Maintained by Seed's editors, web editors, and the other people who make Seed tick, Page 3.14 points you in the direction of some of ScienceBlogs' finest offerings, plus the tastiest tidbits of science news and opinion from around the web.
I was born in 1984. My earliest memory of a computer is thumbing through a plastic box of black, square 5.25-inch floppy disks, trying to decide whether I wanted to play The Oregon Trail, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, or Word Munchers on the family Compaq 386.
Since most of the ScienceBloggers have a few years on me, we thought it might be fun to have a stroll down their technological memory lanes. Here's what they remember about old-school computing. (Feel free to give them a hard time about their ages; they're all extremely sensitive.)
Revere (b. A long time ago)
"My first computer experience was in 1969 on a PDP-9, booted with paper tape, 48K of wound ferrite core memory. Took up a whole room. A big room. We had to set switches manually to get the boot tape to input. There was a Mac at that time. But it was something called Project Mac at MIT. We just heard rumors of it. It was this amazing machine that could be shared. More than one person could be using it at once. Wow. Something called time sharing. Not condos. There were no condos. All my programs submitted batch on punch cards in Fortran. I EVEN REMEMBER WORLD WAR II !!! Excuse me while I go drool."
Doc Bushwell (b. 1954)
"I wrote my PhD thesis on a North Star Horizon computer that was linked to our stopped flow spectrophotometer for data acquisition. I rented a typewriter that could be hooked up to North Star for the final thesis product. My ChemDraw figures were processed on a tiny Mac 512 KiB, and the figures were drawn by a plotter in the comp. sci. building across campus. And yes, I had to walk miles and miles through the snow to get to school (hey, this was Wisconsin)."
John Wilkins (b. 1955)
"I had to type my first essay on a four poster manual typewriter that was made in the 1920s. I did my first electronic essay in Wordstar on a PC 8086. My first program was in Fortran on punch cards (it didn't work, but I had to wait three weeks to find that out). My first computer was a Commodore 64 with a tape drive for storage.
And you try telling the kids of today that, and they won't believe you."
PZ (b. 1957)
"I wrote my thesis on an Apple II, using PIE Writer, which was kind of like Wordstar, with imbedded dot commands for formatting. You had to run your text, which was sprinkled with cryptic .p and .sup and .i commands, through a format program that would produce a binary...then you'd send that off to the daisy wheel printer which would make the floor shake for a few hours while it pounded out the words on that awful perforated paper."
Zuska (b. 1963)
"I typed my senior thesis on an IBM correcting selectric typewriter.
I wrote my MS. in LaTex on a mainframe, had to compile and run the document and walk down two floors to the printing room to pick it up each time I wanted to see changes in it. Oh, the equations...
I wrote my PhD diss. on a MacIntosh Plus. Was that ever sweet or what. I should add that I did have the added support of a never-ending bottle of Old Smuggler, which greatly facilitated the available technology."
Coturnix (b. 1966)
"Played Hobbit on Sinclair ZX Spectum in 1980. Learned how to punch cards in highschool. Skipped 10 years of computer evolution. Then jumped into Usenet."
Mark Chu-Carroll (b. 1966)
"My first computer was a Commodore 64. No tape drive - I used to write programs on the computer, and when they worked, I copied them out *by hand* into a notebook. Seriously. I had just enough money to get the computer, no spare money for the tape drive!
I once had to crawl under a raised thermo-floor to run network cables. The machine room at Rutgers was on a raised, perforated floor, where cool air was pumped in from below. I got to crawl through the floor dragging a cable, because I was the only geek skinny enough to do it. I also did the same thing as a prank to scare the living shit out of another student programmer. (Imagine sitting in a chair, and having the floor right in front of you pop open and shout "Boo!")"
Dave Munger (b. 1967)
"Let me give you some sense of how incredibly advanced our high school newspaper was. We had an electronic typesetting machine, which was connected to our Commodore 64. You could actually type a story on your computer, save it on a floppy disk just 5 1/4 inches in diameter (using a hole-puncher, you could add a notch to the side of the disk casing, allowing you to flip it over and save files on the other side. This increased storage from about 165K to 340K, or less than 1/1000 of my iPod Shuffle.), load it onto the school's computer, and then, after adding a few cryptic commands into the text, typeset it. Of course, you'd still need to take the typeset copy, wax it, cut it out, and paste it into place on the final master copy of the paper.
