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What Are Your Favorite Computing Memories?
aussersterne asks: "Every now and then while reading Slashdot comments, I realize that most people have no idea that -the network was the computer- for decades before Amazon.com and Google ever appeared, taking for granted the rather boring state of commodity computing that dominates the marketplace today. Unix and dial-up shell users remember bang-paths, 110 baud BBSing, 'luggable' computers, UUCP, DC600 OS media, VT100s connected to dumb terminals, and 1152x900 8-bit color web browsing before most PC users had even shelled out for their first copy of Windows 3.x and the free 'serial mouse' it included. Middle-aged geeks, what are your favorite recollections from from the '80s and '90s computing, network, and hardware world, as full of platforms and innovation as it was? Which computer system is still 'your baby' all these years later? Anybody still have a running Sun2? A running FHL UniQuad? Anybody still use KA9Q?"
I thought this was a very clever way to propagate messages between BBS's. I guess I graduated from Fidonet to Usenet around 1990...if one considers that graduating, and not simply moving in to The Project.
>> "What would the robut do? Frame someone!"
Though I'm not middle aged, I do have tons of fond memories of sitting in front of my Commodore 64 with my dad, learning to load programs and playing games with him. The two I remember the most are Threshold and Falcon Patrol.
"Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." --Barry Goldwater
~~~
I wasn't born yet but the famous Coup that formed IBM is a favorite, read about it.
The GPL, for those that truely understand.
We middle-aged geeks go back earlier than the '80s and '90s. My baby was the PDP-10 running TOPS-10, then TENEX, and occasionally ITS. My first gonzo gaming experience was playing Zork on a 300 baud hardcopy terminal in California connected through a local TIP to MIT. Still a hard game to top.
This is entirely age dependendent I suppose, but the great Eureka moment for me was discovering the BBS circa 1990 from a friend, then on my own figuring out how to connect.
This might not seem like much, but it was my first independent project with a PC and I was 13.
btw, that first bbs was "Saimin" in Hawaii, and I to this day I still use the same handle.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
BBS. i may never have as much fun with computers as i did back then.
my favourite computing memory is the 8mb (2Mx32) stick of edo i use as a keychain
I'm relatively new to the whole computer scene even though I've been using them since my family first inherited a 286 when I was 12 (which I promptly disassembled). When I turned 16 I took a programming class in high school where they taught us a terrible language called Turing. I remember one day where the teacher approached me and asked me to show a student some technique because he, the teacher, didn't understand it as well as I did. It was a good day :)
... I finally bought a copy of the Motorola 68000 developers handbook, complete with exact timings for each instruction, and was thoroughly disappointed when this 'monster fast' machine managed to vertically scroll a background about 20 times a second.
:)
:D
I was expecting to be incredibly fast and silky smooth on the screen, it was around then I learnt the habit of optimising the bejesus out of my code
I knew I had to start going out and meeting girls when the answer to a problem i'd had for weeks came to me in a dream. I'd written a fast replacement driver for the operating systems built in text output api. Some canadian bloke then started selling a version which was nearly twice as fast. I was well pissed off and couldn't work out how he'd done it. Then this dream came and told me about using 'Move.P' instead of the 'Move.W' instruction. I had one of those Eureka moments and immediately started coding.
Oh, and spending the only quality time I spent with my mum at the time playing Space Invaders on the Atari 2600 with her. The score wrapped around at 9999, so we'd spot each other and keep tabs on how many times our score had wrapped around
I'm torn between spending hours on IRC where I met my wife, or playing Zork on a TRS-80 Model I.
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
I don't think a computer has been made that replicates the joy I had working with the Difference Engine.
Babbage was kind of a pain, though.
Best Windows Freeware
Running my very first assembly language program on a PDP 8/l. Running a text-mode lunar lander written in FOCAL on a PDP 8 then patching it to change the lunar gravity and fuel available.
Playing lunar lander on a GT-40 (PDP 11/05 with graphics adapter) in graphics mode in 1973.
Building my own ADM-3 terminal from a kit.
Booting CP/M successfully using my own custom BIOS. Buying my first pair of floppy drives (360k, $200 each). Buying my first hard drive (5meg, $250).
Building my own PC from a bare printed circuit board and a bunch of parts
Successfully booting MS/DOS with a BIOS I had completely written myself.
Watching my employee successfully boot Linux on a custom ARM9 board that we designed.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
...was my happiest computer moment. One megabyte took 77 minutes to download. My second-happiest moment was after I had bought MegaTraveller 1 for the PC, took it home, and discovered it required a hard drive. My Tandy 1000 (8088, 4MHz, 640k RAM, 2x5.25 LD drives) didn't have a hard drive, so through trial and error I had to put the required files on four floppy disks and insert them at appropriate moments (disk 1 to start up, disk 2 for the first four planet systems, disk 3 when I enter the spaceport, disk 4 for the last four planet systems). Getting around that hard drive problem was absolutely thrilling for me.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
My favorite computer memories
Reality has a liberal bias
...playing Red Storm Rising on my 286, shoot a torpedo and flix the turbo so I don't have to wait 2 hours for it to find the enemy sub. That was the last good sub game I played.
A psychopath can't tell the difference between right and wrong. A sociopath knows the difference - he just doesn't care.
First - rewriting a bit of code from a BASIC program, written in a magazine, for my Commodore64, so I could change the way a ball bounces on a screen. Really simple, and I haven't improved much, but damn if it wasn't cool at the time. :)
:)
Second - The numerous times I had to format and reformat the hard disk (a 40 MB drive! w00t!) and write and rewrite the config.sys and autoexec.bat after I crashed or did something bad to the family's 386.
Third - Getting a 486, and tweaking those config.sys files to run Ultima VII. Installing a SoundBlaster card in there and hearing Wing Commander speak to me.
Fourth - Setting up my own BBS (TAG anybody?) and getting online.
Getting to college in '95, pirating Windows and pwning n00bs in Doom (and later Counter-Strike).
The year 2000 - started using Linux. Yay!
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
We got one around 1983. I looked at a print out with a maginifying glass and saw that the colors were genereated by closely placed but not blended dots of the primary colors. That and learning how to cheat at Wizardry.
One of my fondest memories is playing Zork on the family C64 and having Grues scare my younger brother :)
1989. I was four. My father brought home a new tandy running deskmate. The tandy had this moderately functional drawing program that seems like a really antiquated version of mspaint. So, after using the program for a while, my father tells me to get off the computer and find my older brother so he can use it. in my typical four year old sense, i just start calling for him from where i was at the computer. unbeknownst to me, my father was recording me on the tandy with a microphone. boy, did i get a kick out of hearing myself on the computer.
:]
i still have that wav file. and i still listen to it now, 16 years later.
and i still have that tandy. it went through a ton, and still works. my brother used to do his finances on taxes on it all the way up through his 2nd year in college(~2000). after that, i pretty much turned it into a dedicated machine for playing civilization, since it would run on the tandy wonderfully.
maybe i'll go dust it off this afternoon
The first time I worked out my dad's adult BBS password. Ham Radio operators aren't typically very good at choosing non-obvious passwords. ;)
"Derp de derp."
I'm not middle aged, but I remember connecting to Prodigy (remember them?) over 1200 baud in DOS... forget the version though. And my dad buying a 100MB hard drive... and thinking it was huge.
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.
.. as I unpacked it for the first time from its happy foam box, plugged it into the telly, and proceeded to clik-clik away on its beautiful little chiclet keys. oh, how i love that oric-1, even still today.. trips back home to the family wouldn't be the same without a quick crank of the treasurebox in the attic, a "10 PING; ZAP; SHOOT; EXPLODE; GOTO 10" or two ..
.. oh my, how the raw power of me, professional C programmer, felt that day.
..
#2: Then, a few years later, the same smell (only much, much, much more intense) when I unpacked my first MIPS Magnum pizzabox, placed it on my desk, watched it boot, and prepared to port my code to it
#3: Booting Yggdrasil-Linux on my ol' 386 about 2 years after the Magnum experience
#4: booting new hardware i had a small hand in developing for the first time.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
300 baud pulse dialing modem on my Apple //e.. that only worked with a 40-column text all-caps terminal program.. no ansi, no vt100 emulation, just a dumb terminal. What joy.. and I was so behind the times..everyone had 2400 baud modems. Hah!
