retrocomputing posts

I remember playing Star Wars from a cassette on our Apple ][. My dad bought it in a bike shop and it came with paddles and some starter cassettes like Breakout, Applesoft BASIC and Star Wars (complete with slightly off-pitch theme song). Later we upgraded the ][ to a ][+ on the inside (capable of addressing a whopping 8K of RAM!). We also upgraded to two disk drives -- something you really needed for playing Wasteland. The dual drives might have been on my Laser 128, but that was the first computer that was given to me specifically. The Apple ][ started it all.

Things progressed nicely when I caught my first computer virus by unsafely downloading some Monty Python sounds on my dad's Macintosh SE/30. Today my iPhone has far more computing power (and has yet to see a copy of Disinfectant cleared on the App Store) than a room full of 80's-era Macs. For anyone who reflects back upon their first computer and their current computer, it is a similar, dizzying experience.

As we head into a new decade, we've assembled a few stories from our Seed contributors on this same topic. Each contributor recalls a specific type of computer and their own special experiences with their first computers. The last story, "Helping My Mom..." is more about how computers have left a generation behind, and how the technological divide still exists... But it's OK -- the future is bright for computing, as we now carry miniature PC's in our pockets every day. Here's to the future!

To jump to a particular story, click below.

The Digi-Comp II

The Sinclair ZX81

The sad little IBM PCjr

My first computer: remembering in black and green

A used IBM 80286

Helping my Mom slide technologically backwards

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/psd/ / CC BY 2.0

Some people have an inordinate fondness for their first car. For me, it is my first computer. In Junior High School, I wanted a computer so bad I could taste it. What use did I have for a car? I was a geek and unlikely to get a date. I used to read Sky and Telescope magazine, and in the back they always had an advertisement for a new computer. This was in 1980, before PCs were mainstream. It was called the ZX80. That name caught our fancy. I had a close friend who wanted it as badly as I and used to dream about having my own computer, one small enough to fit on my desk. One that I could program any way I wanted to. The ZX80 came in both kit form and assembled. That year came and went and we never did get our hands on a ZX80. The price tag of $100 was way beyond our means.

In 1981 a new model appeared in the back of that same magazine: the ZX81. For those of you old enough to remember, and who really care, Timex bought Sinclair, who made the ZX81, and renamed it the Timex-Sinclair model Ts1000.

My father was all for education and felt a computer was very educational. He eventually bought me a ZX81 for a steal at $50. Wow! My own computer. I had taken computer courses at the local universities (on mainframes) and had learned the BASIC programming language. Fortunately for me, that was the language the ZX81 used. I still love BASIC, although Visual Basic gives me headaches.

But about the little black jewel. It was small and weighted just 12 oz. It was small enough to fit in my hand. The ZX81 came with no monitor attached. The computer was designed to use a black and white television as the monitor. Fortunately, back in the early 80's, black and white TVs were not hard to find. The attachment was via a VHF/UHF switch. I used to love flipping that switch and watching the computer boot up. Everything is exciting about your first computer.

It only had 1K of RAM, and yes, that's kilobytes not mega- or gigabytes, of RAM, but there were 8KB of ROM. Just how useful could that be? Well, with a lot of imagination and efficient programming I was up to all sorts of things. The best was programming games. Unfortunately there was no internal storage media. This computer was designed to store programs in a pretty old fashioned way -- on a cassette recorder. You would hook it up to the cassette player, hit record and the computer would make sounds like a modem, for those of you old enough to remember what a modem sounds like (it's sort of like a fax machine). Then, you would write down how many feet of tape that particular program resided on. Reading the program was done in reverse. Forwarding the cassette to the proper feet of tape, telling the computer to download a program and playing the tape the same as if you were playing Joan Jett.

The keyboard was very different as well. First of all it was an all membrane keyboard. No real tactile feedback. And, when you programmed, you could not just type in any old letter, each key performed a different task such as "print" or "for." That kept mistakes to a minimum and made the programming much much faster.

I used to mow lawns the same time as I got my first computer. We lived in Texas and it got hot very early, so I'd be out mowing at 6 in the morning programming as much in my head as I could. I just could not wait to get home and get it all on the computer. To this day, if I smell carbon monoxide, computer code runs through my head. Call me crazy.

As soon as I could, I bought a memory expansion of 16K that hooked onto the back of my computer. It was great. I could program longer and longer code. The problem was I had about 20 minutes before the behemoth, it was half as large as the computer, would heat up and shut down the computer. But it was still cool.

The experience of my first computer left me enthralled. I was young and full of wonder. Nothing else came close to bringing me such joy back then.