Headlines were done by hand, one letter at a time, on our headline machine. Photos, of course, were processed separately, converted into half-tones, and hand-pasted in. Laying out a single page for our newspaper, on a good day, took about 8 to 10 hours. This was "desktop publishing" in 1984."
John Lynch (b. 1968)
"My first computer was a ZX81 (Timex/Sinclair here in the US). Had 1k of memory. Taught myself assembly.
In high school and college, virtually everything was hand written. Didn't even use a calculator until college (wasn't allowed in high school - I remember log tables!)"
Dr. Freeride (b. 1968)
"My high school English teacher made fun of me for wordprocessing my papers (on a Commodore 64 with a program called "PaperClip," in which I had to type the formatting lines at the top of each document). As revenge, with my term paper I gave him a bag full of the holey strips I removed from the edges of the tractor feed printer paper."
Dave Ng (b. 1969)
"I had one of those Sinclair machines. Great for space invaders. Then an Apple II, II+, and IIe. Ah good times.
But being Chinese, I'm cool with getting old (you know Fu Manchu's and getting to call everyone "grasshopper")."
Chad Orzel (b. 1971)
"The first real home computer we had was a TI 99/4A, which had a weird compact keyboard so that you had to hit something like function-P to get a quote mark. A friend of the family had a business selling them, and we wound up with a huge number of peripheral devices for it.
Some years later, we had an Apple IIgs, which I wrote my college applications on using AppleWorks. We also used it for playing Shanghai and Tetris, so I was well prepared for my freshman year, when my whole hall was obsessed with Tetris—I remember having dreams about those damn falling blocks."
Mike Dunford (b. 1975)
"I started on the internet when I started college, in 1993. My access then was through a "computer room" in the basement of the dorm. I'm using the scare quotes because the machines in there weren't stand alone computers. There were about 25 VT-220 terminals in there, which could be used to link to the campus mainframes. Most students used the Vax for recreational stuff, since the IBM was a dinosaur even at the time, and the unix cluster was restricted to students with demonstrated academic need for the machine."
Technology
Education & Careers
Comments
Ah, Oregon Trail! I was born in 1977, and when I was in middle school we had "computer lab" once a week -- and it consisted entirely of playing Oregon Trail.
My parents bought an Apple IIe when I was in elementary school, and I have fond memories of playing Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? and Frogger on it.
Posted by: Liz | October 24, 2007 3:05 PM
My first computer was an Apple II +. Original monochrome green monitor, but we did have two 5.25" floppy disk drives. We also had the optional 80 column card for word processing / spreadsheets.
I don't remember what the word processing software was, but I remember that all formatting was done using control codes in the text, similar to the HTML that I know and love so well today. There was also PrintShop, that as far as I rmemember we only used to make cheesy birthday cards and, much to the dismay of my father, worthless banners. (The replacement ribbons for the Imagewriter dot matrix printer were fairly expensive, and bannermaking burned through them like nothing.)
As far as games, I remember the original Apple Breakout (in low res, no less,) the VERY first subLogic Flight Simulator, Castle Wolfenstien, and the Dark Crystal.
I remember Apple Integer BASIC, and buying any Apple rag that had code you type in and make do something. I also remember attempting to cut notches in the 5.25" floppies in an effort to get them to be double sided. (I don't think it ever worked, because the disks were either double density or they weren't.)
Ah, the good old days.
Posted by: David L. | October 24, 2007 4:19 PM
I was fortunate enough to be enrolled in graduate school in the 60's at Washington University in St. Louis, MO. While there, the MIT group that was developing the LINC computer (Laboratory Instrument Computer), one of the first "mini-computers" especially designed for individual laboratory use, moved to Washington University to continue development. They were housed in a building on the Med School campus where I was a research assistant and starting my thesis work. While they were developing the assembler for the machine, they started offering courses to the academic community. So my first hands-on programming experience was with the LINC machine language, manually keyed in through two banks of digital flip switches set in octal patterns, one bank for setting the instruction address in memory, one for setting the instruction code. Shortly afterward, the development group finished the assembler and operating system, and we could program in assembler using 3-letter codes for machine instructions through the teletype terminal and store programs and results on two one inch wide mini digital tapes.