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Too poor to buy Toni Bakers book on Z80 machine code I taught myself from other peoples assembly listings and the nmemonics at the back of the ZX81 manual.
I had a ram pack which didn't work unless I removed a zener diode then it didn't work on my next zx81 unless I put it back.
I then rewrote to cool tools which gave read,data and restore to ZX81 basic and one which played sound out of the TV speaker. I also wrote one which decoded morse code tapped out on the keuboard.
Then I moved on to the TRS-80 with two disk drives that school kicked out.
They were the days when 5.25 inch floppy disks costs at least £1 each single sided and folk had special tools to "doube-side" them.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
From 'oh you can click the text and it takes you to another page?' to surfing porn all within about an hour. 1993?
My "oh deity, this stuff is awesome" moment was when I started to learn AmigaDOS way back when on an Amiga 500. We'd had a C64 for years before but I never did anything other than games on it. The Amiga was the same for me for a year, then Commodore User (or Commodore Amiga User as it renamed itself as later) started running AmigaDOS tutorials, and I was hooked.
BBSes were another great one, though the phonebills were a shock.
Damien
Solid State.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
Ahh the good ol' days, dialed up at 1200 baud 'till 4 am.
I played it for 6 years. The game is still alive and well, I just don't have much time for it anymore. It's Windows-only, but it's open source under the MPL if anyone wants to port the engine and build a new interface around it.
Hooking up a new 10 MB Sunol Systems hard disk to my Apple ][+ for my BBS in ~1985. Cost me a fortune. I remember seeing that 9.x megabytes of free space and thinking "I'll never need more." Heh, my wee iPod shuffle has 512 MB.
Trolling is a art,
I used to work for a company that forgot to include their computer room air handlers when they spec'd their generator load, so whenever we had a power failure it was a mad dash to the computer room to shut the VAX's down before they "fired".
;)
I was reminded of this years later, when working for a different company, I walked in one day and the doors to the computer room were wide open! One of the mainframe system guys saw me and literally went white, he said "Oh... we had an air handler failure and forgot to call you. I hope the HP's are OK" I said well they should be, I checked them out, sure enough they had sensed the high temperature and shut themselves down (of course it did expose that my alerting system was not working correctly, in all situations). The mainframe had not faired as well, not sure what they fired, but it was expensive, as I remember.
Good ol' "POKE 144,88" disables the "run stop" key on PET, CBM, VIC-20, C-64, and C-128 computers...not sure if it works on the various emulators out there.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
Typing in the program from a magazine for 'A Passage to India' on my Commodore 64 and then spending endless hours playing it with my dad.
BBSing and IRC...how i spent my high school years.... some people's high school memories are track and football, mine are mostly Legend of the Red Dragon and DalNet. Oh and maybe playing Syndicate, that game gives me good summer memories.
My dad and I hacked a real keyboard onto the 16k model I could afford.
The rush of writing a display list interrupt to change the color pallette in the middle of the screen refresh just can't be beat.
Well, until I started playing with Linux.
Born 1972 1976 : Commodore green LED pocket calculator : quickly understood +-*, but failed to grasp / and especially the % key. 1981 : Casio PB-100 + Cassette deck : solving linear systems of three equations, and computing pi wirh Buffon's needle...an early exposure to numerics thanks to the manual and absence of decent games or anything else to do with it ! 1983 : Ti-30 LCD (PB100 considered too precious to carry to school...) 1983 : Commodore 64 + color monitor + cassette deck...Cauldron and Ghostbusters, my own function drawing program in HiRes (where I had not noticed that the Y axis is inverted vs the mathematical one, the math teacher was surprised by the fact that I was the only one in class with all the curves correct in the slightest details, only reversed upside down...) 1988 : Atari 1024 STE + Printer+ monochrome monitor (and color monitor from C64). Discovering modern typesetting (Signum), Carrier Command, GFA Basic with my own 3D drawing programs (no hidden lines however). I rendered a horse stable for my father, saying it would be ugly. My father said I must be wrong. Once built, the stable turned out to be ugly. Also computing all the possible finite groups of order 6 to solve a stupid exercise, computing intersections of a sphere and a cylinder to save on ink technical drawing time... 1989 : HP-28B, symbolic computing, getting top marks in analysis and matrix algebra ! PC-AT at school : differential equations, linear algebra programs in Pascal 1991 : Sun 0S/Solaris at school : discovering Unix and Usenet (alt.binaries.pictures.erotica already) I remember trying mosaic and finding it useless since the pages would'nt display if all the images weren't ready, and there always was one missing. Xarchie and Xnetlib were much more convincing to my eyes. 1995 : whitebox Pentium 75 with HP printer : DukeNukem3D, Civilization, Linux 1.2, the WWW (14.4 modem) with Netscape 1.0 this time. access to Cray T3E/IBM SP2 : parallel computing ! HP-UX workstations at work : OpenGL ! 1999 : Compaq 366 MHz laptop : GTA1&2, Midtown Madness Self made Beowulf cluster 84 processors should I stop here ?
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
Oddly enough, I found that my favorite memories of computing are from the many times I had to figure out exactly what went wrong with Windows 95/98.
While I realize that this shows me to be far younger than many Slashdotters, as well as much less technically skilled, I think I ended up learning a lot about how to fix many basic computer problems. I may not be a "computer guru" or even a "133t h4x0r", but it did get me up to what would probably be considered a modest level of understanding.
It may have been extremely frustrating, but I look back upon it kindly for allowing me to learn.
Saving, borrowing, and going in together with my roommate to put together the $2,000 (that was lots more then than it is now) to buy an IBM PC. The beast came complete with no drives (that's right, NONE - we wrote things via the embedded "cassette-basic" and could save the programs to a cassette tape recorder), 16kB RAM and a monochrome non-graphical display.
The San Francisco computer shows of the early 80s. Those were fun shows. I saw the Osborne I when it was first shown there and went on buying sprees to buy chips (yes, young-ones, individual chips) to plug in and get my RAM up to 64kB, as well as expansion cards (everything was optional back then) to get a clock, printer port, serial port, and finally 640kB of RAM (expansion card and lots and lots of chips to plug in). Everything was outrageously expensive by today's standards so there were lots of cobbled together add-ons. A favorite was a photocell gizmo that clipped onto the print-head of an Epson dot-matrix printer which along with some software made it work as a scanner.
I remember buying DOS 1.0 and a third-party 320k double-sided floppy drive (IBM was only shipping 160 single-sided drives at the time). You had to patch DOS to get it to use both sides of the disk and at $15 for a floppy this was important. The alternative was to buy one of those punches that cut a notch in the opposite side of the disk so you could flip it over and use it as two single-sided floppy disks. When we went to add a second drive we had to figure out how they had wired the drives and found out that all OEM drives were jumpered as "drive b" and the cable between the two was twisted to swap the first and second drive signals. We cut the jumpers and got everything working.
Later, we bought a modem (Cermatek 300/1200: $600) and had to convince the powers that be at UC Berkeley to upgrade the modem bank. The head of the computer-center finally told me that they were now buying 1200 BPS modems because they were the "wave of the future".
I remember having lots of aha's about how computers really work when we learned assembly on DEC computers. The first assignments required us to toggle in the programs at the front-panel of PDP-8 machines. Octal was great for that because the PDP had the switches grouped in threes so you got really fast at using the middle three fingers to toggle in the octal instructions.
Finally, I remember a little cardboard computer we used in one class. I still have it somewhere but can't remember the its name. It had sliders for the registers, a card with small holes for memory registers and little "bugs" to use as a memory and instruction pointers. You filled in the memory cells and registers in pencil and "executed" the "programs" manually by erasing and rewriting memory, sliding the register stack sliders, etc. One day I'll photograph it and put it up on the web.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
Hcked across the local community college PDP-11 running RSTS/E back in 1977. (From the terminal at my high school!)
80's, 90's, bah, young kids.
Not middle-aged. So sue me.
Back in the early 90's I had some of my most memorable moments on the PC. I was only 7 at the time:
BBS'ing using the ultra-fast 9600 modem
Beating people up in the arena in Ambrosia
Being scared for the first time by a computer game (Doom)
Ehh, that's mine.
