject. (Not a sports fan and did a summer of baseball for English 102.)
The scary thing is that every now and again computers reach the ‘hit key, get coffee, come back’ stage _again_.
I had an Atari 800XL, with a tape drive and the usual joystick-operated games. In those days, you could borrow magazines from the library and type in applications in machine code and then run them… or not, if you had made typos.
I started my degree in 1989. In my first semester, I had to hand in a three-page paper, and typed twenty. In my second, I had to hand in a twenty-page paper… and ran, screaming, to the University computer pool. I remember walking the corridors with a 5 1/4 floppy in hand, waiting for a free machine somewhere. Then I considered buying my own – a friend had a brother who worked in a computer shop who’d set one up for me. I told my Mum, she grabbed me, and said ‘you are getting a Mac’. And thus, a Mac SE (9 inch black-and-white screen, 2.5MB RAM (cost extra), 20MB hard disk (back up on a packet of floppies), 8Mhz processor speed.
And it was a fully-grown computer. You could manipulate images (as long as you didn’t mind the black-and-white part, but Photoshop in those days had pretty good dither algorithms), create vector graphics, use DTP and a thousand and one fonts, create multimedia shows, write databases (Filemaker, how I love thee still)…
I started writing fiction two weeks after buying that computer. I’d been making up stories before that, but never, ever, had any interest in writing them down. The computer changed that, so I owe Apple.
I laugh when I fill out surveys, because ‘how many people in your company?’ ‘One.’ ‘How many computers?’ <mumble> (Three in working order, three that probably aren’t.)
And that’s not counting my phone which has more processing power than my SE ever did…
Oh, my old Timex Sinclair! Hook it up to a TV for a monitor, cassette player for programs (have to get the volume right – too loud or too soft and the program wouldn’t load!), learning to program in Basic (10 PRINT “HELLO”, 20 GOTO 10)…
Before that, I thought I was up in the world, using an IBM Selectric typewriter!
In college, my roommate had a ‘word processor’ that had a 3-line screen, but was otherwise a typewriter. I thought that was high-tech and was honored that she let me write my papers on it.
I’m not dating myself or anything…
My first computer was an Atari. The first computer that my father and I used to write stories on (I was 10(?).) was an old school Apple IIe — CRT, two 5″ floppy drives and it ran on the ram it was built with. Yes indeedy — those were the days.
We upgraded to an 8088 when we couldn’t get support for the Apple IIe, then a 286 in the days of the screaming fast 486DX. It wasn’t until my 20’s that I moved from the trailing edge of technology to the near-bleeding edge of technology.
It’s amazing how crippled I feel without my laptop/a computer to type on!
My first was a Macintosh, with half a meg of RAM and a one-sided 3.5 inch floppy (400K formatted). Bought it in 1985. Got the Imagewriter II dot matrix printer too. That cost a pretty penny! Total about $1200 IIRC, a lot in those days for a low-pay LTJG. I was the hit of the wardroom aboard my destroyer–everyone wanted to type their reports on my computer, using MacWrite. [The ship had a mini-mainframe computer, a Wang VS-80, used mainly to keep our Admin files; I wrote my first novel on that Wang, then had to luck into a computer-literate first-class Midshipman who was from U Texas to liberate the tale from the computer, as its only soft output was reel-to-reel tape.] I loved that Mac, upgraded it to Fat Mac config as soon as I could afford it: two-sided internal drive (800k, woohoo!) and ONE MEG of internal RAM (woohoo again). Bought the external floppy drive so I didn’t have to swap floppies any more, what luxury. Never could come up with the scratch to buy the Rodime 10MB external hard drive, which was three inches thick and had the same desk footprint as the whole computer, roughly a foot square–one of the attributes the marketing guys had come up with for the hard drive was that it “raised the Mac up to a more comfortable eye level.” (!!!)
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Four years later I was working for HP, building hard drives. Our outgoing product was a 100 meg hard drive which could only be transported via forklift or handtruck; the thing was about the size of a small washing machine. Individual read/write heads were the size of a cigarette pack. That was 1990; the drive I started out on was a 5.25 inch full-height drive that stored 320MB–it weighed 7 pounds. We also made a 3.5 inch full-height (10 platters) that held about the same amount. 6 years later, when HP quit making hard drives, our new product was an 8.7 gig full-height 3.5 inch internal drive with 10 platters (19 data surfaces). A couple months ago I bought a 500 gig 3.5 sub-half height drive which has, I believe, 3 platters (say after me: “areal density”). Progress!