The machine was a marvel in its day, 12 bit word length, 2K memory and several hundred K bytes tape storage. It's usefulness in the lab was enhanced by coming with analogue inputs attached to A/D converters along with digital and relay outputs and a 5 inch programmable oscilloscope screen for display.
I wrote the code to control laboratory apparatus that presented sounds in various sequences and simultaneously recorded auditory evoked potentials from the brain as part of my thesis. Later the averaged evoked responses could be displayed on the computer screen and measurements made with a cursor and digital display.
Digital Equipment Corporation bought rights to the machine and shortly combined it with their PDP8 mini to market the LINC/8, which I also used as a post-doc.
I've used main frames, mini's and PCs since that time, but have never formed as close an attachment to another computer as with the LINC.
Posted by: Steve Rothenberg | October 24, 2007 7:39 PM
What, no Osborne users out there?
Posted by: etbnc | October 24, 2007 10:21 PM
(b. 1966) My first computer experience was probably a TRS-80 with 4 Kbytes of memory. That would have been around '78 or '79. Oddly, it was probably more advanced than the computers I maintained in the US Navy 10 years later: AN/UYK-20s (basically a militarized UNIVAC 1616) which used core memory, discrete transistors and integrated circuits (meaning chips with about 6 logic elements - call it maybe 40 transistors on a good day). See this photo of the maintainence panel of one. There were less than 3000 of these ever built. I had to learn this machine from very nearly the transistor level up. Astonishingly, I found military contracts for versions of these machines on the net for as recently as 2003.
Posted by: Benjamin Franz | October 25, 2007 12:04 AM
TRS-80 = Trash 80. If I remember correctly.
Posted by: John Lynch | October 25, 2007 2:41 AM
I used the Osborne to write the early drafts of my thesis in the late 80's (hooked it to a video monitor to get a decent screen size). Then switched up to the fancy-schmancy Compaq Deskpro 386. It might not seem like much today, but back then it was far and away the best IBM-type system there was.
Posted by: Dave S. | October 25, 2007 7:42 AM
In the 80's I was taking an Osborne home from work -- the term "luggable" applied -- it was the size and weight of a portable sewing machine. And that little screen! I was using it to write documentation for VT-830 terminals (the Burroughs emulation). Or maybe VT-220. For Lanpar.
Posted by: Monado | October 25, 2007 8:37 AM
The California History Museum restored an old IBM 1401 in 2005. Speaking of old nerds, they even got Gene Amdahl involved.
Posted by: Monado | October 25, 2007 8:55 AM
First programming was BASIC on a TRS-80. Ah, those were the days.
Started college in 1990, and we had this great mainframe system. You could find out who else was on the mainframe, on campus, and chat with them! You could send messages to people on a few select other campuses, but there was no real-time chat.
I went through the transition from print Biological Abstracts to BIOSIS online. The college had to pay an astronomical amount of money per hour, so I'd have to sit with the reference librarian and map out a flowchart of my search terms ahead of time, using the print version for guidance. Then when she got on it would be a race to see how quickly we could get through it all.
Posted by: Carlie | October 25, 2007 9:49 AM
Born '77. I remember a friend getting C64. It was so awesome. Spy vs Spy rocked.
Then my parents got an Apple IIc that were going to use for our small business. Shortly afterwards my older brother got the Amiga 500, which I eventually "inherited" as he got interest in girls and stuff. I had pretty good time learning Basic and using the applications we had on both the Apple and Amiga. I guess this was all in the late 80s and early 90s.
When I finally entered college in '95, I got on the interwebs. Wasn't until '97 that I finally bought my own computer.
Posted by: daenku32 | October 25, 2007 9:55 AM
My first programming experience was writing a BASIC program to calculate titration results in 1969 on a Xerox Sigma 6 through a Teletype terminal.
