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Computer Folklore, Circa 1984
savetz writes "The full text of the classic 1984 computer book Digital Deli, The Comprehensive, User-Lovable Menu of Computer Lore, Culture, Lifestyles and Fancy, is now on the Web. (Autstralian mirror) A wonderful look at technology culture in the golden age of the microcomputer. 20 other old computer books are at the site, too."
De Re Atari.
Holy shit.
That was one of the first "serious" computer books I ever got -- I won a copy as a door prize at an Atari user's group meeting when I was about 12 years old. By the time I was done figuring out what all that crap in the back of Compute's Gazette was doing, my copy of DRA was so dog eared and broken spined that it couldn't sit flat on my desk.
Good memories. Glad to see it's still around somewhere.
--saint
I love how many books are becoming available in their entirety online. It gives an open-source advocate a warm fuzzy feeling.
By the time I was done figuring out what all that crap in the back of Compute's Gazette was doing
I meant Analog and Antic of course, not Compute's Gazette. Sorry, I had a C64 before I got my Atari 400 at a garage sale.
Not that it matters, but I figured I'd try to head off the hordes of whiny nitpickers pointing out that Gazette was all Commodore code.
--saint
"X" is for Xerox: the word processor's friend. Even though your computer printer will gladly produce 340 copies of your 430-page report, it could have a coronary at the end. If you use a slow daisy wheel printer (one page every few minutes), this might take over two hundred days to print nonstop. A special benefit for dot matrix users is that xeroxing makes the dots fill in nicely to look more like letter-quality hard copy.
Wow. One page every few minutes. And users complain because their laser printer takes 20-30 seconds to warm up...
The Digital Deli Online
Sex - Find It
Love it: this book was published on the same year I graduated in CompSci and went into business as a programmer.
Especially cool, the retro views on technology, I found. Yoda back strikes.
Like the one on computer safety. I mean, how many people actually take a break every 30 minutes to avoid damaging their eyes?
Ceci n'est pas une signature
http://textfiles.com/ is another fantastic, wonderful resource and window into computer-ages long gone. Check out the top 100 - especially the Captain Midnight story. My kids will be getting this read to them before bedtime some day.
I miss all of the old computer magazines. Nothing like having BASIC embedded in your articles. I think Compute was my all time favorite.
The Secret Guide to Computers by Russ Walter was my personal old computer book favorite, I remember checking it out of the library, it had tons of great info about all different kinds of computers. Great writing sytle, kept your attention and was funny! I recall he had his home phone number in it too...
I wonder if it's still published... off to Google!
... if that's your best, your best won't do... - Twisted Sister
I have an old (~1994?) Introduction to Networking (QUE) text in which it says TCP/IP is a standard that will more or less fade because the DOD insists that future protocols comply with GOSIP (Government OSI Profile). Nice call QUE!
1984 is not that old, the Mac and IBM PC were already out, for heaven's sake! 1984 is long after real classics like the Kim-1, Sinclair ZX80, and Apple II appeared. The real golden age of microcomputing was when you could fit the entire OS, basic interpreter and maybe a game or two into 8 K of RAM. Back then, a budding nerd could easily understand what every single chip and instruction did.
Real men use PEEK, POKE, and GOTO!
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
1984 was also the year that the first edition of "Fire in the Valley" came out. "Fire in the Valley" was the the most popular history of the personal computer in the '80s. What was amusing in retrospect was that in 1984 we thought the history of personal computers was basically over -- personal computers had gone from labs and the garages of hobbyists to the homes and offices of "normal" people. Looking backward, of course, 1984 seems almost as remote as the introduction of the Altair in 1975.
Notice as well, how much of it is outdated. The good stuff is still not free, or online (piracy nonwithstanding).
Reading through this article, I spotted this bit:
"Whenever there's a lull in the conversation, some fool Atari owner invariably throws out the telecommunications equivalent of "What's your sign?":
Interesting to see that while parents today complain about their kids using incomprehensible speech in IM, their generatation was doing it 20 years ago (and it was just as looked-down on then).
Marble Madness was an awesome game.. and this brought back great memories of it.
