Technology, Innovation & Telecomm

In 1978, I remember desperately wanting to get an Apple II. Truth told, I wanted just about any of the home computers that were big at the time. Do you remember the Sol I? How about the RCA Elf-COSMAC (VIP?)? Now there was an interesting architecture. Registers, registers, registers… There were a ton of totally cool machines, and boy I was totally lusting after each of ‘em.

My first computer was a KIM-1. It had 1K of RAM (if I recall). I managed to up that to 3K by adding a 2K static RAM to it (via wire-wrap wire, perf board and metal stand-offs). I also kludged an RS-232 port onto it so I wouldn’t need to use either the calculator keyboard and 7-segment displays, or the current-loop interface for teletypes… Had great fun modding that thing but oddly, I did’t write a lot of code on it. At the time, I was actually a bit averse to assembler/machine code. Next, I got ahold of a Sinclair ZX81. It was a computer made in England that eventually became the Timex-Sinclair 1000. It’s predecessor was the ZX80. Both were based on the Zilog Z-80 and were doggone cheap for the time. I ordered mine from the UK. Took a long time to get and sadly, it also wasn’t the best vehicle for my computer discovery. I was silly enough to purchase the 16K RAM pack and some software for it. Geez, that stupid RAM module was touchy since it was parked at the back of the already-small computer and stuck up above it. Any movement of the machine (and that was a dead-bang certainty given its size) and you risked losing everything in memory. While I didn’t make much progress on that machine at the time, hindsight has given me a certain respect for it, since Sir Clive Sinclair did a bloody good job of cramming a pretty significant amount of stuff into 4 IC’s.

The first truly useful machine that I got was a Commodore VIC-20. I think it had 3K of RAM but was blessed with a full-sized keyboard. For some reason that machine just clicked with me. I managed to build all manner of hardware interfaces for that thing, including motor controls, speech synthesizers, analog I/O, DTMF decoders, etc. It’s BASIC was pretty powerful and you could get to the heart of the thing pretty easily. It was based on the 6502 and had a 40-column display. I loved it and moved on to the Commodore 64. Since the two machines were so similar in principal (I know, the ‘64 had way better sound capabilities, more RAM, better graphics, etc.), it was a natural for me to move over to it. Somewhere in there, I got ahold of a Rockwell International AIM 65. That was also a 6502 machine with a full-sized keyboard and a decent little LED display. It pre-dated the Commodore hardware, but I got it later on. It was also a lot of fun to develop hardware for. That was my last non-PC hardware until I purchased a Macintosh many, many years later.

The point of this little diatribe is that I somehow managed to gain a lot of valuable experience from those little pieces of hardware. It was a loving exercise in electronics, computers, & software. And…I worry that that kind of experience is harder and harder to come by. While I wasn’t directly involved in the revolution, being a kid around the time that personal computing was being born was quite a priviledge. How does one go about getting the same opportunities? Having electronics as a hobby is pretty hard for a kid these days, since so much of the silicon out there is highly integrated and oftentimes surface mount. One has to be pretty deft to do that kind of fine soldering, etc. to make the kinds of things that would be interesting these days. You can get hand-held game machines that have thousands of times the computing power and resources that we had when I started out, so what I see these days is a kind of “so what” attitude towards tinkering. Not sure what the effect of that will be in the long run. I do know that those experiences were invaluable as I entered the professional work-force.

I suppose I’m getting old and this is the kind of diddy that you’d expect from a geezer (hey, I’m an early-40’s dude. Not *that* old…). I always said I wouldn’t do it. You know, pine for the good old days. But the truth is that I think it’s pretty hard to come back to that kind of experience. And I guess time has moved on to other areas of focus for younger, tech-inclined folks. Let’s hope that their version of what I was able to experience is as much of a blast as I found it!