In grad school I programmed HP 2116 mini-computers in assembler and built interfaces for chemical instrumentation, primarily electrochemistry.
For my PhD I put together an Intel kit for an 8085 and programmed it through a keypad in hexadecimal, as it had no assembler; I wrote out all the interfacing code by hand in hex in 1 kilobyte of RAM.
I typed my thesis on an Smith-Corona electric typewriter which I had to buy with my own money, but through the Wonders of Modern Technology I was able to produce copies of my thesis using a new Xerox machine, rather than by carbon paper. I was so lucky!
The other day I installed a 1 terabyte disc drive on my core-duo iMac.
Posted by: Doc Bill | October 25, 2007 10:00 AM
1981, working for a South African parastatal. TRS-80 II machines smuggled in under sunctions. 8" floppy drives with 150kb or so of space. Eventually we also obtained a 2mb hard drive that was the size of the current ATX case. It was peer networked, via microwave (blistering 8b/s)- I won't name the protocol nor where it was smuggled from, since that was embargoed information. But we were a trail run for this stuff going on here now!
Posted by: MartB | October 25, 2007 10:30 AM
My first experience was in the 1970s on a fax like contraption with a phone coupler that my father brought home from work. Wed played star trek on an insurance company's mainframe. Entire forests died that night as we killed klingons. It didn't respect me in the morning.
Posted by: yoshi | October 25, 2007 10:46 AM
Ahhh, memory lane. I was born in '68. I remember in middle school math, our "reward" for finishing our work (perfectly) first, was to have "game time" on a tape driven IBM that the teacher kept in the front. We, in the advanced math class, would rush through our work, race each other up to the front of the room, anxiously await the results from the teacher, and then argue over who would get to "play" the game. After the tape had loaded the program 3.417 years after it began *grin* we would pilot the starship Enterprise, which I believe looked a lot like a collection of hyphens and equals signs through a galaxy destroying Klingon warships (don't recall what they looked like, I believe primitive would be an understatement). We had to figure the angle and calculate how much energy we wanted to use to destroy the warships. In other words that sneaky bastard had us doing MORE MATH!!!
Posted by: dogmeatib | October 25, 2007 10:56 AM
PZ says "old nerds are so pathetic" - I'm way too pathetic to turn down a challenge like that. Born in 1958, in 1972 my highschool had a "Math Club", which was really a computer club. Once a week, after school, we all (6-8 kids) piled into the physics teacher's station wagon, and went to a school in the other end of the city where they had an IBM 360 that we could program with punch cards. I met "Eamon Knight" at Math Club, and we got married 8 years later. But, in the meantime I went off to MIT, where I used Unix on a PDP11/45 (though for my senior thesis I was back to punch cards to run SUPREME simulations).
Then out to the working world - back to IBM mainframes, though at least we had text terminals by this time. Started a home project for a DIY toggle-switch programmable microcomputer (still have the 1Kx1 RAM chips bought "cheap" for $2.29 a piece), but eventually gave in around 1982 and bought a pre-assembled hex-keypad programmable Z80-based board computer. What was it good for? Not much, though its twin at work was useful for controlling a speech synthesizer chip I was working on at the time.
Posted by: Theo Bromine | October 25, 2007 11:14 AM
My second machine was a Commodore 64... my first was a Commodore PET, with a chiclet keyboard (close-packed square keys), a built-in green-screen that might have been 8" diagonal, and 4K of RAM. It loaded progras such as Space Invaders from a cassette tape drive, which used standard audio tapes.
The C64 also started with the same tape drive, but eventually I got two floppy-disk drives. To disambiguate the drives, I had to manually cut a solder-pad on one of the drives' circuit board, thus bumping the device number it reported. The C64 used a color TV for display -- it had 16-color character graphics and 8 programmable sprites. Incidentally, its "64K" of memory included the KERNAL [sic] code and the I/O registers. I used that C64 for most of my freshman year of college (1984-85), before getting my first IPM PC.