Marble Madness was the supreme mid-1980s arcade game. I played that game hundreds of times in high school, and won it at least a dozen times. A couple things set it apart. It had a cool 3D-style isometric viewpoint, which was done infinitely more convincingly than similar presentations like Zaxxon. Plus, given how hard you had to throw that trackball around, you could get a legitimate workout playing Marble Madness.
I think Marble Madness was sort of a smart person's Donkey Kong. It had a great subtle sense of humor, and a Steve Jobsian attention to detail. Like, fr'instance, the marble you controlled had glitter in it that would roll around as the ball rolled. And it could die in several twisted ways, from shattering to getting eaten by acid. The graphics were some of the best yet for 1980s videogames, and the music was likewise sensational.
After Marble Madness' success, a sequel was inevitable. The trouble was, some genius in marketing thought that for people to identify with our beloved marble, it had to assume human qualities. Thus, Marble Man was born.
Unfortunately, Marble Man never quite got out of testing before the crashing arcade scene made Atari withdraw it from market. I'm not sure if anyone knows where the few original ROM's are anymore. But one thing's for sure...there are thousands of Marble Maniacs out there who would buy it in a heartbeat, just to see if the original was surpassed.
1) The Original Macintosh unvailed in January 2) The Original Nightmare On Elm Street priemers in Movie Theaters
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
one mystery cleared up: I had always wondered how Byte Magazine, started by Wayne Green, ended up as his (ex) wife's property:
Because he was in the middle of an IRS audit and did not wish to have his new venture involved, Wayne registered the magazine in his wife's name. As it turned out, this was a serious error. No one except those involved will ever know just what happened, but when the smoke cleared Wayne still had 73 magazine and his ex-wife, now married to a German gentleman, had Byte, with Carl Helmers as the editor.
doh!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
And with the introduction of Apple's next generation of easy-to-use 32-bit computers in the Lisa/ Macintosh series, the Apple culture seems destined to grow and flourish.
I guess there was a time apple wasn't doomed.
I enter the office at exactly 8:59 to prompty start work no latter the 9:01. The first order of businness is to read the day program specs delieved to me by my highly competent management. At 9:30, 10:00, 10:30, 11:00, and 11:30 we take a two minute break where everyone in the office stands up in our cubes to look at each other. Our management forbids us to talk to each other, but we are allowed to make jestors. At 12:00 our management deliever us a tray with our lunch on it. When have until 12:40 to finsh lunch. For the next twenty minutes we are allow to use the restroom or have a smoke. However, we are not allow to leave our cudes. At 1:00 we return to our code. Again, every thirty minutes we take a two minute break. At the end of the day our management strikes the bell and we return to our cages. I need to go now the management sees me. It's about time to return to the code. This is my life as a code monkey.
For obvious reason I must post anonymously.
People are gettin nostalgic of 1984 computer books... Man I was born in 1984. I'm getting too old for this, gotta move to Florida put on my white golf shoes and accidentally vote for Bush again.
Nuclear war would really set back cable. - Ted Turner
The day local subscribers are offered digital phones is not far off. With divestiture, the offspring of AT&T can feel the hot breath of competition on their necks for the first time. These AT&T orphans will be offering a whole gamut of new products and services-lest someone else do it first.
Answering the phone could become a major decision as you struggle to remember whose number is showing on the display and whether this person is owed any money.
Not that there will be any real reason to leave the house. With the right peripherals, shopping will be no problem. Merchants will be able to fax their catalogs over the phone. And you'll be able to use the phone to make the bank transfers to pay for the stuff. Indeed, whole appliance factories could be rigged to "build on order."
... was my favourite. A *really* well designed OS on a 1MHz machine, with the basic having simple interfaces to the OS routines and the built-in assembler. Absolutely fantastic machine for its day, and this book laid it all bare.
:-) Students (who really weren't that computer-savvy back then) would freak out if their computer started to "talk" to them...
[grin] I remember using that and the network guide to load up *SAY across the network ont remote computers at college
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
The book contains a short piece by Bill Gates (here: http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/soft.php) and reproduced below. It's an interesting read because I still hear him talk about similar themes even today.