My fondest memory of BBS was the upgrade from 2400 to 14.4 for me that made surfing 20-30k porn images of scanned magazines (this is before porn sites) 'real time' which meant I could view one Jpeg while downloading the other and switch between them without losing my er concentration.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
The Day I Became Elite
oh and falling alseep while on CompuServe and waking up 40 quid poorer
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Playing Sea Wolf on the Apple II+, at the age of 4. That ugly orange controller and the two buttons.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Nothing like writing a small program to display lines in each of the 256 colors in mode 13, and then playing with the palette.
I remember firing up 1024x768x16, and wondering who on earth could see those tiny pixels, and being amazed at how slow the moveto() lineto() in QuickC were.
I started as a mainframe programmer in the mid-eighties, but moved to pc-based programming within a couple of years. I'll always remember my excitement at being able to install a multi-processing os on a pc!
:-)
It was QNX, which was also my introduction to a (quasi) unix-like environment. It was here that I started learning C, and here I am 20 years later still doing Unix and C programming, (yes, among other more recent platforms and languages).
My favorite particular memory was in 1987, designing, implementing, and installing a warehouse automation system for an Air Force base in CA, running it on a 386 "PCs Limited" pc, ("PCs Limited" was run by Michael Dell, later becoming Dell computers). The system communicated with about a dozen pallet stations in two warehouses, and directed several wire-guided automated vehicles throughout, tracking them as far as load status, destination, and battery power. It even had a screen showing a real-time display of where all the vehicles were!
I went to the base for several weeks for installation and testing. I'll never forget the feeling I had when I started one of the early tests, starting up the system and looking at my watch saying to myself, "ok, in about 30 seconds the system should tell these two vehicles to leave here, go to the other building, and pick up loads". 30 seconds later the vehicles both start beeping and moving out...it was really cool
As far as I know, the system was used from 1987 until the base closed down about 10 years later. Get this, it wasn't even an industrialized pc, and it was installed in one of the non-air conditioned warehouses. Wish they still built them this tough!
Facts are stubborn things.
Probably going to be a common one for this crowd. I ran my own in the area I live in for several years, it was the only anime board in the area. Had files, games, you name it. I was one of the first people in the city to get a 14.4k modem at the time, the 9600 baud users were happy to be getting the max utilization out of their hardware.
:)
I worked up a copy of Waffle BBS to execute as a door program from the main system, and had a UUCP feed come in nightly complete with email. I believe I was the first board in town to offer that kind of thing publicly for no charge.
The whole board ran on OS/2 from a command prompt using a Rexx script. The script handled all the mail transfers with Fidonet and other such message nets, as well as the nightly game maintenance (VGA Planets, BRE and SRE, OOII, LORD, etc) and such. The system got profiled in the Computer Shopper Magazine BBS section once, still have that copy lying around.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Of course, now that Sun has burned through all of their credibility and good will, I wouldn't touch their stuff with a stick...
Mike
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
I may only be 19, but I remember getting home from elementry school, dragging the phone cable from the kitchen, and grabbing the latest ComputerEdge's BBS listing and playing LORD(Legend of the Red Dragon) and talking to others via realtime chat (as in, seeing as they type, mistakes and all) on my old 9600baud modem. Not quite as old as the submission's memories, but still fond.
Not my earliest by far, but the largest event that effected me was when I saw my friends computer boot up with out using a boot disk. I was totally floored at the idea a computer didn't need a boot disk to load. The machine was a luggable 286 that was Orange and Black monitor. At the time I had a Tandy 1000, with a total of 256k of memory. I kept that machine until I made my first PC. 486 DLC 40...
Typing in 100's of lines of C64 Basic out of INPUT magazines (Still got all 52 in the binders!), only to find that it didn't work! (well before my typing speed was anything more than 1 word a minute!)
Or maybe that fateful day when I said to the resident geek in the computer labs at Uni; "So what is this linux thing anyway?"
Saving up £300 for a 16Mb simm, then seeing the price half within a few months of buying it!
http://www.22balmoralroad.net/ http://www.tinynetworks.co.uk/
I remember the day I got my mail order Boca 14.4Kbps modem for a *mere* $200!! (to replace a Hayes 2400). I would have personally hugged every employee of Rockwell responsible for their wonderful cheap chipset.
- Going to the local Apple dealer with my mom and dad to pick up an original IIe with a green monochrome display.
- Convincing my dad to let me have the "Fly the unfriendly skies" Skyfox t-shirt.
- Buying the Neuromancer videogame with birthday money, and through it finding out about the novel by Gibson.
- Wasteland.
- Hacking the Bard's Tale III characters with a hex editor.
- Getting an Amiga 500 and a genlock, and using it to add primitive effects to home movies.
- Connecting to local GremCit boards with a 300 baud modem from my Amiga.
- Getting a hacked account on a local ISP from a friend, and liking it so much that I paid for a legitimate one.
- IRC and Usenet before the advent of the web.
- Watching as the world realized the potential of the global network.
- Meeting young people today who have grown up in a world where they're always connected to their friends and a vast resource of information.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
And I don't mean "political correctness" either. In the early 80s when I started out in Tinseltown, I was fortunate enough to work for a boss who was into computers, and we got the state-of-the-art Apple IIe!!! People like actress Kim Cattral (a youngster then) would widen her eyes with admiration as she passed by my desk.
I myself spent $300 on an NBC portable computer (PC-8201A) with a whopping, get this, 16k built-in memory. Not 16 gig, not 16 meg, but 16k! I actually wrote 2 screenplays with that beauty. I'd write six or seven pages and the memory would be full, then I had to download the pages to a cassette tape as a backup memory.
Flash forward, now in 2005, I'm writing on my blog (http://sunandfun.blogspot.com/) about Hollywood and the state of cinema, without ever having to worry about running out of memory.
Sun and Fun
At this point everyone is sitting around stairing dazed at each other wondering what the hell they were going to do. After everyone else was out of options, I piped in with "Let me try!". They said "Don't break it." In less than half an hour I had it running like a dream.
Basically, BP99 called a system API for model identification. I wrote a DLL (called an EPF on Prime) that immulated the system call but returned the expected model type. I then edited the application binary to call my API rather than the system API for that call. I fired it up and it called my library, got the expected model, and ran fine. I saved them buko bucks on that one and didn't get much more than "Good, now we can continue" for it. But who cares, it was fun.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
I remember using the DOS debug command to perform a low level format of a hard drive. I bought a Western Digital RLL controller and a 40MB MFM hard dive. Using the low level format, I was able to format that drive with RLL encoding to get 65MB of drive space out of my 40MB drive.
I didn't think I could ever use that much space.
Anyone remember when it was running on an old Alpha?
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
MERITSS. T.I.E.S. MIRJE. But by far the most entertaining one we could dial into (at least without getting into trouble) was the MECC Timesharing System, or MTS.
During my high school years between 1978 and 1981, I was introduced to such concepts as:
* E-mail between people located in geographically diverse areas (well, as far north as Hibbing and Duluth MN and as far sound as Rochester MN).
* Real-time chat programs with multiple channels, and some of them with fanciness like built-in dice rollers for RPG use.
* COMBAT!! MU,COMBAT,USMK001 or MU,CCOMBAT,USMK031 brought you into a world where everyone was piloting a ship with a single laser and a pair of missle tubes, and where folks would type in arcane commands like "L2000 M2 M2", peer at the scrolling yellow paper, and check their stopwatches for the magic time when the missles reloaded and the laser was cool enough to fire again.
* Karnath! Multiuser dungeoning at its best.
* Programming! BASIC, Fortran (MUMNF), and other fun things.
What a blast. My introduction to the BBS world and Fido/RIME/I'Link a decade or so later was a lot of fun as well, but timesharing systems are where I really began to appreciate the things that could be done with computer systems...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
I remember dialing into "chats" on different bulletin board systems. You could upload / download files, send messages to other people. It was pretty cool. All text stuff.
This is my sig.
- adding on custom expansion slots, 80-column boards and switch-selectable cartridges
- bending, riveting, and painting sheet metal to create a case enclosure to protect everything
- wondering why one of the exposed boards fried when it touched the metal enclosure
It was an EXCELLENT computer...way ahead of its time.Being active in the Commodore 64 world...
- running a BBS from my Dorm during evening hours
- being very active with GEOS
- connecting to Quantum Link to communicate with fellow GEOS users
- download a 70 page GEOS Technical Mmanual at 300 baud, and printing it on a Dot Matrix printer
Thanks to Frodo for the Palm, I can now have a Commodore 64 in my hand!Getting my Ham Radio license...