Posted by: David Harmon | October 25, 2007 11:18 AM
(b. 1945) My first program was Autocoder on an IBM 7070. 5000 words of core, each 10 decimal digits (yes, decimal). CPU speed was 27 KPS. The 7070 was supported (via magnetic tape) by an IBM 1401 to handle the high-speed I/O operations like paper tape and a printer; didn't want to tie up the massive computational facilities of the mainframe with mundane things like I/O.
Cost in current dollars $6 million, not counting the building that housed it.
Hey, you kids! Get off my lawn!
Posted by: Bob | October 25, 2007 11:34 AM
I had a BBC Micro Model B. Truly a fantastic machine, with the bonus of the original version of Elite. Also got a BBC Master 128 lying around somewhere (yay! Elite gets 4 colour graphics!!!)
Posted by: andy | October 25, 2007 11:43 AM
(b. 1952) I took a programming course in college in the 70s. (FORTRAN, of all things.) You had to wait in line to use one of the punch card machines. Then you'd take your cards to the window and turn them in. Then the next day you'd get your program back -- if you were lucky, it was nice and thick and you successfuly computed the interest on the sale of Manhattan or somesuch. If you were unlucky you would get a page or two which indicated that something had gone worng (sic, I meant to do that) with your program -- perhaps a wayward comma or the like, and you'd have to get in line to use the "express" punch card machine which was reserved for those needing a few minutes to make a correction.
Not having the patience for waiting, I eventually gave up on the class, even though I enjoyed learing some programming.
A few years later (early 80s), I worked at a school for deaf and blind children which had several Apple II computers. Some employees from HP were working on speech synthesizers and other adaptations for the students, so that was pretty exciting. Instead of taking a lunch break, I'd play around with Rocky's Boots and Logo (turtle graphics).
Posted by: Susan | October 25, 2007 12:52 PM
Okay, here's obscurity and horror: I bought my first computer in 1984. It was an "Apricot" PC, built in "Silicon Glen" in Scotland. It had a 10" diagonal monochrome green screen, a massive 264KB of RAM, and the fantastic 2 hard-shell 3.25" drives, each of which held a massive 770KB of information. (No, no hard drive, and no slot to put one in, either) One drive, of course was for your program and the other was for your software. Unfortunately, though it used the 8086 chipset, it was compatible with neither a PC or a Mac -- and the floppies could not be read by ANY other computer. And no modem. And printing out the manuscript of my first book on the daisywheel printer took (3 min per page x 350 pages) . . . . way too long.
And it cost $4,000 in 1984 dollars. Memories.
(Previously I had used a friend's $7,000 NEC machine, which had dual 8" floppy drives and an old tractor-drive dot-matrix printer.)
Posted by: Hairhead | October 25, 2007 12:58 PM
Page 3.14 : ScienceBloggers Walk Down Memory Lane
The first computer i ever used was a Commodore PET (just like the one pictured in the linked article). That was in 83 or so. I learned a little BASIC on that:
10 PRINT "Hi "; 20 GOTO 10 RUN
Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi
Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi
Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi
Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi
Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi
Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi
Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi
Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi
Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi
Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi
Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi
Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi
Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi
Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi Hi
...
Shortly after that I got a Commodore 64 for Christmas. I had asked for a Vic-20, which was the C-64's little brother, thinking that the C-64 would be too much computer for me and that it would cost so much that my father would end up getting me a bike or something instead. But he didn't. Thankfully.
So, I learned the rest of Microsoft BASIC and 6510 Assembler on the C-64. I remember being thrilled to learn that the floppy drive, which was as big as the C-64 itself, could be programmed with Assembler, too. It was like having two computers! I don't think I ever did much more than make the drive light flash, though. Parallel programming was far beyond my capabilities back then.
But the C-64 was a lot of fun. This was the days before multithreading and protected memory and restricted address space, etc.; everything in the C64 was available to the programmer. Because there was no such thing as a "video card" or "video memory", the display system used the computer's memory to store the state of the display, and you could change which chunk of memory the display looked at. So, by telling the display to look at certain section of memory, you could watch the internal state of the machine itself, in real-time. It looked like random garbage, but real geeks knew that it was the equivalent of 64,000 of the big red blinking lights that those old room-sized computers used to display their state. Progress!