@GreenWyvern: Please, let us not revisit Fortran. Fortran 4 was the latest and greatest I ever used. Generally I used Assembler or a Cobol-like compiler for the GE-225. Yup, GE used to make computers and they were state-of-the-art if the art you’re talking about was early-mid 1960’s. A piece of trivia: all the calculations to construct the arches on the Sydney Opera House were written in Fortran and run on a GE-225. Every night they came in and ran the program through multiple iterations until they had specs for the next days construction.
And Jane, I think you’re talking about paper tape. Came in various flavours,the most common being 8-bit. It could be used to load a program or data.
And punched cards … been there, done that, dropped boxes of them on the floor only to have to get them back in sequence again. You HAD to have them sequenced. One gentleman I worked with couldn’t be bothered and dropped a 2-box program on the floor. It took him a week to get back together and another week or two to get it to assemble properly.
Rosemary
The interaction between writing technology and the end product is interesting. You can date the theses in the library at Cornell by the size; The earliest and thinnest were done in the days of hand copying (a thriving local industry for those with good penmanship back then). Then the typewriter was invented and the average thesis got slightly fatter. With the electric typewriter and the word processor comes an order of magnitude jump. I was there pre-computer. The current efforts probably approximate the Encyclopedia Britannica.
I rather suspect that the writing was better in the earliest efforts, as the physical side was so much work, more thought went into the preparatory stages.
And can you imagine Asimov’s output if he’d had a decent computer to write with!
It was a long time before I could afford my own computer. But I was working at a Kinko’s when they got the first Macs–the original ones with one internal 3.5″ floppy drive. The application was on a disc, and you saved your work to the same disc. If this wasn’t possible, you switched discs. The major programs were MacWrite, MacDraw and MacPaint. Then came added on external floppy drives, minimizing the need for disc switching, for a while. Then external hard drives. Also external dial up modems which we used to check the AP news feed and some of the bulletin boards. I can remember being hugely excited when a program came out–a buggy but awesome program–called Switcher which allowed you to switch between applications without closing one then opening another. Amazing! And eventually there came the Mac SE, Aldus Pagemaker and MS Word, and an Apple laser printer, and desktop publishing came of age. I kept the job at Kinko’s for a long time, just to have access to the Macs. (There was a IBM in the corner–MS DOS: no mouse, no GUI, orange type on black background–which we called Darth Vader. Customers who used it were pretty much on their own because staff all disdained it.)
I used my Atari for years of dotty output. I had it buffered from from 48 k to a towering 300 or thereabouts. I had buffers connected to buffers and wires all over the place.
Remember taking your drive box in to be adjusted, so it would read properly, with a screwdriver? But then it couldn’t read disks it had written when it was ‘off’.
When I replaced the Atari, it was an odd chain of events. I got invited to a business opening, wine and cheese sort of thing, and it was a computer store, with this shiny new IBM monster that had a speed advantage that was really worth it. And a laser printer. IBM AT. Big jump in efficiency. At last something that could beat my souped-up Atari all hollow.
I priced this combo. They wanted 10,000.00 monitor and all, and it was just killing me, how much faster, how much time I could save. I finally thought—if that machine let me get out one extra novel in its lifetime, it would pay for itself. And meanwhile I could actually print off a sheet in less than a minute. Which in a 500 page novel, means something.
I mortgaged the car and got the system, second bank loan I’d ever gotten, besides a mortgage. It was so new they couldn’t deliver it for 3 months.
But when it came, finally, it was wonderful. I got that extra novel out that same year. It was that much faster. I was able to pay off the loan.
I kept upgrading that machine until we went a step up from that, and cheaper, too—way cheaper. Thank goodness. If I had to pay at the same rate for the computing power of my little Dell Latitude, I couldn’t remotely afford it.
My first word processor was Runoff on a Honeywell 6180 in 1976 or so. I got a job at the MIT Computer center, as secretary for the system programming department. I’m a fast typist, but I make mistakes; runoff (the Multics word-processing program) was sooooo much nicer than using up co-rec-tape on the IBM Selectric! And once the young techies — the systems programmers — who staffed that department realized that I *liked* computers, they were *much* more interested in teaching me all about their big, wonderful toy (the 6180) and how to program it, than they were in having me lick their stamps. Lucky me! I’ve been into computers ever since.
