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.
Sinclair ZX81 – I’ve still got it somewhere. 1 (count it) 1 k of RAM and you saved to a portable cassette recorder. I taught myself BASIC on that thing. Going on from there, I remember putting 64k RAM upgrades into IBM XT’s at work and installing Hercules graphics cards so the Finance bods could run Lotus 123 for DOS. I remember Wordstar dot commands, 10mb Bernoulli cartridges (took 7 carts and 3 hours to back up the server) and putting a 4mb memory upgrade the size of a tea tray into a Novell. After which it promptly overheated and died. Ah, those were the days.
I wrote my first program in 1963. It was in Fortran II and on punched cards. I had the only computer in the country booked for an hour. So, I loaded a stack of cards – the Fortran compiler – followed by my program. It then punched out an object deck in a language called IT. You then fed in the IT assembler followed by your object deck. Itthe punched out a machine code deck. You then fed in the loader cards, followed by your machine code deck. And you program then ran. About that time you discovered that you had made a spelling mistake on line three of the program.
Just about been there done that. Not quite although the year is right. Does anyone remember Illiac and it’s southern hemisphere clone Silliac? These were vaccuum tube machines and I remember the Physics Grad Students kept their beer in with Silliac. Those were definitely the days.
When I went to school I was taught Basic on a machine called ABC80. I vowed NEVER to work with computers. Ever. Stupid machines! This was when I was 16, in 1982.
Then in 1991 I worked extra during Easter break, helping a friend meet a deadline. Since then I’ve been working in what today would be labelled “user experience”, which is a broad field. I’m not going into specifics. But back then we used Macintoshes, first SE, then f/x’s and Quadra 700’s. Sometimes we needed to convert files stored in DOS or Win 2.1 formats. So we had an 286 as well. Back then I did a lot of artwork, in Studio8 – Photoshop was yet to be introduced in Sweden – pixel by pixel I rendered 3D effects, with the help of 256 colours.
No, programming has never been my thing. My job, and my interest, is to see to it that computers work as humans wants and need them to, and not as programmers thinks they should. It can be very interesting, trying to interpret and negotiate between different needs and stakeholders who live in totally separate cultures from each other, and see to it that the result lives up to good coding standards while also delivering value, in a way that any person could use, without a manual and without getting stuck.
Not as easy as you might think.
I liked WordPerfect far better than Word as well. First license we had was on a mini-computer back before it was ever ported to the PC. Anyone remember when WordPerfect Corp was called SSI (Satellite Software International I think)? They changed names about a year after the PC port. This was.. 82-83? And MS-DOS was not the default OS for pc’s.. hehe. there was another I forget the name of that began with a P.. ? heh, good thread, I’d forgotten all this stuff.
The other MS-DOS-like OS was CP/M. Except for a few commands, you’d hardly know the difference. IIRC, Billy Gates basically “liberated” it, buying the rights from its creators for some ridiculously low figure… at least, that’s the legend.
My first computer was a DigiComp I in 4th grade. Sealed my geek cred. First “portable” computer was probably a 110 baud acoustic coupler connection to the WPAFB DecSystem-10 in the late 70s. Had a Vic-20 around that time, too.
Had a Compaq luggable. The Macs I developed for in ’83 (MacPascal) had 128K and 400K floppies. The first Mac I owned was the SE.
Earliest used: CDC 3150 computer with 16K words of 24-bit* memory, 16MB (16M words?) of disk storage and two tape drives
Oldest used: PDP 8/I with 8K 12-bit* words and DECtape. This computer had a 2 MHz clock.
*These sound like strange numbers, but at the time six bits were used for characters, not 8.
First owned: arguable a TI SR-52 programmable calculator, later an Apple II. Since then, PCs.
OK Walt, we started in the same timeframe when there was IBM and the BUNCH; Burroughs, Univac, NCR, CDC, Honeywell. My old GE-225 was in that timeframe. The DEC PDP 8 was bigtime.
We did the first GPS software development on an HP 21MX minicomputer (32K words memory) in 1975.
My first computer was an MBC 550. It had two five inch disk drives on it. I was given a copy of Wordstar on it. A few years after I got it the monitor went out and it took a couple of weeks to locate someplace to get a replacement for it. I remember sitting down at Sue’s electric typewriter and thinking how alien it felt to try and write like that.
Yeah, you keep waiting for the text to come up on the non-existent screen. 😆
The first computer I had access to was at my university. It was a DEC System 10 they used in
the particle accelerator lab (which had a 4MV Dynamitron-Tandem accelerator, if that tells you anything). The thing still had a ferrite core memory and lived in about a dozen cabinets about the size of one of those big one-door freezer-refrigerator combinations. I wrote small
BASIC programs using punch cards. They also had a number of PDP-11s that were used to
collect and concentrate the raw data coming in from the detectors. These things had vector graphics and light pens; they had a fairly nifty moonlander game played with a light pen; the task was to land the LEM as close as possible to the MacDonalds (symbolised by the famous arches); after touchdown, an astronaut would descend to the surface, walk to the MacD
and order “two double whoppers and a coke”.