------------------
Today's software is too hard. Usually designed to work well for any and all potential buyers, a few years and hundreds of hours of interaction later a software package will still interface with you exactly as it did at the time of purchase. Your special use may make some uncommon program command the one most often employed, but you'll have to punch any number of extra keys every time you invoke it. Today's software fails to remold itself to express a history of use, and this can lead to incredible inefficiency.
There are programs that allow the advanced user to adjust default values, which are those responses the programmer decided would be most typical for users of a specific application when the software was first booted up. There are also programs that can store a series of often invoked keystrokes and can tell the machine to take the sequence you've named and perform it again. These keyboard macros, the most trivial form of softer software, force you to go through a special set of operations to enter and record changes to the program.
Why shouldn't software automatically adapt to your needs, e.g., learn from experience to change the interpretation of a command, when this is done on a human level all the time? In-human-to-human communication, we adapt our terminology and our method of understanding to our previous history of interaction with each individual. There's no reason computer software should not be as flexible.
"Softer software" is the term I invented to avoid using the poorly understood term "artificial intelligence." In fact, it is a form of artificial intelligence, though not like speech recognition or the expert data base systems that are based on specific algorithms and do not really learn dynamically. Softer software is capable of getting better and better because it has advanced pattern recognition capabilities and can change its performance accordingly.
In general, making software softer requires storing information about a user's history of program commands and analyzing its patterns. This is a form of learning, since the software can build expectations of what the user may do later. Individual characteristics of users, what they're good at and what they're not good at, can be used to establish a reasonably unique dialogue with the computer.
A data management program, for example, could recognize that you always query its files by employee name rather than by an individual's address or hair color. Taking advantage of this pattern and predicting what will be your most common operations on data, the program could customize its query file structure to put information within easier reach. Or maybe it could learn to be forgiving of your most common keyboard mistakes by ignoring misspellings.
Software softness becomes very difficult when recognizing semantics rather than specific operations is required. Say you go into a document, move the mouse to bring the cursor to a certain position and make a word boldface, then go to another position and do it again. Instead of storing up the exact positions where this takes place and trying to match them to later entries pixel by pixel, you may want your software to draw the general conclusion that you boldface the first word in a paragraph and to position the cursor appropriately. Matching things, recording and playing them back at the semantic level: this is the hard part of softening software.
It is possible to say that we have certain types of softness built into software today and that over time we will see a clear progression as programs record a greater number of user events, recognizing more general patterns and building up the dialogue throughout the computer's history. Truly softer software is still some years away, but we are on an evolutionary path where at som
...for those good old days when computers weren't trendy, just good fun.
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
Jesus, I stated on a ZX-81 and went to work in '85.
I still have the first computer book I ever bought. Electronic Data Processing by Glyn Emery Pitman. Published in 1968.
Anybody who thinks computers are cool technology should dig up this book or one like it. They had everything back then, we've been treading water for 30+ years.
He sure was dead on about the future. Quote Below:
They call us pirates and worse. They lock up their programs behind hardware and software schemes. They set the minions of the law upon us. And still we flourish by our wiles.
Ahoy, ye microlubbers: to pirate a program is not to steal, but to liberate knowledge. We don't take money or goods from anyone; we merely free up information. Most of us don't profit from our buccaneering activities; instead, we share the wealth with our fellow computer users.
The software moguls have only themselves to blame for our cracking open the bars to their programs. If they didn't charge a king's ransom for disks that cost a pittance to duplicate, there would be little incentive for us to practice our skills. There would be no need for them to protect their programs if software were no more expensive than what you and I can afford to pay.
We are no longer in the Dark Ages of personal software, when so few people used computers that program development costs had to be defrayed by high unit prices. Now so many microcomputers are in use that a program should cost no more than a lightweight paperback novel. Instead, we are paying illuminated manuscript prices.
Maybe someday the software publishers will understand how they're killing off the golden goose. But until that time, be warned: there will be many a pirate's flag on the software horizon.
JOLLY ROGER
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
And of course, you can see where this line of thought took Microsoft. Clippy. Microsoft Bob. At least the latter got Gates laid.