While I was at MIT, home-built computers just started to come into existence — I recall that some of the guys were building their own North Stars. I also recall that when Adventure hit our floor, all work stopped for an entire week while everyone — up to and including the Deputy Director of the facility, who was a fairly stuffed shirt on an ordinary day — worked their way through the Underground. But nobody could get that last move…. until one guy finally got frustrated in the middle of the night, and hacked the code to get the endgame. (I think it was “throw book at volcano”, which upset this guy because it wasn’t a logical move.)
My first at-home computer, in the early 1980’s, was a Commodore 64, just after it came out — the monitor was your TV set, the disk drive (for those same 5″ floppies) — well — we and everybody else had to take them back to the factory for exchange 3 or 4 times before we got one that worked, and when they did work, it didn’t take them long to get out of alignment….as I recall, they came with a disk we could use to re-align them ourselves. It had word processing (sort of), and it also had Zork… and the rest of the early Infocom games, descendants of Adventure. Later, there was an IBM-PC with two — count ’em, two — 5″ floppies, one for the system, one for your data….
Like I said, I *like* computers.
Whooo, you all have a lot of early computer experience. I used them at work in the library in the 80s – 286s, as I remember. I did a lot of work with DBase IIIplus, working out a little program to use in the library. I bought my own computer in around 1991, with money I earned as a reader/data entry person for the OED. At that time I could not send my work via the net; I mailed floppies to New Jersey. My personal pc had 5.25 and 3.5 floppy disks, and the lovely, functional, non-complex WordPerfect. I kept that pc until 1999 when I upgraded in the face of the fear that older pcs would refuse to function when the century changed. My new pc ran Windows 98, and had a cd reader, but no cd burner; I did not think ahead. I still have that machine;It will be replaced when something other than Vista is available.
However, I learned to type on a manual typewriter. This has served me well because I use good hand position on my keyboard even today. I see a great many people who rest the heels of their hands on any handy surface and then have wrist trouble.
I still use WordPerfect, which I am pretty sure had some of the same developers as my old 14k LetterPerfect, from the Atari. MS Word usually has me swearing a blue streak in about 10 minutes.
When I first lived on the east coast, back in the 90s, WordPerfect was the standard. The best program I’d ever come across, especially when it was still owned by the WordPerfect Corporation in Utah (Now there was a support section that understood customer service). When I moved to Seattle in 1996, it was Microsoft land and I had to learn Word to get a job. Hated every moment I used it, and couldn’t help comparing the programs. Word was ‘dumbed down’ for users, just seemed to get dumber and dumber, and was so counter-intuitive I couldn’t find some functions at all. It got better, but has never been comparable. Now back on the east coast again, and it’s all still MS Word! Wahhh!
I remember those IBMs with the 2 floppy disc drives. I was an accounts receivable clerk in 1986 and had to type in the Receivables Aging report on it using… WORDSTAR! OH My Gosh – haven’t thought about that for a while. I laugh so hard now.
WordPerfect, Lotus 123 and Reflex were such amazing advances to me at the time – a year later. Then it was off to QuattroPro and dBase… only after that did I move to Microsoft Office.
I didn’t have my own home computer until the 1990 or so… by then we had hard drives we could save actual files to but we were still using a dot matrix printer.
My husband (only 6 years older than I am but in technology, it makes a difference) remembers writing a text editing program so that he could type his thesis on a computer. I doubt it had spell check though!
Oooohhh — WORDSTAR! — I’d totally forgotten. Completely keyboard-controlled (ergo real fast), but saved in a weird format that indicated end-of-line by changing the ASCII number of the last character on the line — makes for real strange text if you try to read the files raw now. MS Word used to have a converter for Wordstar that they eliminated with, I think, Word 97… I still have some of those old “.ws” files in my backups.
Reflex was wonderful too — I created a simple relational database for our (very beginning) videotape-sales business that gave me *exactly* the information I needed. Nothing has worked the way I want it to since…
haha! I forgot Star Trek on the mainframe 370MVS.
1986 – a 500mb disk drive for a DEC Vax or DG MV series cost $25000. I wouldn’t even tell you how much the 256MB of memory cost lol…
Shall I mention the costs of drum storage on an IBM 7090? The drums we had came from SAGE and if anyone remembers that system they will know where I worked.