The first mainframe I used via CRT terminal, still at the university, was a Control Data Cyber 175, which had 60-bit words. This led to astonishing maximum values for the usual numeric data types (double precision float went up to 10 to the 308, IIRC). It ran both Colossal Caves and a text-based version of Star Trek, if you knew where to look. On the
other hand, one had free access to a number of microcomputers, with a Z-80 CPU, 64K memory, a monochrome 12 in text-only display, and one 8 in floppy drive. All you had to do was purchase a floppy disc containing the OS and a number of interpreters and compilers for about 5 dollars.
My first own computer was an AT clone with an 8 MHZ CPU, 1 Meg of RAM, a 20 MB hard drive (a ST225) and two 5.25 in floppy drives, running IBM-DOS 3.3. (DOS at the time needed some manual configuration if you wanted to use the machine seriously; as a late consequence the
license plate on my car reads EMM386) It had an ATI Graphics Wonder card that would display CGA graphics on a monochrome monitor. This was in 1987. I’ve lost count of how often I’ve swapped parts or upgraded the hardware, but the craziest buy was a Seagate ST1480A, a 3.5 in full-height 480 MB disk. It was “must have at any price” and cost me about 2,700 DM via a mail-order discounter (about 1,600 dollars at the time). My newest hard drive is a 320 GB
that cost me 62 euros. Times have really changed.
My first computer experience was learning BASIC and timeshare use of the mainframe at the US Naval Academy in 1977. The terminals were dumb TTY, and as someone said earlier, you could play Star Trek on it–the short range sensors printed out a (6X6?) grid with asterisks for stars, Ks for Klingons, and E for good ol’ NCC-1701. You had phasers and photon torpedoes–I had had trig by then, of course, but that’s how I REALLY learned trig, to calc firing angles for torpedoes. Phasers always hit, but you had to state how much energy from your reserves you wanted to use–not enough and their shields would shrug the burst off. Too much and you would deplete your own shields. We learned pretty quickly that the energy used in the phaser burst was simply subtracted from your total energy available. The trick was, with your first phaser shot you input a negative number. A BIG negative number. Like -1E12. Which did zero damage to the Bad Guy ™ but really jacked up your own energy supply. You’d take a lot of damage in return, but then you simply zapped all the Klingons with phasers. But it got boring.
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I went back to school after I got out of the Navy. I learned Fortran on IBM PCs, a big jump forward from punchcards.
I delayed my entry into computers by about 2 years after they became generally affordable, aka the Atari, and bought that disasterous cellwriter, all because I believed you had to program to be able to write on a computer. I was a little chagrinned later to find out I was wrong and could have had a computer earlier. But I took to Basic pretty easily, once I had the beast. I even wrote a computer game, which was a trading game with a randomly chosen crew (out of a range of characters each with a known flaw), a dishonest financial agent, time dilation and a randomly selected cargo which would trigger occasional bad behavior on the part of the crew—ie, the navigator is unable to resist alcohol. And if brandy turns up in your cargo, you are going to be very slow getting to your next port. You had space pirates and aliens that would turn up randomly, and I had a random number generator to actually form the aliens on the spot, and dictate their behavior, whether aggressive or xenophobic or friendly, or whether they understood trade at all: you could gain cool stuff or get robbed. It was fun to write. It even worked. But computers moved on.
Ironically, to generate e-books, I’m now writing in html, at least on a wizzywig basis, working with css and coding in the symbols, pretty well at regular typing speed.
My first computer was a kit I soldered together from the back of a magazine… I can’t actually remember the model, though I still have it up in the attic somewhere. 512 bytes of RAM, a hex keypad for data entry, and 7 segment LEDs, 6 of them, for output. It also had the ability to save programs to a cassette tape recorder (not included). Kansas City Standard woo hoo… I think it could read and write data at 300 baud, which means I could dump the entire memory in about 17 seconds.
I wasn’t able to any useful tasks (other than learning about how computers worked) until almost 5 years later when I shifted to a Commodore 64 to take to college with me (1983).
I remember those! I had great success with my crystal radio set. I was so tempted. But broke!
IIRC, the first computer I ran across (mid ’60s) was some sort of Burroughs drum computer that Fenn College in Cleveland had bought. My older brother was in Computers at Case Inst of Technology, and my dad was a prof at Fenn, so he could borrow the manuals. The next year I went off to MSU where they had a Control Data 3600 – 8 banks of 32k 48 bit words – and card punches. Eventually I worked for DEC on PDP-8,9,11, and 15 computers, and Control Data on the STAR computers. My own first computer was as S100 system with speech synthesizer and recognizer boards and paper tape and cassettes – not the best programmers environment! Now I use Linux and C, and usually assemble my own PC systems. It’s way faster than soldering chips to all those S100 boards.
Actually, the real reason I’m posting is to see what my brand new Gravitar looks like – must better than a photo, I’m sure. And I’m waiting for the ebooks, too 🙂
Welcome!
I worked on one that supposedly could support all the computers in our little short-course programming class.
