i remember when Apple was cool. the II series was an inexpensive dynamic hardware and software interaction to customers and third parties.
I remember changing the order of things in config.sys and autoexec.bat, because depending on the order the TSR programs were loaded in, they’d all fit in high memory (is that the right term? can’t remember), or they wouldn’t. No rhyme or reason either, that I ever figured out. Just keep changing things around and rebooting until it works (hopefully).
I don’t know whether I count as an old-timer; I’m only 42. But my first experience with computers was in 1981 in the fifth grade, when I got to fiddle with a Commodore PET. If you excelled in class - got your homework done early, scored well, etc. - you got to spend some time with the PET. The graphics where character-based and monochrome, but that was still pretty damn cool to a fifth-grader. You could load games (like Oregon Trail) from cassette-tape storage. Fun stuff.
Oh, yeah. I had config.sys and autoexec.bat files specifically designed for every damned game I owned. I even wrote a simple command that would allow me to copy the desired files over the existing config.sys and autoexec.bat files… I would type in something like “autocopy Civ2” to get Civ2 running correctly, “autocopy Xcom” for Xcom, etc etc.
My friends thought I was wicked-smart… well, not really, but they all copied the idea once I showed how much easier this worked than futzing around with the actual files prior to playing a game.
For those of you who grew up on punch cards, did the advent of cassette tapes give you a “What’ll they think of next?!?” moment?
for in between:
paper tape was a step up from cards. didn’t mess things up as bad when you might drop or knock over.
It blew my mind so much I left the whole computer field and concentrated on the biological sciences instead. I saved my old punchcards for my favorite programs for a while, along with my flow charts for them. But eventually they were consigned to the trash.
I came back to computers in time to become a DOS command line warrior, however.
Cassette tapes were a micro thing, at least in my world. The mainframe went from punch cards to CRT’s. And yes, when I went to grad school and saw a room full of students sitting at CRT’s, I freaked. It looked like the Kennedy Space Center. I was obsolescent at 22. It was traumatic.
Ahhhhhhhhh, cassette “storage”! I had an “improved” Timex-Sinclair with the add-on 16k(?) memory.
I’d keyboard and store like crazy. The “on” switch, remember, was THE POWER CORD.
It wobbled. And DESTROYED MY DATA BEFORE SAVING IT.
We lived in an 1898 balloon-frame Chicago two-flat. I worked in the basement, which flooded.
Life was GOOD, then! :eek:
I still recall Norton’s Inside the PC. I read and reread the original printing of that book until the pages were falling out.
I’ve never seen such complex information explained so well and concisely. The Waite Group books on Assembly and C were also must reads in my self education.
I had two years of self study before taking my first Computer Science class.
The first computer I owned was an Atari 800, with 48KB RAM (the most it could hold) and a cassette drive. Too many memories of waiting 10 minutes for a piece of software to load, only for it to error out just before finishing.
However, the first computer I programmed was a “big-iron” IBM 1130 (with 16KB or RAM, although IBM called it 8K of “words”) at the local junior college. Never mind I was in sixth grade at the time… Hands up, if the phrase “face down, 9-edge first” brings back memories.
I remember when…
…3 1/2" floppies first came out - at $3.50 each for 360KB
…a single-layer erasable DVD cost $6 (and that was “only” 10 years ago)
…it was a reasonably big deal when EGA graphics first appeared (“16 colors at once, and not text!”); you can imagine what happened when VGA showed up, even if it was only 320x240 at 256 colors
…if you wanted peripherals, you usually had to go to “computer shows” that popped up every now and then (this was in the days before CompUSA was everywhere - I remember when the nearest one was 50 miles away)
I grew up using an Apple IIe. My dad was a computer hobbyist and we used it for games, educational stuff and whatnot.
I still have a bunch of Apple II equipment in storage. How likely it it to still work? Are any of the floppies likely to work? It’s all unorganized and covered in dust, and some of it is in parts. I often think of taking it out, testing it and possibly selling whatever works, but I figure half the stuff probably won’t work and that will make it impossible to test or operate the other half.