Posted by: cleek | October 25, 2007 1:00 PM
First programming was in 1975 on an IBM the size of a large refrigerator. Dunno what it was. Good experience though, programming a rocket launch into orbit. Back in those days, we didn't have zeroes; we had to make do with ones. Wrote my senior essay on a manual typewriter in 1978. Did my entire economics dissertation - programming, writing and all - in the mid-80s on an Olivetti 8088 with 256k memory and a massive 10MB hard drive. Cost me five grand, but made grad school way, way more bearable compared with living in the computer building.
Posted by: DCBob | October 25, 2007 1:42 PM
My first experience (b. 1939) was analyzing data for my dissertation in 1970-1971. The mainframe required punch cards and some "magic" pre-punched cards that you were given to run the BioMed statistical programs. You submitted the cards to an operator at a window in the computing center and returned a day later to get a printout (if you didn't have any errors) or your stack of cards and a note saying that there was an error. No indication of what the error was. Then, after I finally got the cards right, the printout with the analysis of variance came back the next day. Fine, except that there were negative sums of squares in the second and third data sets. I got an appointment with someone in computer support and he told me my data was at fault. I finally convinced him that it wasn't and he started looking through the source code for the BioMed program and then gave up and told me to submit three different jobs, since the first data set seemed to be analysed OK. By that time my confidence in the programs was shattered. I discovered a young faculty member had a HP programmable calculator and I taught myself to use it and recalculate all the ANOVAs for my dissertation, entering all the data by hand.
Fast forward a few years and I taught myself FOCUS (a Basic-like language) on a PDP-4 with paper tape program storage. Then the college I was teaching at got a PDP-11 with 16 terminals (1977?). I learned FORTRAN and wrote some simulations for my classes.
Finally, in 1980?, I purchased a Radio Shack Color Computer with 16K memory and learned Basic. (I couldn't afford an AppleII on my crummy salary.) I parlayed this experience into a job in industry as a FORTRAN programmer in 1982 -- IBM mainframes, CMS and MVS, JCL, etc. Thirty programmers had to share 4 terminals. We signed up for terminal time and submitted jobs in the morning, getting the printouts back in the later afternoon. Most of the problems were in the cryptic JCL language that IBM mainframes required for job control (allocation of memory and files). Sometimes it took a whole week to test your actual code. I'm not even going to talk about the bureaucratic rules and regulations that dictated what languages and programs you could use. I learned IDMS for database programming (a CODASYL database language; no relational tables!).
Finally we moved into the modern world with Unix and PCs in the 1990s.
Then I retired.
I've got to be oldest one responding to this entry.
Posted by: Dale Hoyt | October 25, 2007 1:50 PM
(b 1963).
First computer was an Altair that Dad got for fun.
College had a DEC box running Ultrix, and I got kicked off it for a while after finding that the Bursar's office had a larger version of the same, and wasn't in use after hours, and writing a bad program - 'twas supposed to put 499,999 nulls in a file with a period at the end, and I used = instead of == (assignment instead of evaluation), and so consumed over 2500 1981-era disk blocks before things crashed.
After that, it was using MS-DOS 1.0 or C/PM on Dec Rainbows (still have one, still works, have both OSes - anyone wanna buy it?) until the Mac came along, and then Mac until Linux, and then corporate computing on Windows.
Home systems are all Linux.
Posted by: Matt H | October 25, 2007 2:01 PM
Dale, you may be the oldest, but my 7070 autocoder programming was in 1965. In 1966 we got a /360 mod 50 and wrote something called Hypertext for it (Hypertext was also, btw, a WYSIWYG text editor and had the ability to put numbers in rows and columns and automatically do arithmetic on them). I was on ARPANet in 1970, one of the developers of CP-67/CMS, and did DoD's first web site, for DARPA. Now I potter around with PHP and PostgreSQL on Ubuntu.
You had ones? We had to break the serifs off lower-case Ls and program with those.