Ha. Its partitioning broke down the moment several people all keyed at once, and you’d start getting somebody else’s printout. So they’d have to shut down the computer and reboot using a thing that looked like one of the ancient Castle Films (school) b&w filmstrips.
I was teaching at the time, had my own computer, but the school board had bought this shiny new computer system, so they shelled out to train us to use it for grades, etc—and then forbade us to use it because the programmers they’d hired wanted all the time.
Well, the first thing the new programmers did was schedule the same teacher’s classes opposite each other, mess up the bus schedules, make everybody unhappy about high level classes all being offered in the same hour, so you had to choose between, say, advanced Art and Latin IV; They enrolled a boy named Caroll in girl’s gym over and over and over, no matter how many times they tried, and put a girl named George into boy’s gym. Apparently the data entry person they hired was a total dolt.
GIGO rules.
I was going out with a computer geek in the early 80s, so I got to play with his computer for several years – it was a DEC LSI-11, with 64K of RAM. (And 8-inch single-sided floppies!) Later he added more memory (to 128K) and hard drives (an RK05F, which was 10 megabytes, and a regular RK05, which was 5; they were pizza-carrier-sized cartridge disks). We assembled a Heath Z-52 terminal to go with it, too.
The first computer I bought was an 8086, with a megabyte of RAM and a 30-meg hard drive. I bought a WYSIWYG word processor called ‘GoldWord’, which worked pretty well, and could do italics on the printer.
The second computer began as a 386 with monochrome monitor, and is now a 486 with color – yes, it’s still around – and it runs DOS. (Also it has Tetris. You need some fun, after all.)
That was unavailable for a while – it was in Texas and I was in California – so I bought a used machine with Win3.11, and upgraded it to Windows for Workgroups (don’t ask, but it was an improvement) and eventually to Win95. Added Word and Excel to it. (Currently those are on the _next_ machine, which is a Pentium running Win98, right next to me. Running; I can’t turn it off without worrying about whether I can get it turned on again, as the power switch is dicey.)
And what I’m using right now is one of a pair of dual-core Pentiums with WinXP. (The other is down, having ended up on the receiving end of ‘Format’ due to something getting into its system files.) The last three are all Shuttles: bookshelf-size boxes, relatively portable and with lots of connectors.
Used to be when my computer got screwed, I’d format C to fix it, just load the system disk, replace a few programs, and I was golden again.
Then we got black-box code and mystery systems, aka Windows, and Windozier. We have not found Vista the monster it’s advertised to be, but neither are we happy with it. We are looking forward to Win7, which by rumor is the first Win-something in years not to have technicians with wrenches chasing it to the shipping department, wailing, “But wait, but wait, I’m not done yet!”
Wow, this thread goes WAY back beyond my time. Commodore, Atari? What are those? I don’t know.
Well, I actually have some sort of a vague idea, because I’m an intelligent person, but that’s getting more toward my ego and less toward the topic.
My dad has been a computer technician since he graduated high school. When I was getting old enough to understand what games were, we got an IBM 386. I don’t know the specifics, I just remember 386 on the front of the box =P.
I do know that the monitor was color and about eight by eight inches, and the floppy drive was a five inch monstrosity. But oh, the games.
Crystal Caves, oh yeah. Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, Awesome. Elder Scrolls: Arena. Amazing.
I was one of those fortunate few children who grew up in a dual world: on one side, karate matches in the back yard, day-long battles with the neighborhood kids (which my brothers and our allies usually won, as I remember it) and adventures in the woods, the sewer pipes, and the construction sites.
On the other side was the wonderful world of computer games… I’m coming to doubt that world as I get older.
The computer was great, back then, as a thing to do for an hour when it was raining, or between play-dates with friends. But my brother’s friend was at my house yesterday and played video games for ELEVEN hours. Straight. In that same period of time hung out with two different people a hundred miles from each other and and built a motocross track on a farm.
So yeah, that was off topic, but satisfying to type. =]
NO, true. I think the judicious application of a blaster water gun may be called for in serious cases of gaming hypnosis. 🙂
We all have our hobbies, but in the words of a wise persion, this is life, not a dress rehearsal. Imho, games are for holidays, or a sub for tv in the evenings.
Given my choice between a video game and a canoing trip, I know which I’d choose, even if I’m a klutz in a canoe.
Now that I no longer need the MMOgames to escape the stresses of the physical world I have lost interest. (But I haven’t quite let go yet because of all the time I invested in building my EverQuest II world.) Being in touch with other people and supplementing TV and book entertainment is what the computer is to me these days.
I used to have the BASIC code for that game. We used to run it on a Z80 system in university. The short-range scan used an 8 by 8 grid, and the galaxy map also had an 8 by 8 grid of sectors. The long-range scan showed the sectors adjacent to the one the Enterprise was in, with a three-digit number in each of the sectors where the first digit was the number of stars in the sector, the second digit the number of Star Bases, and the third digit the number of Klingons. Not a complicated game but a good way to spend the time if you had some free time; nowadays you would use Solitaire for that, I think.
My previous post was intended as a reply to Jcrow9’s comment, but something went wrong.