- not to talk to anyone, but to access remote connected computers using packet radio at 1200 baud
- connecting to the University of Hawaii via nodes and throuch a "wormhole" connection
- running a local KA9Q Packet Node
Unfortunatly, the Internet pretty much killed Packet Radio.Managing a Digital Equipment Corporation VAX installation...
- enamored with DCL
- loved centralized management simplicity
Those were the days when users really respected system admins.My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
I remember when I got my first modem for me C64 - a 300 baud manual-dial manual-answer... I visited a number of local BBS'es before stumbling upon one running Color-64... the first time I saw the login screen in /color/, I thought I was in heaven.
It wasn't long before I bought a 1200 bps (which was blazing fast at the time) and started my own BBS.
Sitting in the basement at Rice University ~1983 sometime after midnight communicating in near real-time with a professional astronomer in Australia.
Very cool.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Now here is a good story, filled with happy posts that made our day much nicer. Kudos!
Sure, they were geeky dates, but she's now my wife of almost 16 years, so it was worth it.
We would spend countless hours working our way through Zork I, II, and III on a Commodore 64. We'd map out the rooms on paper and try all sorts of wacky commands to try to get through. That was when computer gaming really took thought instead of quick reaction time.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
It all started for me in 2nd grade, when our teacher (good ole Mr. Cunningham) would bring in his TRS-80 and let kids play with the computer, based on their in-class performance. If you did well on a test or quiz, you got a sticker which could be turned in for computer time, which was a real novelty at the time (1979).
One day, he had us type in a BASIC program out of a magazine (BYTE? Softside? can't recall) to display a digital clock on the screen - each kid would do a couple lines, then the next would take his turn as class continued on. When it came to my turn, I just kept on trucking, and the teacher didn't say anything. We broke for recess, and after coming back in, I went straight to the computer and kept chugging away, as the teacher resumed class. Once I finished the program, I tried to RUN it, but there were typo's which then proceeded to fix using the line editor (I had seen Mr. C do this before), until I got the thing working. It was probably one of the best school days I ever had, and it was all thanks to his "letting the line out" and giving me the room to explore.
At the next parent/teacher conference he told my parents about the experience, and that he hadn't seen a kid that age with that level of focus to finish and debug the program for such a long time (boy, has that changed over the years). My grandmother got me a computer for Xmas that year (Atari 400), and things pretty much changed forever from that point forward. It was a pivotal moment for me, and I'll always have to give credit to a great teacher (public school, btw) for providing that opportunity.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
This device, more than any other, ignited my life-long interest in programming (nearly 30 years ago).
- Being on the first 3 Shockwave teams. :D Then getting laid off. :(
- Creating the first software based MP3 player ever.
- Working on Lotus 123 Mac right out of college and being reason 3 for why it shipped.
- Being on the Director team at Macromedia. Too bad it almost killed me.
- Creating technology that was not market successful but kept us employed during the dot bomb.
- Writing my first shareware manual for the Vax/VMS TPU Editor.
- Talking to a a person in Berlin over IRC days before anybody knew the Berlin Wall was going down.
- Programming in Basic on the Apple II.
- Using Videoworks Interactive on 4 Meg Mac II's with 256 colors.
- Right now, helping to develop 3ivx Crush.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
My
Getting 120 digits of instructions on a single 80 column punch card for the IBM 1620, which was a decimal machine. Instructions had to start on even locations but could overlap. The card read into memory and executed from the card buffer.
Rewiring instructions on a UNIVAC SS90, which had a 17,000 RPM drum for main memory (50,000 digits!) and a vacuum tube power supply. The Solid State (thus the name) circuit cards each had a couple of circuits, AND OR etc, and the bay was hinged to open up for access, about 7 feet tall. That's where we rewired the cards to make more interesting instructions. The 90 in the name came from using different punches for the Hollerith cards; same size as the 80 column cards everyone else used, but round holes instead of square, and 45 across. But they used 6 bit characters instead of the weirder Hollerith encoding, so got 90 characters per card.
Writing a program for the CDC 6400 which died with all three possible errors (infinite operand, indefinite operand, and out of range, I think), all memory zeroed, all registers zeroed. Only the PC was non-zero, to get the out of range error.
Writing a modem transfer program from scratch, learning everything the hard way, including deadly embrace, timeoust, etc, for 300 baud modems.
Firmware! Can't beat firmware, any kind of firmware, for sheer satisfaction.
Nowadays it's mostly web sites and networking. Not nearly as exciting, but a lot easier to do from home.
I'm not sure if "fond" is the right word, but I still remember my very first 1st year Computer Science assignment, essentially "Hello, world" in Algol W. Done on punched cards, no less, in September 1978.
If you did really well you could use IBM 3270 terminals.
All this was with the campus mainframe, an IBM 370/168 with one whole megabyte of RAM and a 40 MHz clock. Even programmed that puppy's replacement (Amdahl 470/V8) in assembler in one course.
STM 14,12,12(13)
...laura
Seeing a demo of NeXTSTEP circa 1990...
It's amazing how fast someone will scramble to find a boot disk after you add "autoexec.bat" as the last line of that file.
You must be thinking of something else. Sort of assistant, that's all.
Infuriate left and right
Staying up late during junior high, chatting on Quantum Link with the C64. I remember one day a bunch of people broke in and took over the chat areas impersonating the moderators. It was lot like the imposter, 'which one do I shoot?' scene in the movies.
"I'm the real sysop!"
"Don't listen to him, I am!"
"Shut up! I am!"
I don't recall playing any games on the Apple II, or Trash80, er TRS 80 for that matter. What I did playing with them was using BASIC to write games and graphics.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Yeah, I was a C-64 twerpo as well, and as I load up my emulator to play Castle Wolfenstein, I am flooded with fond memories of things like:
:) :) :)
...OK, I'm off to get a bowl of Croonchy Stars..
Say-It S.A.M, and using it to make crank phone calls
Using ML Monitor to make a blue box tone program
and, something I think every c-64 user has been through, taking 6 hours to try to download Jumpman Jr. or similar game, and dealing with those "bad blocks", watching the dashes and colons, only to have Grandma unplug the computer as it's ALMOST done (i.e 2 more hours to go!) so she can run the vacuum cleaner.
GGRRRAAANNNNMMAAAAAAAA!!!!!!
How about ALTOS/ALTGER/QSD? Or multi-padding on an pwned Prime
Jeez, if I let myself, I could fill up a whole megabyte with my nostalgia....Phone Man 4.0 anyone?
OK one more....I ran a CCGMS, and was proud to boast that, with the aid of 8 C-1541 drives, I could boast 1.5 megs of G-Files. Best thing was when I went to sleep, all the LED's made my room look like a little city as seen from a helicopter at night.
All you need is lurv.
These are my two favorite computing memories, at least the two that first came to mind:
* Tandy PC-3 : This was my first computer. I got it when I was 10. I credit it with my long standing infatuation with pocketable and portable computers, programming, and the idea of user-programmable operating environments and applications. It has a whopping 4 KB of memory. And not just RAM, in the sense of working memory- but it was 4KB in which your program and any data would have to fit. It was tiny- smaller than most PDAs are today... very thing. It docks with a sweet Printer/Tape Drive interface, that provides a little 2-3" wide thermal tape printer and the jacks to interface to a little casette drive. I got it free from my uncle. Apparently they were tossing it out. He worked at BASF, and they used it for calculating how much ink/water to put in for making ink mixtures just right. I had been a computer nerd my whole life before it, but unfortunately, a computer nerd without a computer. But it was something I always thought about, making fake computers out of cardboard, reading books about computers, etc. And now I had my own! Not only a computer, but something really, really cool! I took it to school and printed off friends biorhythms, which was one of the BASIC programs I keyed in, one of the examples in the extensive user manuals. I still have her, though she languishes in a drawer at my parents house. Everything works, but the LCD (one line,baby!) is cracked, and only the first half of the characters are readable. Sometimes, I think about trying to figure out what screen I could replace it with and resurecting it... There are too many memories about this beaut to describe just one.