Posted by: Bob Munck | October 25, 2007 3:12 PM
(b 1962)
I was probably the last person in my high school to actually use a slide rule for routine work instead of a calculator. Once I got to college, I found out that the campus bookstore had a whole box of extremely nice slide rules (nice bamboo log-log models, and the high-precision circular ones), along with a bunch of the el-cheapo ones, that they just couldn't sell. My roommates and I pretty much bought them all for a few bucks apiece. We took them to exams to use when batteries failed on our calculators (one roommate had that happen three times).
Aside from a Fortran class where I programmed a Univac 1100/80, and an HP-87 "scientific desktop computer" that I had to argue with when I started graduate school, I didn't really have much dealings with computers until my advisor plunked down an IBM PS-2 in 1990 and told me to learn to use it.
Posted by: tceisele | October 25, 2007 3:22 PM
(b. 1950)
Bought my first computer, an Apple II+ in the late 70's. I hadn't originally planned to buy an Apple, but I wanted to plot my data from my graduate studies, and I discovered that it was the only computer that I could afford that could easily put a high-resolution dot at an arbitrary place on the screen. My first program plotted my data and a theoretical curve, gave me a read out of the sum-of-squares, and routed any selected pair of parameters to the game paddles, which I could twiddle while watching the curve move on the screen to do a manual nonlinear regression. It worked remarkably well (a couple of years later, I wrote an automated curve fitting program in Apple Pascal).
Posted by: trrll | October 25, 2007 4:11 PM
Okay, I'll join the tour bus down memory lane.
In grade 12 (1981) our high school "computer class" got a bunch of brand new Apple II's (which were a huge step up from the old HP they had been using to play a text-based star-trek game). We learned how to program in Apple basic and figure out how to make pictures out of ascii text.
A couple of years later my "intro to programing" class at UBC was the first one to not have to use punch cards, though the Prof told us plenty of horror stories about them when he though we weren't being respectful enough: "If you kids don't shape up we'll put you back on the punchcards. Let me tell you about punchcards ..."
Posted by: dkary | October 25, 2007 5:11 PM
Monado writes:
"The California History Museum restored an old IBM 1401 in 2005. Speaking of old nerds, they even got Gene Amdahl involved."
(b 1946, not the oldest here, thank goodness)
Close, and in the right spirit!
That's actually the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California.
(corner of Rt 101 & Shoreline, used to be Silicon Graphics Bldg 20).
http://www.computerhistory.org/
It's open for walk-ins W-Fr-Sun 1-4PM, and Sat 11A-5PM; if you have a group, call up beforehand and you get a docent to give you a tour of Visible Storage, which has a lots of good computers, but only modest signs, i.e., it's not a yet a full-bore museum-class setup with audiovisuals, etc, although we do have one exhibit (Computer Chess) of that caliber. We're working on a big professional-grade timeline (thanks Bill & Melinda), but that won't open for a few years.
There's still lots to see already, in teh largest collection of such in the world, including:
- an Enigma,
- a piece of the Eniac,
- the Johnniac (an illustration of open-source ... from 1953, for those who think the concept is recent)
- working IBM 1620 and PDP-1 ("spacewar"), 1401 still being worked on (and Gene had nothing to do with that)
- Gene's first computer, the WISC, replete with bullet holes, whose story my wife got from him when she first took him over there
- the Niemen-Marcus Kitchen Computer,
- an early ARPANET IMP
- a piece of the Illiac IV (which is what Gene invented "Amdahl's Law" for)
- the first Google server rack,
- lots of Crays + plumbing
- Gordon Bell's collection of DEC minicomputers
- and much more
- Next year, we'll have a working Babbage Engine on loan, courtesy Nathan Myhrvold ... and that goes *way* back.
-Disclosure: I'm a Trustee.
Posted by: John Mashey | October 25, 2007 7:38 PM
The first REAL Machine I got to use was an RCA 110A machine that was acquired by the Indiana University of Pa (not the one in Bloomington,Ill...) physics department. This was the launch control computer for the Saturn I's and we got it surplus. It was BIG, 4K of memory was about the size of a refrigerator with big frames of circuit cards. The machine had 32K of core, 4 tape drives, a paper tape read/punch, card reader and tty. It also had 2 26V 100 amp power supplies and was tunnel diode logic internally. It had literally thousands of digital and analog inputs plus each instruction was two Heinz Pickles long (we're near Pittsburgh) since each instruction clock was 57 minor clock cycles so it could multiple way DMA I/O.