^_^
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Mr. Veit was the original editor of Computer Shopper, which in the age before the Web was widespread was a moderately thick newsprint tabloid which covered a wonderful variety of computer hardware and software. By the time it was sucked up into the infamous Ziff-Davis machine, the PClone had largely won, but the Shopper still had several columnists in a "Classic Computers" section. Z-D put an end to that, making it a PClone-only rag that, while it was still useful for finding good deals and even, for a while, ran columns by Mr. Veit, had lost its soul.
CS grew fat--I think I've saved one of the astonishingly heavy issues from the era of its maximum thickness--but the Web is finally killing it off, as it is now a vastly better and more up-to-date source of deals and prices than a dead-tree magazine can possibly be. The stray pontificators that write for it suffer from the same lag problems, and one is better off reading hardware sites, tech-related blogs, and sites like Slashdot. (Goodness knows that "The Hard Edge" suffers from the terminal self-indulgence that Strunk and White decry and that crowds out space that the column should devote to useful information.) CS is now a pale shadow of its former deforesting self, and I wonder how much time it has left as a dead-tree magazine.
The computers and the software were simply, it seems. And that simplicity made for more fun.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
That reminds me. Are any of the old Byte issues (the one's with the nice covers), available on CD?
127.0.0.1
Have fun trying to "packet" that, you fuckin lamer newb. Meanwhile I'll be smashing your memory stack through the open UPnP. Thx for the mhz, bitch!
I still have it and the original loose leaf owners manual. It isn't 'stock' since in addition to the Osborne approved upgrades, I added a 8088 daughter board with a meg of memory to run MS DOS 2.0 programs. The 8088 and DOS were worthless but the 1 meg of RAM used as a RAM disk made it faster than DOS machines until 8Mhz AT clase machines came out with a 286 processor.
I should go out to the garage and fetch it. I have not booted it up in a long time. It is responsible for starting me in my present occupation.
As it is, I don't see anyone taking it seriously. That is your goal, right?
The best bits were the "laws" like: Whatever reason you give for buying a computer, you'll end up playing games on it.
I'd love to get a copy of the book as I lost mine.
Here's another prediction for the future that came true:
From Computer Animation Primer (published 1984):
By David Fox and Mitchell Waite
Some of today's most sophisticated special effects utilize shading techniques. The use of transparency, surface detail, shadows, texture and reflections are more of an art than a science. Although it is difficult to imagine how these techniques will one day be simplified, it is almost certain that they will. Perhaps LSI chips (large scale integration -- the technique used to make microprocessors) will be developed that apply shading algorithms to user-generated scenes.
This image alone is worth the visit to the site. Interesting background too:
It's been a long time since computer books were so underground that they could publish with copyrighted images on the front covers. Actually, it's been a long time since underground publications period could get away with this.
Metamuscle.com - News in the Iro
Anybody have a copy of this in a better format? I'd like to print it out so I don't have to read it on-line, but it looks like someone typed in the whole book and converted it to HTML (in about 8 billion chapters). What a HUGE pain in the ass, and extremely un-accessable to people.
Anybody got this in PDF or OpenOffice format?
i have this burided somewhere in a pile of pulp and ink, but it would be great (especially given the subject matter and nelson's foresight) to have this in digital form...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
...it's just that the heaviest users are all virgins, so nobody's had an opportunity to notice.
I was just at a local library book sale and saw a copy of this.
It was a paperback, so it would've been $0.10.
And I didn't pick it up, because my arms were already kind of full, and it wouln't have fit into the stack very well. (that, and I thought that it looked kind of useless.)
If only i had known that this was HISTORY that I was looking at (and not 10-year-old cruft),I would have surely bought it.
*ARRGH*!!
What is the difference between a small revolutionary change and a large evolutionary change?
It doesn't re-order the menu options BTW.
Adaptive menus are an interesting thing, probably the biggest complaint that I would have is that their memory of what to show is too short. I would estimate that around 1/3 of the time, I'm having to tell it to show me the rest of the commands on the menu. Whereas I would prefer that to be only 1/10th or 1/20th of the time.
A bigger beef that I have with Windows 2000/XP interface-style is that they've removed underlines from menus and dialogs (unless you hold down the Alt key). That makes it more difficult to learn the short-cut keys on the fly without having to sit down and force yourself to explore and memorize.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
"I predict that within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them" - Professor Frink
IBM 1130. Punched cards. 1971.
