Disclaimer
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent anyone else's view in any way, including those of my employer.
© Copyright 2005
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent anyone else's view in any way, including those of my employer.
© Copyright 2005
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!
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3:01 pm - May 7th, 2005
My first computer was the VIC-20. I got a memory expansion cartridge for it that took it up to, I forget… 5k? 8k? I also got the HESMON machine monitor cartridge that got rid of BASIC and got you down to the assembly language level. That was fun. I got it doing pre-emptive multitasking and mostly used it to write graphics programs that let me display and print graphs for my control systems class. I also played Sargon III chess and Gorf a lot.
Then between my junior and senior year of college I finally got a IBM PC. Two floppies, 256 kb of RAM, CGA monitor, 1200 baud modem. I had it about a month when I decided I had to get a hard drive and upped the memory to the full 640 kb (because nobody’s going to need more than 640k, right?). I bought a used half-height 5 Mb hard drive from some doctor in Squirrel Hill and installed it. It was one of the first half-height drives around. That lasted about 2 years and I upgraded to a 20 Mb drive. Now I have systems with 2 Gb of RAM and half a terabyte of disk space. Sheesh.
3:45 pm - May 7th, 2005
I never got the machine monitor, since at the time I thought BASIC was pretty cool. Any machine-level stuff I did using PEEK and POKE in DATA statements. Never was much of an assembly-type… I got a fair amount of software for mine too, including my first introduction to a general-purpose database package.
My first PC was (somewhat embarrassingly) a Tandy 1000SX. I still have it. When I was using it, there wasn’t anything that it wouldn’t run, despite reports to the contrary! It had 64K when I got it and I upped it to 320K, then 640K. That 20MB drive was *vast* storage!
Same here: 2GB with dual 2.5 Ghz CPUs and 320GB of drive space…things have truly progressed.
But I still kinda miss the good ole’ days!
4:07 pm - May 7th, 2005
Here’s the one I miss, the AT&T PC7300, the UNIX PC. It had a 68010 processor, 2 MB of RAM, 1200 baud modem and a 10 MB HD.
I got it for $600 when Mace Electronics went out of business. It was geek heaven to be running UNIX at home. This was years before Linux, Free/Open/Net-BSD, or OS X.
4:23 pm - May 9th, 2005
When I was at Rockwell, we had a 3700. It was a cool machine for the time and really compact for the power it had!
Speaking of AT&T, remember the Olivetti-built boxes? I’m not sure, but the 3700 may have been one of ‘em.
5:00 pm - May 10th, 2005
The 7300 was built for AT&T by Olivetti. So was the PC6300, their DOS/Windows machines. Despite those nice machines, AT&T could never make it in the PC business. As someone said, “AT&T couldn’t market eternal life.”
12:43 pm - May 20th, 2005
Two things:
My first “almost personal” machine was an RCA 110A at IUP. Personal in the sense that as a grad student there I had the key to the room (yes it filled one) and that I was working on a project using it. Anyway you programmed on punched cards or flipping switches at the console. But more important for me when you wrote a program you debugged it by dragging around a scope and crawling into the cabinets probing stuff to see where your bits went… I learned a huge amount about programming and the connection between that and the actual hardware.
Second, hearing about the PC7300 from Sean brought back memories, I saw one of those in a demo at Utah and really, really lusted after that box. I got the manuals and dreamed of owning one of my own. I was running Apollo workstations at time and really wanted my own UNIX box. At grad student pay it was only wishful thinking then. Now running OSX, wireless on a Powerbook, only 20 years later I got my wish.
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