Among other things, there is a Corvus 20MB hard drive that’s as big as a desktop computer.
Oh, the memories. I remember how pissed I got at my sister when she unplugged the thing while walking by, and destroying my beautiful program.
I really wanted the 16k add-on. I remember the price had come down to $50. And my parents always sent me $50 on my birthday. I couldn’t wait for my birthday.
That year they sent me a coat instead.
I did much the same thing with a tic-tac-toe program. It had two stages, one for the X and one for the O, and to save memory I for some reason I forget now converted a bunch of add instructions to subtract instructions when switching stages (and vice versa.) Initializing made sure they were all add instructions. It even worked.
I suspect it was long before 360s. a - f is logical. The reason the LGP-21 did not use this notation was that the six bit character representation for the numbers and letters mapped into the opcodes for the appropriate instructions - so typing a “B” got you the opcode for the Bring instruction. I guess it saved a few transistors.
Speaking of emulators, in the old sense, when I was at Illinois I worked on microprogramming. We had a Lockheed SUE mini which we converted to be user-microprogrammable by replacing its ROM with a RAM. I wrote a simulator for its microinstruction set on our PDP 11-20, and I wrote an LGP-21 emulator on the SUE. Simulating the emulation of the LGP-21 instruction set was faster than the original machine!
I had played with other people’s computers before, but the first one I owned was my trusty old Amiga 1000. I still have it, and even though it has been a few decades since I last fired it up, the abilities it had at the time caused such a flowering of unique ideas that there are still things that have never been duplicated on either Windows or Mac.
Oh yeah, does anybody remember the old Osborne portable computer? It was about as big as a breadbox and weighed a ton, but it was the first “laptop.” It was pretty cool, but did not last long. Probably because back then, nobody could envision any use for such a thing.
All three years of middle school I had a computer class mostly dealing with programming in Apple BASIC. At some point during that time I convinced my parents we needed a computer, so my first was an Apple IIc. I really just wanted it so I could play Ultima.
What’s funny is my upgrading over the years, for a while there, was directly tied to the Ultima series. When VI came out, it was released on the IBM only, so I convinced the parents to get a 286. Then a couple of years later, VII was released, which used its own memory manager and would only run on a 386. So I managed to find a used 386SX motherboard and upgrade my computer. And so on.
The very first computer I encountered was an already ancient Wang system in high school, 1977 or so. It had an alphabetic (not QWERTY) keyboard, program storage on cassette tape, and a printer made from an IBM Selectric typewriter by the Math department Chair. Programmed in BASIC.
Next, in college, I learned Fortran IV on a CDC 6600, using punchcards.
Next, came a succession of DEC PDP-11/70s, which broke me out of the deer-in-the-headlights mode of programming, and I began to really get into into.
In my Digital Electronics classes, the hot new microprocessor was the Intel 8085, followed shortly by the Z-80 clone. 16K of RAM and ROM was a lot on the breadboards we built.
Getting out of school, I became a VAX/PDP demigod, and still carry a torch for them. I can also claim having to boot a PDP-11/45 from a paper tape and a manually entered bootloader. What a pain in the ass that was.
Commonly derided in my office as “luggable”, not portable.
The first computer I sold was a dual-floppy system.
Then NEC came out with these monitors that could switch from orange to green depnding upon which color you preferred. Ooooh! Aaaaah!
I remember when the Seagate guys broke free and sarted re-partitioning drives to hold 33megabytes!
We held a special sales brainstorming session to figure out what kinds of businesses might have a use for our new 80 megabyte hard drives. (Which were the size of a modern mini-tower.)
That was about the time the first NEC multi-sync (RGB! 16 colors!!!) came out. We were completely overrun with customers. When we were told the shipment would come in on Tuesday, customers starting lining up on Monday night. When it finally came in on Thursday many of them were waiting again. Most of them were extremely unpleasant to deal with in the interim.
Then my boss lost his mind and ordered a warehouse full of “Facsimile Machines.” Which were completely impossible to sell because they were only useful if the person on the other end of the line had one too.
I got out of the business about the time the first 286s came in.