What a stupid instruction set. Life didn't get good until I'd worked past PDP-8's and got onto PDP-11's
and it's been all downhill since then.
Segments are for worms. BALR this, bitch.
Need Mercedes parts ?
I remember, back in 1991 and 1992, the days of Computer Shopper being as thick as a telephone book. It was so big, not only did it have an index, but it also had an index for the index!
It stayed really think until the internet revolution of the mid-1990s.
I know it's off-topic, nevertheless.... /dev/hda
/dev/hda
/dev/hda
:)
Suggestion:
hdparm -d1
You may also try
hdparm -d1 -u1 -m16
and also
hdparm -Tt
to see just how fast your hda is. That is, if the drive you tried to copy to/from is hda. Replace with hd[bcd] at your leisure.
Just my two cents
Ummm.... I forgot.... something working very slowly while copying and copying at very low speeds is the classic syndrome of your IDE devices not having the DMA enabled. Has nothing to do with your processor. Try
/dev/hda
/dev/hda
hdparm
and
hdparm -i
to see if this is the problem.
"Damnit, for the last time, theft and copyright infringement are COMPLETELY different things!"
Ummm...NO! But for the crowd that wants everyone to think well of them. I can understand their distress.
Just as Michael Jackson doesn't want to be thought of as a pedophille.
So much of the interaction with the menus becomes automatic, muscle memory, that when the adaptive menus are enabled I think it slowes me down.
Real men use toggle switches to enter 8 bit bytes, one memory location at a time. And do the hex math in their head.
I remember ditching the bundled Valdocs program (spreadsheet + word processor), since it only ran on the Epson and I couldn't use it on the university's lab PCs. Switched to having (WordStar|WordPerfect|SuperCalc) in one 5.25" drive, and my data disk in the other, and toting the disks around campus.
Come to think of it, that QX-10 might still be in my parents' garage...
...a market economy is the only way that you sustain a high enough average level of wealth that we can afford to be arti
I started with a zx81 in 1982, followed by a zxspectrum 16k, then upgraded to 48k and bought a prism vtx5000 modem for it in 1984, to use prestel's micronet. Got it home only to realize we had the wrong type of phone socket and couldn't get connected.
If only i knew then that crocodile clips weren't just used on cars.
no, you are wrong. you need to learn the meaning of the word "redundant". it doesn't necessarily have ANYTHING to do with the number of times something has been posted.
I have this book, in print. It's one of my favorites. I go to sleep reading it all the time. I'm glad that others get to read this fantastic classic.
As an aside, it was interesting to see the introduction to this book making note of the variants of BASIC out there, and how to adapt the programs to each one. I was an Atari bigot back then (at the righteous age of 12), and remember ignoring articles that primarily targeted other, inferior, machines.
This is not my sandwich.
I'm wondering which of today's slammed-on technology waves will actually take hold ten years from now. If I could figure it out, I'd be rich enough to pay somebody to waste time here for me.
This is not my sandwich.
Real men use toggle switches to enter 6-bit bytes, one memory location at a time and do octal calculations in their head. Kiddies use the tty and paper tape reader/writer.
Stick Men
"I know it's off-topic"
yeah, it really is.
No shit dude. I'm amazed you noticed. To get closer to the topic: I used to own a Sinclair ZX Spectrum+ 128K. A real joy it was, until it went up in smoke :|.
Actually, you can also change Windows so that the shortcut key ("Keyboard Navigation indicators") is always shown. In Windows 2000 this option can be found in Display Properties, Effects. In WinXP it's Display Properties - Appearance - Effects. Here's a page that shows how to find this menu item in WinXP, see the UI-51 figure.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
Funny how there is alot of talking about it being stealing in the slashdot thread on certain companies ignoring the GPL. Yeah, theft and copyright infringement are different but they are both still WRONG TO DO! If you didn't create it / pay to use it / get a license for it, it IS NOT YOURS.
http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/the_merry_pranks ters_of_microcomputing.php
So if you do as they do and not what they say, you might think, hey I could make a lot of money if I could sell mp3's to my college pals..
Well I guess if there isn't a law, there is nothing to breaking it..
Just say no to license servers!!