* Tandy TRS-80 4P : Ahh... another computer surrounded with many great memories. A couple friends and I came upon a TRS-80 4P for free at some point. This was in 1995 or so and I was 15. For those who don't know, the P denotes "portable." It was a luggable to be sure, though from what I've read, more luggable than some others that carry the descriptor. When we got it, the monitor was out of sync. But V- and H-Sync dials weren't on the outside. Thinking it was just a broken old computer, and having little respect for the mechanical god it was, one of us had smacked the thing. I have no idea who or why it was smacked in the first place- but after it was, we noticed the sync was a little better! Another smack... and better yet! We ended up taking turns whacking the thing, beating it- until the sync was fixed! We were amazed and, at the time, we thought it was pretty damn hillarious, proud that we could tell people that sometimes, to fix a computer you just have to beat it senselessly. A few months later, we took it apart for fun and found those V- and H-Sync nobs, hidden somewhere deep in the case. Now that's what I call good industrial design!
Another fond nerd-memory about the 4P... After a couple weeks of no manuals, no help, no prior experience with any TRS model (we were in Apple country, see) but a lot of random hacking, we were able to write a very very simple editor in BASIC that would write to 5.25" floppies. Nothing fancy like ed, but it worked. With this editor, one of my friends Lucas and I started to take it to school with us for takling out notes. "Annoyingly nerdy" comes to mind as a descriptor. We had a lot of classes together, and would take turns. Some teachers made us put it away- after all, the thing beeped every key you pressed, and the keyboard's clacking and the computer itself was pretty loud. But others seemed to think it was a great idea, introducing technology into the classroom, with the initiative being in the hands of the students. That amused us by itself, since we didn't think they knew the kind of useless dinosaur we had on our hands- though with better software, it would've been far more useful. Anyway, lugging around a 40 lb
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Ganes became when I got my ATI Stereo/FX. I was a little late to the whole sound card era, but either way going from beeps to FM synthesized music and actual wave sound effect was great.
I've been with a home system since 1982-ish when I got my Atari 800. while I have many, many fond memories (a 450 baud mode, getting a BBS up and running, getting a digitized 6 second sample of Van Halen's You Really Got Me on the system, figuring out how to change strings in binary games by loading the game into a text editor and searching [strings showed in plain text], etc).
h tm
:)
3 days ago, a friend and I were reminicing about the good ole days, and eventually started talking about the game Miner 2049er. I loved that game. I did a quick google search, and lo and behold... the author of the game wrote an emulator for it a few years ago, and released it to the world!
http://www.bigfivesoftware.com/Emulator/emulator.
I played it when I got home (only a mac and freebsd machines at work and the emulater was a win-only) and it was exactly like I remembered. And still addictive. Try it out. The memories come back
is the source of some of my best and worst computing experiences.
The good: Having a 32-bit multitasking OS, no 640k memory mangager crap, plug and play (they didn't call it that though), on-board SCSI controller, and NTSC out while people at work awaited their new $4000 486 machines with Windows 3.1
The bad: Finding almost no one at work who cared how cool it was to have seamless multitasking (I mean real, useful mutlitasking - not a barely functional proof of concept) 3D rendering, and desktop music and video production. It sucks being ahead of the curve.
Ah, six bit display code. Didja know that display code :D in columns 1 and 2 (or 10x+1 and 10x+2 for x>=0) of a terminal output line would log the user off? (mwahahahaha!). There was another sequence that would case an internal buffer to be spewed to the terminal. Sometimes this contained account and password information. (I discovered this quite by accident when downloading the same text file twice to a SWTPC 6809-based micro (pre-IBM PC days) and getting different results. Nothing like applying one's binary search skills to track down the "interesting characters".)
I had implemented RATFOR (Rational Fortran, from Kernighan & Plaugher's "Software Tools") for the Cyber, as well as a 6809 cross-assembler, and had a hand in modifying the ETH Zurich Pascal compiler, so, among other things, the printout would have a backtrace to the previous compile-time error -- useful when having a dozen bugs in a 300 page printout. I still remember that you save data to core using A6 and A7, and retrieve data from core via A1 through A5. A0 was a scratch register. Ah, mainframe assembly.
RA+1 calls. (Did you know that you could use negative array indexing to make RA+1 calls, like loading (0,0) overlays, from within a Fortran program? Loading the popular reentrant Fix editor as a (0,0) overlay would cause it to crash for everyone? I wonder why FIXDOWN suddenly disappeared... it was an innocent four line FORTRAN program.
Then, there was that certain someone who used RJE to steal passwords when people tried to start up Adventure: "While walking through the two-pit room / We were too rash and met our doom. / We were about to say GOODBYE / When the size of the DAYFILE caught our eye. / 'Twas very ugly but plain to see: / Our password stolen through RJE." Personally, I preferred doing things the old-fashioned way: with blue 6/7/8 cards that did not have the 9 hole punched: never knew who you'd get. Just never mention SYSZSYS, O.K.? FUCKOFF! TWXMESS Hello, is anybody out there?
I know the Gameskeeper (In my day, to typeset your thesis, you first wrote a typesetting program. Sometimes, that was your thesis. In my case, I used the one produced by the Gameskeeper. That was so FORMAL) hangs out here sometimes, but I have no idea whatever happened to The Junk Dealer, Dragon Lady, or Ivan The Terrible. Yes, I was a top Honours CS student. No, the Computer Center did not always approve of my 'research'.
*** Host Processor Not Available ***, indeed.
Punched cards... magnetic tapes... 6/7/8/9 cards. Adventure ("You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike").
Microprocessors work on a SWTPC clone running TSC Flex was fun... I had writetten a hard disk driver for the massive 10 Mb disk drive we got for the lab.
My favorate "orphan" system was the Alpha Microsostems AM-100, 100/L, and 680x0 series of machines: 16 bit data bus (AM/100), multitasking, multiuser operating system (complete with flat filesystem with six character upper case names and three character extensions)... in 1976. MITS Altair Basic, eat your heart out!. CP/M, and MS/DOS were toys compared to this (microprogrammed LSI-11 clone, and later 68k based). Around 1981/2, I had one on loan, at home, complete with a 10 MB CDC Hawk disk drive. I still lived with my parents at the time, and they had learned to not ask what was making the "jet plane taking off" sound and dimming the lights. I did not pay the power bill.
You could've hired me.
I have lots of wonderful though mundane memories, from running a BBS and Fido node, to my first graphical OS interface. But I have one memory that really stands out.
After 10 years in MIS, I was on a new job and had been tasked with upgrading a Netware server from 3.x to 3.x+1. I had been told to fly out and get the job done before the end of the week but, I told my boss that I thought I could have it done that afternoon.
I sat in my cube, used rconsole, mapped some drives and upgraded the server, even though it was on another continent, using the install floppies that had been copied to another server in a different town all together. It was all over rather quickly but, afterwards I thought about what I had just done and the technology to make it all possible and I litterally shuddered in awe.
Today, this is all old hat. It's so common that regular clueless users do similar stuff without even knowing what they are doing but, to me, at the time it was awe inspiring. That's what I remember best, the awe of it all. The shudder, I can almost feel it.
In retrospect, I should have flown out and taken a few days off at the companies expense. Oh well, live and learn.
I was the coolest kid in town when my dad brought that 8k pet home. That summer was wasted well, wearing out the colored keys of that computer and watching the hot copy of Star Wars on a massive VCR over a hundred times :]
Oh those were the days.
I remember writing simple choose your own adventure games with my big brother, when I was just old enough to read/write, good times. Then we got the PC Jr. and I was blown away by the CGA graphics that weren't even used in my favorite game (Wizardry). Then along came EGA (black cauldrun, Lesure suit larry and other sierra games corrupted my pre-pubescent mind). Then at some point we got the 8086 (or was it an 8088) and the modem... and bbs. Never heard of this LoRD, but did spend many a night playing tradewars and Murder Motel. Waiting till midnight so I could take two turns in a row =P good times.
I can understand why a VT100 wouldn't be classified as a 'dumb terminal' since it had cursor control and certain other 'smart' features. But why would I have connected one to a dumb terminal?
Sure, at least once we've all used a three-wire 'null modem' cable to connect two terminals together to 'check it out' and type messages between the terminals, but why would it be a nostalgic memory to connect a VT100 to a TTY terminal??
little hazy on the time frames now but:
late 50's-going to see a mainframe for the first time, where my dad worked, thinking it was just spectacular. Took up a whole building basically, don't remember the make/model though. I *think* at the time it was an IBM, he worked there before going on to RCA.
early 60's, another mainframe, some RCA model, MUCH more blinkenlights
70's, arguing with dad that these new personal computers would be BIG, he countered saying they were a fad, no one really would want one for long or find a use for them....
