I Must Be Getting Old
I’m a software engineer, so occasionally us geeks gather around and start swapping our old computer “war stories.” Ah, sweet memories…
I’ve been mostly behind the technology curve, myself. I was an “early adopter” of sorts, as I got a computer for Christmas in, I believe, 1982. It was an Atari 400. It had a membrane keyboard and decent graphics, but no built-in languages. I did get the BASIC cartridge (it was Atari, see?) and eventually a tape drive to store my horrible spaghetti-code BASIC programs, but that was it. No floppy-drive, no printer, no modem. I missed out on all the cool BBS stuff, but I probably wouldn’t have done much with a modem anyway. I was in rural Louisiana; any BBS would have definitely been long-distance, and I don’t think my parents would have put up with that.
As it turns out, that would be the only computer I owned until 1998. You see, I spent the years from 1989 until 2000 in the groves of academe. I figured the Universities had plenty of computers for me to use, and I wouldn’t have to worry about obsolescence.
As an undergraduate at a state Tech university, I was did indeed get to use computers: for CAD programs, circuit modeling, and programming. I took FORTRAN in 1990, and by the time I was finishing up in 1992-93, they were actually offering C++!
About this time, we started fooling around with this wacky network stuff. I knew one guy who nearly flunked out because he spent all his time in something called a “MUD.” I remember watching him: first, you login to the terminal (9600 baud, with a green monochrome monitor), then you type “telnet” followed by a bunch of numbers separated by periods. “That’s just too complicated!” I thought.
I preferred to spend time on the cool new Sun workstations with COLOR MONITORS! Wow! There was this thing called “Usenet” where you could find pictures of, ahem, scenery and stuff. Well, first you had to download about 4 text files, concatenate them, and run a program called “uudecode,” but it was worth it. Gorgeous scenery!
There was even a program called “Mosaic” which would let you…well, it didn’t let you do a whole lot back then, but it sure got a lot better. I spent the next decade in graduate school, and the internet and the World Wide Web became increasingly more important for research and communication, as more and more people setup websites with their e-mail addresses and electronic copies of their papers.
In 1993, I used a program called Archie to search FTP sites. Now we use Google, and it’s unbelievably much less painful. In 1994, the only tool we had to create web pages was a text editor. Now, I’m using the web itself to create web pages. Now that’s progress.
Anybody out there got any stories from the “good old days?”
March 4th, 2004 at 2:47 pm
I remember when fingering someone was an everyday occurance for geeks.
March 4th, 2004 at 3:39 pm
See here for a few, I happened to be reminiscing about this myself a couple of weeks ago.
Actually, the first time I dealt with a PC was a roommate’s KayPro, back in 1982 or so.
It had a game called “adventure” on it, totally verbal, along the lines of
“You are in a cave. There is a door in front of you. There is a door to your left. There is an axe on the ground.
p=pick up axe
f=front door
l=left door _blinking cursor_”
It was more fun than that may look like, at least it was for me. Inside of a week I had about a four foot map of that cave.
March 4th, 2004 at 3:51 pm
I read your post, Thomas, and it reminded me of the computer lab I ran as a grad student, around 1996-97. The previous lab admin had setup all the machines (PCs with 486 CPUs!) and given them superhero names—mostly X-Men, but a few of DC’s finest as well.
Geeks indeed. ๐
That KayPro…that was supposed to be “portable,” right? I remember seeing a computer like that. It was HEAVY. Hardware has truly come a long way.
March 4th, 2004 at 4:12 pm
Ah, memories…
SU, I preceded you by a couple of years on that curve at least as far as academia is concerned.
I got a Commodore 128 just before I started college here at UT in ’84 and used it to dial in and work on computer class programs for the couple of years I was in Computer Science. I learned BASIC, Fortran, Pascal, PL/1 (my personal favorite), Assembler and they were just introducing C (Not C++, the original C).
Then my soon-to-be-wife bought a 286 to help her with grad school, and I “adopted” it to begin surfing BBS’s here in town. I also eventually used it to access MUD’s and MUSH’s, which took up A LOT of free and not-so-free time.
Sometimes I wonder what happened to all those folks I used to comm with on BBS’s and the MUSH’s….;)
Oh, and Thomas – “Adventure” was the precursor, I believe, to the whole “Zork” series of text adventure games. The Great Underground Empire…:)
A Hollow Voice Says, “Foo…”
March 4th, 2004 at 4:18 pm
Barry, the new blogger here wrote that ๐ BUt I too had a commodore 128 and a TRS80. SOme guy in the mid 1990s gave me $50 for that TRS80 and turned it into a fish tank.
March 4th, 2004 at 4:21 pm
this one time.. lol.. you wont believe this.. i bought this computer, right………. and it had a floppy drive! ROFLMAO! Can you beleive those were actually used at one point?