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Photo:

Many people can remember the first computer they owned. Whether the experience was euphoric or maddening, the experience seems to be emblazoned into our minds like burn-in on a two decade old monochrome monitor. The topic can illicit tears of joy or sobs of frustration. But either way, there always seems to be a fondness and nostalgia surrounding our first computing machine.

The first computer that made its mark on my life wasn't even mine. My elementary school had a computer lab full of these fascinating beige boxes with multicolored fruit stamped on the top. They were the Apple ][e. My school had spent thousands of dollars on each computer in the 80's and still had them around. The computers came equipped with black and green monitors and a floppy drive. Looking back, the computers were practically medieval. But for a child having his first experience with a personal computer, they were the most glorious machine I had ever laid eyes on.

I can still remember the first time the teacher let us insert a 5.25 inch floppy into the floppy drive that was as boxy as the computer itself and boot up the system. Our first lesson on the computer involved a program called Logo. It involved a small digital turtle that doubled as a cursor on a blank screen. The student could draw lines, shapes, and whole pictures by "telling" the turtle what to do by typing commands into the computer using a simple programming language. If your school was rich enough, a robotic turtle with wheels for feet could be hooked up to your computer to draw your pictures on large sheets of paper. Unfortunately, going to a small catholic school, we weren't able to take our lessons quite that far.

As I reminisced on these memories, I thought it would be interesting to go further back in time and ask my step-father, Bruce Barnes, what his first experiences were like with his first computer.

"Gaming is all I did", he told me. "It was about 1983 and I had a small Texas Instruments computer, a TI-99/4A that had cartridges that fit in the top. It didn't even have a monitor, you plugged it into a TV."

He told me that he played all sorts of games like Munchman (a game similar to Pac Man), Parsec (a space combat game), and Tombstone City (a survival game in which you face off in a western ghost town against space aliens). He spent hours on each of the games and had many, many more games by the time he stopped using the computer. And this was long before modern game consoles.

Paul Pellerito, a pharmacy technician from Louisville Kentucky, told me about his experiences with his first computer.

"We got a Packard Bell 486dx with Windows 3.11 for Christmas in 1992." he remembered fondly, "It was big, heavy and beige. My brother and I took turns staying home from school so we could play with it in 8th grade! This was back before the World Wide Web."

He told me about his experiences with the three months of Prodigy that came with the computer. But his brother and he signed up for the free email service from Juno instead and used the Web's predecessor, bulletin board systems (BBS), to play games.

"My brother was hooked on Tradewars on the BBS!"

I asked a friend now living in Vancouver Canada, Chris Roller, when he got his first computer. At the time, he said, he was living in Colorado.

"I wish I could remember exactly when. I would have been 5 or 6 at the time. My memory from there is comprised only of the strongest parts. We had an Apple //c+."

He told me everything he remembered. Including a special purchase his father made at the time.

"I remember very specifically that it had 2 disk drives. I remember them being side-by-side under the monitor. My dad paid $200 for an additional 5.25" floppy drive and that was a 'good deal'."

Chris also told me about King's Quest, the first computer game he ever played on the Apple //c+.

"I doubt I understood how to play it properly. But heck, I'd type commands and things would happen in the game! Pretty neat, right?"

Nick Wells, an Information Systems Manager in Grand Rapids Michigan, told me about his father's computer which was the first computer he used.

"It was my dad's DEC Rainbow 100. It had a color monitor, but was mostly black and green. It ran DOS 3.0.2. My dad had written his own checkbook program using Fortran and we had a word processor."

He told me that the computer was the height of technology in those days.

"It booted off of one 5.25 inch floppy and saved your data to a second. It had a 20MB hard drive that cost a small fortune."

Whether we remember our first computers fondly or scornfully, they will always hold a special place in our memories. Like a cherished and fragile floppy. Think back to your first computer. If your anything like me, you'll find yourself remembering it all over again in black and green.

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When I was getting ready to head to high school in 1983 I begged my father to get me a computer. I really wanted an IBM PC, but on the middle class living we made do with IBM's newest model: the IBM PCjr It was a cute little computer with a "chiclet" keyboard, 128K of RAM and two cartridge slots.

Nope, it didn't have a hard drive and the floppy drive was 180k. It took a couple of minutes to boot up DOS, after which you had to switch your floppy disk to the application you were running. The monitor was tiny and the mouse was extra, but I loved my little machine and spend hours on it each day. The PCjr was discontinued by IBM quickly after its launch, but I will never forget the Charlie Chaplin commercials and the 300 baud modem I added to it in order to dial up to BBSes (bulletin board systems).

