Your place in Computer History

In My Humble Opinion
41

Hmmm,

Didn’t know much about computers in Elementary School. Just did not see them.

In Junior High i was in a gifted program where we got to play games at a terminal that didn’t have a monitor, but printed everything out. I played lots of nettrek and similar games on that.

In 7th grade our school got a single Apple II+. I did some minor basic programming on that along with others. In 8th grade it got a floppy disk drive.

In high school our computer room had a bunch of TRS-80s which were used for the computer class or text games. A year later they added a couple of Apple IIs. A handful of my classmates had Apple IIcs or IIes. One friend had a Texas Instruments Computer. All of these were pretty much used just to play games. A little later the computer lab got a bunch of DEC rainbows which nobody touched. I think they were a failed product and donated out as a tax write-off. Eventually the library got its own computer lab of Apple IIes that were for word processing.

At home my family got an IBM PCjr which eventually became mine as they upgraded.

In 1992 I bought a used MacSE. I didn’t get my own ‘new’ computer until I bought a Power Computing 132 (The Mac Clones, if you don’t recall) sometime in 1995.

42

Oh, forgot: my family got one of those TI-80 computers, which could run basic and play pong, saving programs and data on cassettes. I set it up for them but didn’t fiddle with it much simply because I was in college by that time.

My first personal computer was a Mac Plus, with 1MB memory! In 1986 (used). A lot of folks I worked with got CP/M computers with 8080, 6800, or Z80 micros, but it always seemed like a lot of fiddling for very little useful computing. The Mac Plus was great. I’m a Windows guy now, though.

43

Today (literally) I found my old Compaq Contura 4/25 . Plugged it in, waited for an hour and fired it right up. Software installed:

MASM
TASM
Borland C Compiler
Realia COBOL (Yeow!)
SPF PC (SPF editor)
MKS Toolkit
MS-DOS 6.22

Everything works! Must have been in storage since at least 1999.

And they still make batteries for this device.

44

That’s the computer, advertised by Bill Cosby, which almost killed TI. Cost more to manufacture than the Commodore 64 and not as good - and then TI decided to sell them through a price war.
When I lived in NJ I knew someone who worked on designing that machine and was proud of it. No, not very bright.

45

First computer I touched was the IBM System 360 at my junior high school. Blew thru everything they had on it, and the people in the lab wanted to teach me programming - by the principal over-ruled them because I refused to go to gym class. After that, a friend’s Altair.

The first one I owned was an Amiga 1000, which I still have. Haven’t fired it up in years, but used it a ton to do graphics in Deluxe Paint II, and had a Live digitizer board that would bring in live camera video. Used a program called Invision by a company called Elan to process the video in bizarre ways that I used with the band Psychowelders. Also had a genlock to use the Amiga to overlay characters that I used in video editing.

Used that Amiga and a terminal program to get on the net via one of the very first ISPs, the World in Boston. Long distance call from Kansas City to Chicago, very expensive.

First PC was a 486 that cost $2000. Did a ton of 3D animation using AT&T Targa and Vista cards on a program called Digital Arts DGS. Took that skill to Chicago and demoed TDI Explore on an SGI Indy. This program was the heart of Maya when Wavefront and Alias merged.

For a while, I thought BeOS was going to catch on, and if quality beat marketing, it would have. These days, Windows and OSX - pretty much OS-agnostic.

46

My first exposure to computers was the Apple ][ line in the early 80s, when I was a kid. Our family bought a Franklin Ace 2200, which was an Apple II clone, and was my first major exploration of computers. I played on that thing regularly, and watched my parents use the AppleWorks word processors and spreadsheets (which were so woefully underpowered).

I remember the first time I saw a Mac was on a field trip to some science and technology place and we got to play with them for an hour or s., I didn’t really understand (and it wasn’t explained) that it was a graphical operating system, and I kept on thinking how there was so much amazing stuff, just in the ‘startup program.’ (not realizing that I was running different programs in the OS).