89-first time I used a box with a GUI- Slickerness!! thinks me. Bought the machine, a mac 512, still got it. Had used various peecees before then but didn't like DOS nor the command line, still don't.
I wanted to write a novel, so, having learned from friends what PCs could be made to do (automatic repagination, easy spellcheck and search-and-replace) I bought a used IBM XT2 (8086, 8MHz) with an upgraded 20-Mb hard disk and CGA graphics for less than a thou.
First thing I did was install WordPerfect-5.1 (brand new at the time) and mock up a novel-sized document. I then scrolled to the end. I would have sworn it had frozen had the green disk-in-use light not been blinking steadily. I waited for several minutes for it to get to the end (300 pages) and, impatient, left the stopwatch running on the desk next to the puter, went out to dinner, came back hours later only to find the disk access light still flickering regularly.
Round about midnight, the light's rhythm had changed dramatically, blinking more brightly but less often, and then, WHAM, before my eyes, the last line of the mockup test text appeared!
Lo and behold, it took a little more than six hours to scroll to the end of a 75-thousand word text.
I was hooked on making a faster PC right then.
PS: I am using a fairly modern PC to write this: a Duron 750 with a exactly a thousand times as much RAM (640 Mb) which should be enough for word processing, being ten thousand or so time as fast as the XT2 was, but using the outline feature in Abiword-2.2.x installed on Feather and loaded completely into RAM brings the PC's CPU to its knees, making me wait for updates and scrolling slowly and unevenly, even though there is no swap space being used.
Makes you think, doesn't it?
Seriously, though, both were rather cool as far as calculators went (but mine had a card reader/writer, yours didn't, nyeah, nyeah (the TI-59 did)). The 224 program steps in the SR-52 were a bit limiting, though. 1972, sheesh.
You could've hired me.
Oh ya, that first time we got Doom2 loaded on 2 computers, and connected them via a Null Serial cable.
Hmmmmmm
Bad User. No biscuit!
pivotal moments in my geek life:
//e with 2 drives and a green monitor.
- Dad getting a pocket calculator and a digital watch in the same year - both with LED displays.
- The two-part episode of The Bionic Woman where she had to go through the deadly obstacle course to defeat the evil computer...behold the power of technology!
- Dad was a high school teacher and got to bring home a Commodore PET during the summer for us kids to play with. CLOAD, baby!
-Spending 4 hours typing some huge BASIC program into the PET out of Byte magazine, 1 finger at a time, losing it once due to power glitch, retyping it the next day, another 3 hours correcting typos, and then finding out that the version of BASIC on the PET wasn't the same as the one used for the program. This is especially frustrating to a 12-year-old with ADD...I had never concentrated so much on a single task. And then to find out the time was all wasted...a good preparation for an adult career in IT.
- Getting an Apple
- Learning how to copy games and other protected disks with nibble copying and other nefarious things.
- Beagle Brothers!!! My God, those guys were the best. I learned all my reverse engineering skills from them. A close second was the TMH disks for Apple II's. They were better for graphics stuff, but weren't as clear in how they worked.
- Dialing in to a college mainframe with my friend's Atari 400 and a modem you put the handset into.
- Getting kicked outof my HS computer class because I knew how to program and use computers and the teacher did not. (And they were teaching LOGO! Come On!!)
- In my first attempt at social engineering, gaining access to the store manager's account on 's mainframe, creating my own account, and giving people raises.
- Using my first exploit to gain admin rights to an employer's Novell network and read the boss's email.
There are others, but that's more than enough.
It'd definitley have to be visiting my dad's Digital Equipment office in Geneva and playing VAX INVADORS on the VT terminals while we called our family back in the states.
I hate Grammar Nazi's
I remember writing a batch file in DOS 5 before I knew what they were. I looked at the contents of a batch file, saw they were sequential commands, and proceeded to write my own batch file. It took me couple tries before I realized it had to have a .bat extension, but I eventually got it working. Loom.bat swapped to the Loom directory and ran the exe :) Later on I wrote little batch files to load TSRs and memory managers into memory.
Funny how some of the stupidest things can be some of your fondest memories.
Those were the days. A friend of mine got hold of three 486s and networked them with coax cable, and we played deathmatches for hours. It was then that I discovered the joys of camping-- we started playing one level, and I just ran to the room containing the exit, faced the door with a shotgun, and waited. He must have spent 20 minutes looking for me and cursing me because I was nowhere to be found. He finally gave up, headed to the level exit, and when he opened the door... BOOM! I killed his character, scared the shit out of him and damn near pissed my pants from laughing so hard.
Ah, those were the days.
TRS-80 Model I and Scott Adam's "Ghost Town"
Good times...
Anonymous Cowards suck.
I remember when a few of the BBSs I used to go to on a regular basis organized a big meetup at a bowling alley one weekend. I naturally assumed it would be a bunch of nerdy geeks, but the people that showed up were really interesting and varied. You can also imagine my suprise when I found out the sysop of my favorite BBS was actually a woman! It really opened my eyes seeing how diverse the groups were. I even ended up winning a bowling pin decorated by that her, which I still have to this day.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
First would be taking the first computer class my high school had. To classify it in way they understood, the teachers called it "Computer Math". I spent the semester with 16 TRS-80s and others like myself making ASCII art and learning basic on our own since those in charge didn't know much more than we did. Second would have be when I realized you could do things (overclocking, etc) that the original manufacturer never intended or wanted. Since then, except for laptops, my PCs have been one cobbled together frankenstein after another, and I've loved every tweaking bit of it. :)
"Build something idiot proof, and someone will build a better idiot" - Samuel Clemens
And all the fights we would have in school throwing all those little dots of paper at each other from the teletype.
And playing Star Trek on the teletype.
- round keys.
- endless scrolls of manilla paper.
- paper tape punch/reader
- and BASIC was cool!
This was right around 1975.I used to love reading Alice and Bill's monthly column in "Computer Shopper" magazine. I would go through the magazine every month and "pretend build" my dream computer, and see how much it would cost me to actually build it. I loved that column so much that when I was in Army Basic Training at Ft. Jackson (1995), I had my girlfriend at the time buy a current issue and snail mail the Hard Edge to me. What a nice way to remember the civilian life after a hot day of road marches, push-ups, and MREs.
I finally got rid of the 5 Sun-2's in my basement when I moved a couple of years ago (less basement space in the new, bigger house). These were used to develop the AmigaOS back in the mid to late 80's (before we moved all the modules to native compilation). Along with them went the PDP 11/64. I kept the SunOS tapes, though.
Moments: getting my 2MB huge Zorro-I expansion card for my Amiga 1000, and figuring out how to do all my work from (recoverable across crashes) ramdisk. Playing Faery Tale Adventure. Playing Mule on a C64 with the homeless druggie friend of a roommate in college. Running the weird hypnotic graphics demo that came on one of the Amiga 1000 disks during parties and seeing people get stuck watching it.
Playing Netrek on the 'net on a league team (the Buddies) back in circa 1990.
I remember one legendary project, back around 1976 I helped my university create a "portable" PDP-11. It was installed in a huge 18-wheeler rig, a portable classroom in a trailer. The sides of the trailer expanded to make a larger room, the floors folded up when you pulled the sides in to move the trailer. Pulling up the floors almost killed me once, when the cables snapped and the floor came crashing down, almost decapitating me, since I was standing underneath, prodding the rollers along.
Anyway, the project was an amazing failure. We were porting some old IBM Coursewriter CAI programs to BASIC, they were early courseware to help teachers identify learning disabilities. I told the project manager it would be a lot easier to just fill a van with a bunch of Apple II computers and drive them out to each school, and set them up in a spare classroom, rather than drag a classroom along with a computer in it. But of course the guy who thought up this stupid project believed that Apples were only good for playing Pong.
Of course the project ran so far over budget that instead of the original plan of 16 terminals attached to the PDP-11, they could only afford 2 terminals. And they had to have the Power Company wire power lines direct from nearby power poles every time they arrived onsite, which never seemed to provide stable power. All that trouble, and they could only deliver 2 training stations to each site.
After the project failed, I learned that the trailer was originally purchased from some other university that tried the same thing, and that project failed miserably, so they sold off the trailer to some new sucker (us). Some idiot thought he was going to make his reputation off this advanced concept in delivering computers to schools. And he did! But not the reputation he was expecting.