Today I write this on a Mac Tower with two gigs of ram, a terabyte of storage and three, yes three 30" monitors. My internet connection is fiber and 30 megabits a second, but I don't feel connected to it. In a way I look back on my old PCjr like EVE must have seen Wall-E -- outdated and underpowered but with a ton of personality.

For fun, have a look at the Charlie Chaplin commercial for the little computer that couldn't I found on YouTube. Charming!

Additionally, here's a print advertisement they ran for a while back in the day. I wonder if this was the one that got my dad to buy me my PCjr? I'll have to ask him when I upgrade the RAM in mom's iMac over the New Year.

They don't make them like they used to do they?

In the comments please answer the following questions:
1. What was your first computer?
2. Do you look back on it as a computer or a pet?
3. Compare how you feel about your current machine to how you feel about your first love.

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My first computer was a used IBM 80286 with 640k RAM, a 10MB hard drive, running MS-DOS 3.0, and a sporting stylish 5.25" floppy drive on top of a 3.5" drive. The computer was brought home by my father, from work, when I was 6 years old. He'd bought it from the company when they upgraded to 386s that were brand new that year. When he carried the massive box into the living room that evening, I wasn't sure what he was carrying, but I knew that I'd like it anyway. We spent the evening setting it up, and I was the first of us to actually flip the switch on the back and power up the beastly machine.

This computer, which still exists and runs today, was the first one I'd ever seen, and I didn't know why, but I liked the thing. Even at that age, I was obsessed with technology; even going so far as to beg for a Nintendo just because it had wires. When the machine booted up, we were met with a DOS prompt and... nothing else. My dad grabbed one of the many manuals that came with the computer, and started flipping through. Eventually, he found what he was looking for, and started typing what seemed like gibberish to me.

After an hour or more of watching him type on the huge, white, loud keyboard, he finally stopped and said, "OK. We'll come back to this tomorrow," and shut down the computer. I didn't know what I'd just seen, but I wanted to learn. So while we ate dinner that evening, I read one or two pages of the manual, and figured out a few basic DOS-commands, and a few simple lines of BASIC. After dinner, I walked into the living room, up to the desk, and switched on the dusty box.

Sitting there for most of the night, typing one-fingered, and referencing the manuals every 10 seconds or so, I was eventually able to make the computer do a few things that I thought were really good--the standard "Hello World!" script being among them. Once my father came in and saw what I was doing, he sat down and had me show him a few things from the book. After that night we started picking up shareware, games, word processors, and anything else that we could find; and met the system requirements.

A week after we first set up the computer, we went to Radio Shack and picked up a RAM upgrade. So, we went from 640k to 1024k. That's right, a whole megabyte! And that was pretty much twice what every program we could find required. We went from playing horrible Classic Concentration games, to picking up all sorts of amazing products from SSI/TSR, like the Silver and Gold Box collections of AD&D games, and even an early flight simulator that wouldn't run with the computer's original hardware.

That computer was in regular use until it was replaced by a Compaq 80386 with no 5.25" drive, one 3.5" drive, a 20MB hard drive, and 2MB of RAM, but it was still pulled out every now and then to play some of those games that were only available on 5.25" floppy. It enjoyed a long life of Wolfenstein 3D, Ken's Labyrinth, Rambo III, and countless Commander Keen games. It went from DOS to OS/2, and even had Windows 3.1 installed on it at one point. Word Perfect 3 was the word-processor of choice, and batch files cluttered every sector of it's trusty hard drive. BASIC manuals and tutorials cluttered the desk, and at least 5 different "floppy containers" were in use, and stuffed, at any given time.

These days, I'm on a MacBook with a 2.16Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, a CD/DVD burner, and a display that's not only widescreen, but supports resolutions nobody even thought of back then. The home computer of choice for the household is a DIY-monster I created using an old case, a Pentium 4, 4GB DDR2 RAM, a 320GB hard drive, and a video card that could render Pixar movies in real-time. Technology has certainly come a long way since my first computer, but that doesn't mean the thing is useless now. Like I said, it's still around, and every now and then it's still booted up, and an old game is loaded and played for hours on end. And that's perfectly fine with me. As long as it keeps chugging along, I'll keep going back to it and giving it all the attention it could ever need. As long as the parts are available to ensure that it still serves up some fast-paced Hillsfar then it will always have a place in my home.

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We leave you with a tale of a person's first computer, and her desire to get rid of the thing! - Ed.