Finally, in 1992, I wanted to get, well, an actual computer that could do things, and finally convinced my dad to get rid of our Apple clone and get a real machine. He bought a totally awesome (ha!) 386 SX 33MHz with 2MB of RAM and an 80 MB hard drive, along with a 2400 baud modem, running MS-DOS 5 and Windows 3.1 (though I was outside Windows at least as often as I was in it).

That was really where I became proficient…mastered DOS and all the command line stuff, got around my dad’s ‘protected’ adult files that the guy who built the computer put on there, first started exploring online things by connecting to a few local BBSes.

We later upgraded that machine to a whopping 4 MB of RAM (at something like $250), and got a 250MB hard drive. I remember my friend had a 750MB drive, and I remember asking “Why? You’ll never fill that much space.”

I tinkered with that heavily, even performing a handful of upgrades…I was a co-sysop with a friend of a file sharing BBS.

My senior year in high school, my dad finally upgraded our machine to a Pentium 120. Overall that machine was a piece of crap, though. I went to college the next fall and bought my first owned machine…a custom built Pentium 166MHz with 16MB of RAM and a 2GB hard drive. Used that for two years, then bought a Pentium II 350, which was the last machine I purchased from a PC maker.

By 2000, I was building my own machines, starting with an Athlon XP 1400, following it up with an Athlon 64 system and later a Core 2 Duo machine, among some others I’ve built for my wife/us as a media PC, etc.

My current machine, which I built two years ago, is a Core i5 2500K @ 4.5GHz with 16GB of RAM, a 128GB SSD, 4.5TB of primary storage (plus a 4TB backup drive), a Geforce GTX 460 (I game, but not heavily on my PC any more), dual monitors (24" and 22") and some other nice extras. I am a photographer, so most of my storage space is for photos, and the power is for photo editing. I’ll need to replace one of my 2TB drives with a 4TB drive sometime later this year, as they fill up fast.

So, I’m a nerd.

47

My dad had a Heathkit computer in the early 80s. I played Wumpus Hunt on it.

Next, we had a Tandy 1000 with 640KB RAM. That was huge! I learned to program on that machine, a little in BASIC, but mostly in Borland C. I had a few commercial games, but mostly wrote mine own. Mostly 2D shooters, space sims, and fractal art. Also the only machine that I didn’t build from parts.

My first own computer was a 286 with a 287 math coprocessor that my dad’s company binned because it didn’t meet spec (consistently overheated or locked up, but I figured out which signal would force it to do a soft reset). I built it myself from parts. It had 8MB RAM, and with the math coprocessor, I could do much bigger and more complex sims. I was sad when I eventually broke up that machine for parts. :o

Once in college and grad school, I got into UNIX and other multi-user systems. One of my friends ran a Linux server out of his dorm room in 1992. (He’s still big in the open source world; has a Wikipedia page even.) I got my first email address and internet access then. (Before then was all local BBS’s.)

I made first WWW page sometime in 1993. At the time, the Web didn’t seem like much of an improvement over Gopher services. I remember when Mosaic would display connection speeds in bytes/sec (and we’d snicker that whenever it dropped below 100 that the link was via telegraph) and when Weather Underground switched from Gopher to the Web. But the evolution was frenetic.

Employment-wise, I coded nearly from scratch some 3D models and GUIs for them and some command-line utilities when I was an intern at an engineering firm. Once in grad school, I hand-coded a bunch of sims for my PhD in physics. Had to squeeze every ounce of optimization for speed and memory. Once in the real world, coding has been much easier; the models are much simpler and computers are so much faster and bigger, I don’t often hit computational limits.

It’s been a fun ride on the computer-tech rocket. I can’t wait to see what my kids can do with it.

48

Yeah, I had a Sinclair, and used my tape recorder for storage, and a B/W television for display. I actually took the thing to college (needed special dispensation for the TV (freshmen weren’t allowed to have them)). In HS, I did a lot of programming on a Commodore PET, which I really enjoyed. At college, the mainframe was a Honeywell CP6 (though I eventually used the VAX on campus too).

[QUOTE=Dendarii Dame]
A friend taught me how to use a computer a little in high school, but really my boyfriend taught me pretty much everything else I know about computers in college and afterward.

Reader, I married him.
[/QUOTE]

And I’m mighty glad you did…