March 4th, 2004 at 4:23 pm
I wandered into the computer lab at Auburn in early 1977 because I’d heard they had a Star Trek computer game. It was a primitive, “Asteroids” thing, but fun anyway! I’d come into the lab around 2 AM because the handful of student terminals were usually empty then. Taught myself BASIC and even wrote a simple random number program, which was stored on a long, long paper punch tape. I didn’t mess with computers again until the 90’s. If only I had known then….
March 4th, 2004 at 4:56 pm
I remember having email off of a server called “winnie_tp”. At the time I assume it was some sort of Windows protocol or something…until I realized that the names for some of the other servers/printers were tigger, rabbit, etc. that I realized that the servers name was actually an abbreviation for “winnie the pooh”
March 4th, 2004 at 7:09 pm
I remember having to use 56K dial up…um ok, I dont have any good stories.
March 4th, 2004 at 9:22 pm
In the early seventies, I was carrying a toolbag. Fixing computer equipment for a small manufacturer.
A new product line was being rolled out which was controlled, not by hard-wired circuit cards, but by a 12inch tall by 19inch wide mini-computer. (A PDP-11 clone.) In the process of learning to trouble-shoot the new hardware, I was given a machine-language instruction card and an assembly-language manual. I had never done assembly programming, but we had to learn how to create small diagnostics.
Understand, the only “smarts” this machine had was a 64-byte boot loader ROM. Anything else had to be loaded as part of your program. (No operating system. Every program was a stand-alone.) So I took instruction-set card in hand one Friday night after work in an engineering lab with a prototype system and, by 4am, I could build a line in EBCIDIC in memory and print it on the line printer. That was fun, so the next weekend, I hit the lab again and this time, by 2AM, I was reading a tab card on the card reader, translating it from Hollerith to EBCIDIC and printing it.
Over the next few months, I added more device drivers to my link-library and started trying simple application programs. Part failure analysis, diagnostics for manufacturing, that sort of thing.
I actually got as far as a working time-slice multi-tasking system kernel before the company was shut down. It took the whole summer of ’75 to find a job as a junior programmer since nobody wanted to believe that hands that had touched hardware could program, too.
March 4th, 2004 at 10:08 pm
I think homebru is winning.
March 5th, 2004 at 11:12 am
SayUncle/Thibodeaux,
Yes, the Kaypro was pretty heavy, I’m guessing 30-40 lbs. But technically, it was portable: the keyboard folded up and latched over the monitor; I think the handle was on one of the sides. The first “lap”top!
And yup, homebru is winning!
March 5th, 2004 at 11:35 am
The other day I gave a presentation on Jabber and instant messaging in general and while I was doing research for it I got to thinking about the social shift I’ve undergone in aclimating myself to communicating in an online environment..
I’ll never forget first time I managed to dial up my crappy 1200 baud modem to my friend’s 2400 baud (huh, he could have DoSed me!) and engaging in a “chat” session in Telix. I remember a feeling of apprehension and excitement and being not sure what I should say, but feeling like I needed to say SOMETHING.
Eventually you learn that while online you can relax a bit and you don’t have to constantly run on all cylinders while conversing.
I think this is a shift all people go through, where the immediacy of personal face-to-face interaction is obseleted online.
My best friend went through it when he first got on IM. For a long time when he would message me, if I didn’t message him back in 20 seconds, I would come back to a screen full of this:
hello?
hello?
hellooooo?
are you there?
hello?
HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEY
answer me
hello
hello
helloooo?
Finally he Got It, like everyone does, and realized that IM allows for a more leisurely pace of conversation.
Anyways, I forgot where I was going with this. Good times.
March 5th, 2004 at 1:58 pm
Yep, homebrew even has me beat. My first computer was a MicroAce (Sinclair ZX80 clone) which I soldered up from a kit and then modified. My first programming project was a data logger which I built around a Rockwell AIM 65 in 1982. The ROM included an absolute assembler (I had to count the bytes to a jump target) but I/O functions were system calls and the BCD to HEX conversion (incoming data came off a panel meter) was copied from a magazine article.
March 5th, 2004 at 2:00 pm
Sorry about generacizing Homebru’s nickname there.
March 5th, 2004 at 5:08 pm
triticale: I use this nickname not because of a sideline in brewing, but because I, too, used to build things. I actually used the nickname for a while BC (before computers).
But that was hardware and I are a software geek now.
March 7th, 2004 at 12:47 am
1981: learning PL/C on punch cards at Penn State
1985: writing technical manuals in EDT, printing them in Digital Standard Runoff, from a miniVAX at my first job
1987: dropped DSR for LaTeX
1988: Compuserve, address 76166,420, accessed at 2400bps on a Sharp 8088 laptop