Being in my late 20's, I am a member of the first generation of people that grew up with computers in pretty much all aspects of my life. I've witnessed and adapted to many new trends: Apple II's quirky ability to lock up when the 5 1/4" floppy got dusty, the introduction of a CD ROM drive to school computers and the widespread use of the Internet in homes and beyond. That makes me the first person many family members and older friends turn to for computer help.

About six years ago, I built a computer for my mom out of bargain computer parts found around the house and online. I was pretty thrilled as I didn't spend much on it and, while it was a little slow due to bargain RAM and processor selections, it ran pretty well. My mom had taken a few computer courses at the local community college and had gotten used to Windows 98 on their prehistoric computers, so I thought loading Windows 98 on the computer before giving it to her for her birthday would be the best choice. I was wrong. I became the 24-hour computer helpdesk and dial up Internet support.

Windows 98 played its role nicely, allowing her to get online and type up letters to print and mail (email was not her strong suit) and play solitaire, seeming to not need my computer help at the beginning. Also true to its role, however, Windows 98 started to throw blue screen exception errors occasionally which frightened my 50-something mother who thought this was indicative of having done something illegal and that the cops were on their way. She called me at work or late at night with a panic in her voice that told me she was sweating. I tried telling her that it was no big deal and that I'd look at it the next time I made the 60-mile trek to her house but that did little to soothe her jitters. She would start reading the numbers of the exception error off, expecting me to be able to write it down and immediately diagnose the problem.

To be fair, I wasn't as diligent as I should've been in researching the problem. I was in my early 20's and Mom's computer problems weren't high on my priority list. I did ask a few friends, who essentially confirmed my beliefs that perhaps something more robust than Windows 98 should be installed, and I offered to take the computer home one Christmas. My mom misunderstood my intention to take it home to fix it and instead thought I was taking it home for good. She sighed and grabbed my arm and said, "Oh my God, thank you. That thing was no end to stress for me". So my final part in providing computer help was taking the thing home. Although I do provide helpdesk services today, looking up phone numbers that she finds on her caller ID that she doesn't recognize and looking for ink ribbons for her Brother electric typewriter, which she now uses for writing holiday letters.

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Manomio has certainly been patient in waiting for their fully licensed, retro-awesome Commodore 64 app to be allowed beyond the velvet rope guarding the entrance App Store.

One of the hold ups that led to their initial rejection back in June was the presence of a BASIC interpreter. Rather than strip the code entirely, Manomio tucked it behind a Konami code of sorts. Once users began reporting their luck in re-enabling the interpreter, Apple unceremoniously booted the emulator out the back door.

According to Manomio, the code has now been totally removed and the application re-re-submitted to Apple for re-re-approval.

It seems like an odd point of contention. As PC Mag's Jamie Lendino puts it, "anyone who would try and crash the iPhone via programming the C-64 emulator in BASIC deserves a gold star more than anything else, but that's my opinion."

Do you ever think about the family lineage of your hard drive? Heck, do you ever think about the history of your hard drive at all? Of course you don't. Hard disk storage has become so ubiquitous, so reliable, and so inexpensive that most of us never give it a second thought. But where would Download Squad be if you didn't have all that cheap, seemingly endless space to download your prize finds to?

Nowhere, that's where.

So hard disk drive, we salute you. These videos, which I found on the Magnetic Disk Heritage Center are true gems. The first, an IBM marketing film-strip ca. 1957, dramatizes the invention of the hard disk at 99 Notre Dame, San Jose, California by IBM engineers in the early 1950s. The entire concept of storing data in such a way that it's directly addressable, and accessible at random is so heady and incomprehensible for the time, they explain it over and over again. It even demonstrates how they built a marketing tour bus and went on the road to demo the new hotness to customers across the USA.

The second is a true geeky-pleasure masterpiece. A very technical discussion of the inner workings of IBM's second generation of hard drives. Possibly intended for engineers who serviced the units -- which look larger than your washing machine and dryer put together -- it's as dry as a bread sandwich, but it shows some amazing footage of the inner workings doing their thing. Amazingly, those inner workings haven't really changed *that* much in principle, they've just gotten a whole lot smaller, faster, cheaper and densely packed with bits and bytes.

Grab some popcorn and click through to check out both videos.

With all the buzz about the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing I got to thinking, how powerful were the computers that "took us to the Moon?" It turns out, they were nothing short of amazing. If you've never had a nerdy bone in your body, feel free to skip this post. But, if you ever laid on your back under the stars and thought about Mercury, Gemini, Apollo or the Space Shuttle, read on and see if you're as geek-struck as I was researching this.