Those aren't old memories. [stroking my imaginary gray beard...] I forget how young Slashdotters tend to be.
I fondly remember using the ARPANet as a young defense contractor before they let all you riff-raff in and renamed it the "Internet". In those days, it wasn't all about porn, science fiction, and demanding rights to download hip hop for free. It was about particle physics, science fiction, and demanding the right to use MACSYMA for free. Well, okay, there was ASCII porn.
Ah, those were the days....
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
I liked programming the Altair 680 with hand assembled code put in with the monitor. It is a nice memory, however, it got old quick. Later, the fun was discovering all the special bytes on the Commodore machines. After that, BBSs were entertaining.
Basically there was only two of us seriously playing on this BBS door game, and I had the upper hand for a while. But then suddenly I got locked out of the game (presumably due to some bug where I thought I was already playing or something, so it wouldn't let me in) and when I came back, the other guy was whomping on all of my sectors and I was getting my butt kicked.
As I had previously expanded across the map, I'd take all my soldiers on to the next sector, and leave only one man in each square (so I could still `own' it.) Since I found that 50% taxation (use the money to buy mercenaries) and 0% draft worked best, this one man never grew into more. So I had half the map with only one man per square. But since my border towns had more, so it was basically hard on the outside and soft on the inside. I thought I was relatively safe.
So, finally I get back in, and I'm reading how I've lost all these squares, square after square after square that the other guy took over. He had like 30,000 men in one army and he was mopping my squares up. But then suddenly there was a battle that I won. He came in with 30,000 men and I had one man. My one man killed his 30,000 men and had stopped his advance cold, since that was the bulk of his forces.
After that, I sent him a ha ha! (in the Nelson style, but Nelson didn't exist yet) message, and then he sent me back a message about how he'd kill that man, and his family, and his family's family ... but by then, I was back to mopping up the map of this guy.
Fun!
In any event, my uncle showed me a terminal of some sort, sat me down at it, dialed a number on the phone, put the phone onto the acoustic coupler and words started appearing on the screen. I can sort of remember how fast it was, and it was 50 baud.
And he started Adventure, gave me the run-down on how to play, and let me at it. I didn't really know what I was doing, but I was in awe at it all ...
I don't even remember which uncle this was, or how old I was, and I'm not even sure it was in Seattle, but whomever he is, he probably should know what an effect he had on my life in his innocent little thing that was probably done just to get me to stop annoying him :)
BTW, it didn't matter that I could have added dang near a new Amiga a month (and I'm talking the A2000, A500's need not apply!) for what I was paying for the privilege, it was fraggin' worth it!! What a machine. What a fantastic crowd.
{Sigh} Take this PC and stuff it. I want mi Amiga-3000++ back!
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
Anyone interested in antiquated computers will probably also be interested in Digital Retro, a book with loads of old machines, pictures, histories. Fascinating stuff.
I think slashdot had a review at one point too.
--> Stephen
This Z80 based beast was fantastic simple. I disassembled the BIOS, the DOS (NEWDOS it was called), the BIOS Basic interpreter including the math routines, the floppy disk format routines. The DOS was running from a floppy, your program/data was on another. I made custom system floppys which run much faster (optimized disk storage of OS modules). I improved the keyboard driver to respond better, and it was all just for fun at an age of 14. Finally, I moved to MS-DOS 2.11 and wrote some fancy parallel port transfer program because I had no means to transfer data between the incompatible systems.
But these days, I'm much more happy with Linux. I understand it almost as good. Never liked the
windows world.
Well, it's not really after 'all these years' as I've had many other computers longer, but it is certainly my old baby - Compaq Portable III - see my journal for more info, I've got it doing things beyond everyone's expectations.
Oh, and my favorite memory? Pushing and popping that stack!
Video Production Support
On our shared Unix system (a Sequent Symmetry, no less) at University the Computer Society hacked together some tools for Buddy Lists and IM.
.friends file (we're in the UK, so .buddy was out :) that mapped login IDs to real names. When you ran 'nwho' you could see who was online, and where they were logged in from. (It mapped IP addresses and PAD locations to physical locations).
:)
One was a replacement for 'who' that would let you add a
Combined with a program called 'slmp' for status line message printer you could get notifications in the bottom corner of your screen to tell you when a friend logged on. Better yet you could ping messages back and forth without using 'talk' so you didn't upset their 'vi' sessions...
This was all done with CLI logins, no GUI tools at all, but if anyone is trying to patent location based IM, we may have prior art
This was all done between 1991 and 1994...
Mark
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Reading memories of others, it remind of of installing win32s on windows PC in order to use Mosaic.
#include "coucou.h"
I had sat down to write a program, in Basic of course, to solve a word puzzle, a kind of crossword, that was published every week in the local daily news paper. It was probably also my first program that solved a combinatorial problem. With surprisingly little effort, I got something that worked!
When my grandfather came over a few days later, I loaded the program and brought him in to my room to show the program. I knew that he did not understand the fun I had with my computers, but since he was really into these puzzles himselves, it gave me a great opportunity to show him what a computer could do and how it worked.
I declared that I could solve said puzzle with my computer, showed him the program and how it was built up, ran the program, and concluded by printing out the solution to the puzzle. I noticed to my disappointment that my grandfather had gotten a blank stare in his eyes and had just nodded through the little presentation. Being a good grandfather, he told me how clever that was, accepted the printout, and went out to talk to the others. Ah, well, "wrong generation" I thought to myself.
One minute later my grandfather dashed back into the room again, blurting out "but this is the solution!" He had taken another look at the printout and realized what I was talking about. He was impressed! And I was really proud.
Reality or nothing.
Well, Win95 came with the beast (something like 24 disks). Tried to update the video driver, failed. Reboot, 4 colors 640*480. DAMN. Reinstalled the driver, works fine, BUT... I can't get it higher than that. Why ? Because I click on the sliding bar, puts it in 800*600 16bits colors, then... CLICK ON THE X AT THE UPPER RIGHT PORTION OF THE SCREEN. Dang. The OK button was hidden below the start menu, and I thought the X did the same. TOok me a week to accidentaly drag the window... hey, I was 14 and all my computer knowledge was DOS 3.3 . ;-)
A year after, I bought a modem, wanting to go online. USR 14.4 modem external... Teh shit. BUT, it made that awful noise when connecting... So, I used to put a pillow on it so my mom wouldn't hear me connection after midnight for... educational purposes. Well, after 9-10 months, I found out that the little know at the side was the... volume.
Those are sweet memories to me. Today, I'm quite knowleadgable in computers, I can build a Win2k-2003 domain, I fiddle around with VBS scripting, PHP, networking, etc... When I see a newbie do a stupid mistake, I remind me of those incidents, and I let it go. ;-)
I was introduced to computers via an Epson QX-10. Had a monochrome monitor dual lowdensity 5.25" floppy drives , no hard drive, and about 20 of the best games ive ever played. Me and my brother would beat each other up to see who would get to use it. I still remeber trying to get the dam text editing program to work... man was it a pain to use. I still remeber taking in a typed homework assignment when I was in 2nd grade... my teacher was a little freaked out by it :).
I had just joined the computer revolution circa 1976, not with the original MITS Altair 8080 but with a next generation clone of it. My first hangup was that I was all thumbs with a soldering iron, but the motherboard in those days was only a backplane: sockets, traces and a few resistors, nothing else. The CPU was on a card, like anything else.
Well, the S-100 bus was named that because it had 100 pins to the socket, and I had 22 sockets... do the math. I was having a serious anxiety attack.
Then a friend referred me to a local electronics assembly firm that had a wave soldering machine. I connected with the local manager and he put the motherboard and sockets into a metal frame and sent it down a conveyor belt. The underside of the board passed over something that looked like a waterfall of silvery molten lava, and in just a minute, there were 2200 immaculate solder connections (I think I had to touch up 2 of them when I got home)
I showed that board at the local computer club and everyone was just amazed!
Best part, I asked the manager what I owed him and he said nothing, it would cost the company more in paperwork that he would charge for 1 board.
Mine is playing games via bps modem at Crystal Palace on a TRS-80.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Wire wrap. I just loved the beautiful helix the wire made on the posts. It was fun stripping the insulation off and doing a clean wrap by hand. (I never liked the power wrap tool.) I also like the craft of laying the lines neatly from pin to pin.
There was a real skill involved in a wire wrap project, from the first step of deciding where to put components on the board, to planning the pin connections, to doing the actual wrapping.
Batch jobsThis, of course, was from a long-ago age, when technicians and programmers routinely had things work the first time. You had to, pretty much, when you were submitting batch jobs that just got done a few times per day, and your assignment was due the next day. Do I submit this job and lose my card stack for 2 hours, thereby getting two more tries today, or do I use the two hours to make sure my code is correct...
My introduction to computers as a communication medium was on the PLATO system. When my girlfriend transferred to another school I conducted a long-distance relationship online around 1983. (I don't know when BBSes started to be popular; they might already have been by then, but I certainly wasn't plugged into them.) PLATO Notesfiles were very closely analogous to Usenet — in fact, I think I've read that Notesfiles were part of the inspiration for Usenet. PLATO was developed mainly for online courseware, and there was lots of really useful teaching material on it, but lots of people also used it for games and communication. It was a major letdown when I went to Yale for college and they didn't have anything remotely as sophisticated as PLATO. :-) Then I had to content myself with BITNET for a while, until I got an account on the Unix machines (which had Usenet and talk(1) access).
My first year and a bit of learning to program was with punched cards on a Cyber with NOS/BE. I loved the sound of the machines, thier robustness and the definitive finality of each keystroke. The uni then bought a couple of VAX 11/780s with 128k RAM(boy did they thrash before the memory upgrade) and 60 to 80 terminals each. Sitting down at a terminal and marvelling at erasing my mistyped characters instead of throwing a faulty card out was mesmerising. I spent over an hour playing with the keyboud, just moving the magical cursor all over the screen. I marvelled at the brilliance of the people who programmed the cursor controls and devised the screen fonts. Wow.
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
I played Star Trek on a teletype too I visited my brother's campus in the late 70's and he let me use his student login. They had a PDP8. I was frugal with my Long-Range scans because it took up so much paper. It was a lot less tedious on the VAX at my campus with VT terminals! When I started my first job, there was a box of cards in the corner of the bosses office. That was a backup of the "binary image" for Star Trek that ran on the IBM 370/168 we used.
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
Somebody at work pirated a copy of Loderunner on a 5.25 floppy disk, and it ran fine on all of our two-floppy-disk PCs. It would not run on my Compaq Portable Plus, with its 10 MByte hard disk. For a while I resorted to opening the computer up and unseating the hard drive controller card in order to be able to play the game, but that got old (and I was afraid I would eventually break something). I used debug to figure out where the boot code on the Loderunner disk was going wrong, and made myself a patched copy of the game disk. That was my first hack, and still one of my favorites.
If you're not offended you're not paying attention.
If your first computer ran DOS or Windows, you should not be posting to this thread.
http://www.musenet.org/ logged on a month or so before a rather young WiRED magazine ran an article on it. "museriots" and whatnot ensued. have yet to see as rich and rewarding an online community as micromuse of 1995.
I can remember very well in 1975, as a 18 yr old student, we wrote a fortran program for a PDP8. We let the program run, and when ok, we were allowed to go for greater precision, and load the instructions via punchtape and phone line remotely on a bigger computer, located in Brussels, from which the school rented cpu cycles. Now the teacher was busy too, giving his time to each students in turn. My program ran , but there was no output on the teletype. So I tried to warn the teacher that something went wrong... he told me to wait my turn... when he finally got my attention he nerveously halted the program with some voodoo like instruction. it was too late. The school would have to pay a huge amount for running my program, that ran all that time in a never ending loop. It took a while before I made another punchtaped program for that remote computer.
--------
* Sigh *
It was a "desktop calculator" my dad had. The cool thing about it was it's companion, the HP-9100B, which was a plotter.
I had never really bothered with math until my dad outgrew the system and let me set it up in my room, where I went 24/7 on it. I mostly did spherical trig stuff, and spent an inordinate amount of time with platonic solids. It bugged me immensely that dodecahedrons couldn't be cleanly arranged together in anything but a vertical stack.
Your display on this thing was four registers. That's it. You'd program it in machine code by entering in numbers to specify the operations and their operands. My next machine was a handheld programmable calculator, the HP-41C. There you could only view one register at a time, BUT you had an LCD alphanumeric display so programming was more like assembler.
I always thought it was a great tool to learn programming on since you were forced to keep the whole program in your head while writing it. And you could do some fairly sophisticated stuff too as there was quite a bit of memory (4K?)
It's amazing how far we've come, and yet, it sometimes seems as if we've barely moved at all. The other day I had to kick out some Python to tackle a math problem I remember having worked out on the HP-41C two-and-a-half decades ago. Maybe I got it done quicker in Python... but did I have as much fun doing it?
...that our BBC Micro had finally arrived, after six months of waiting.
Six months! Damn, we had some patience in those days...now I get pissed off when my new CPU doesn't arrive within 3 days :-)
To be fair, I had come home from school every day for six months and asked my parents if 'it' had arrived yet, so I guess I wasn't that patient.
We ordered it so early, we only had to pay £335 for the Model B, instead of the £399 it went up to later (still months before the first ones were delivered, of course). Ph34r me!
I can't really remember much about that evening...although I do remember the Welcome pack - which still seems more fun than the 'Tour of Windows' you get these days.
I also remember thinking once (about 3 months before it even arrived), "You can have red text if you want! Red!" I told my Mum but she was less exuberant about this exciting piece of chromatic information.
Round about that time, I was also just getting into Douglas Adams' stuff - little did I know that my patient interest in computers would result in me working with Douglas about 20 years later. It's a funny old world.
Before the BBC Micro, we had a Commodore PET 2001 for a few months that a family friend lent to us. It used to boot up and report that it had 7,167 bytes free. Sometimes I wonder if I will ever forget that number :-)
I remember messaging about Anime, pascal programming, and playing Trade Wars 2002 and Leyend of the Red Dragon.
We used to gather in a restaurant or someone's house to watch some anime.
Ahh... the good days.
amazing thing.
:'( I could never finish it waaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!
I loved that game, but i used it so much that the floppy died.
Other games i liked:
Gateway to aphsai
Summer / Winter / etc. games
Aliens
Project Firestart
Impossible Mission
H.E.R.O.
The game Parsec on the TI-99 4/A I loved that game cart. for all it was worth. Voice synth and all I hated the darn controllers as they were in parrallel and some idiots friends could move my ship with the "2nd player" controller. Then of course I learned how to code on it as the only other titles I had were crappy edutainment. Without a cartridge/tape/diskette you only had BASIC to play around with and one of the biggest POS versions of BASIC I ever care to code on ever again. BTW, first /. post. Although I know nobody cares.
Something about that little unit still makes me smile.
An odd memory: that nifty "electronics smell" that Commodore had - loved it then, love it now...
What is that stuff? VOC traces from PCB manufacture?
Walking into the Computer Lab in my high school introduced me to computing. A whole room with Apple ][ computers with "big kids" writing software. My first computing question was "Doesn't that blinking thing {the cursor} irritate you?", that day I went on to debug Pacman movement code that the guy was writing - to my eye it didn't look symmetrical, and it wasn't - you know, up, down, left, right and getting all the +/- correct.
:)
I went on to read every book in my local library to learn some software development skills. A friend of mine had a dad who worked at ESA and he would bring home an HP 87 on the weekend. We were hooked.
Then I convinced my mother to provide me with an interest free loan to buy my own computer, a Commodore Vic 20.
I remember typing in a big-screen clock program about six times, because the cassette recorder wasn't in stock and you lost what you did when you turned it off.
I went on TV and won a Disk Drive for my Vic and that opened up a whole new universe. I participated in computing contests and using a transfer cable that I built to get data from an Apple ][ to a Commodore 64, I transferred HGR graphics of the Mona-Lisa and some chips to the Vic where I displayed them on screen, using the 6502 stack as swap because I didn't have enough RAM to move images in any other way, than swap an image, a byte at a time.
Around 1985 I bought a Mac 512ED and started writing software in Pascal.
I went on to break the world record endurance computing, then moved to the other side of the world and started building web-sites, seems my 3.5Kb RAM days are still standing me in good stead.
I still often wonder if being frugal with memory as a development methodology makes me a better and more productive developer than kids who grew up with 1Gb of RAM, let alone a 10Mb HDD or a 172Kb FDD
|>>?
The only game that really meant anything that I was programming was Monopoly but before I finished it Bradley released it.
FalconShould there be a Law?