We were trying to bring up the OS (by the way when you did programming on this box you dragged a Tek scope on a cart behind you to poke at the innards to see what it was doing). After much fruitless effort we finally determined that it was dying on indirect branch through a certain register. As a buddy and I walked home we mused on this and suddenly a light went off for both of us. Almost simultaneously we both started telling each other "What about that card rack with all the missing cards...". That turned out to be the problem none of this micro thingies you had to stuff in 26 cards (1/bit) to populate that register. We did and it WORKED !!. Later the machine went on to even greater triumphs like running FORTRAN. But this was the most exciting thing I got to do with it.
That machine was a great teaching aid, I mean you could see and touch the bits.
Posted by: Jim Schimpf | October 25, 2007 9:11 PM
b. 1948
I wrote my first program in Fortran in 1967 when I was a senior in high school. A friend helped me steal time on a Univac 1107. We went in on a Saturday and only one other guy was using the machine. His program was computing the optimum trajectory for the moon rocket. When his program crashed after an hour or so, we dropped my little stack of cards in the hopper and after a couple of tries my program ran!
As a coop a couple years later I worked on one of the same RCA 110A's in Jim Shimpf's post. I believe the one he used was the one removed from the Saturn I breadboard at MSFC in Huntsville.
I became a professional programmer and now write code to test memory controllers on new processor designs at AMD.
An Apple II Hayes Micromodem for which I wrote the firmware is in the Computer History Museum.
Posted by: Don Hyde | October 25, 2007 11:21 PM
My first computer was a Mac 128, the first Mac, which I ordered in February of 1984, after a 15-minute test run at the local Apple store. It was $2500 without a printer or any kind of external drive. I bought and read every book I could find and spent many hours learning what was available. By the summer of '85 I was using Microsoft File to run a database for a local theatre group to print labels for their patrons' mailout every six weeks. It took 14 hours to update the database and print out the 4000 labels on a slow Apple Imagewriter printer.
I was working at a computer store in August of '85 when we got a preview of Adobe (Aldus at the time) PageMaker v0.9 and used it on MacPluses with Apple LaserWriters. We networked Pluses to a LaserWriter which was using PostScript and Apple's proprietary networking technology called LocalTalk. The Macs required about 1 minute to network, using phone wire and small cheap connectors . This was the birth of "desktop publishing". A MacPlus/LaserWriter cost about seven or eight grand in '85, but you could do almost everything a print shop could do (in black and white; color came later) and do it on an office desk, using PostScript fonts and a user interface which required no programming and simple training. The print shops at the time were very disdainful but were buying systems from us in a few months in order to stay in business. Large companies set up their own design departments for all of their printed materials, saving time and money.
Posted by: Gray Lensman | October 26, 2007 12:47 PM
My first computer was in the form of, um, "borrowed" computer time at college. I wasn't taking any computer classes, but someone noted that all the passwords on the paper terminals were initialized to "A" so I made up a user name and made an account. Using Call/OS I could bypass Hollerith cards for using the IBM 360 upstairs from the lab. I did mostly line-printer art, with special JCL to specify thicker paper and a new ribbon for my opuses. The sysops were noticeably ticked off if I had my JCL wrong and made 20 copies of errors messages, all nice and dark on thick paper.
I was eventually caught, and went legit when a kindly professor gave me an account.
Later I bought a green Vector Graphics S-100 machine and ran a BBS in Denver. Big 56K of memory. Then I had an Amiga.
And on and on..... my garage is filled with hulks of obsolete computers now.
Posted by: grafixguy | October 26, 2007 12:49 PM
I get to be the first to mention the Tandy Color Computer II, huh? I was born in 1981, and that was my first computer. I believe it had 16K extended memory and hooked to the TV for a display. Once for a gift, my dad got me a 16 color monitor. It's funny that we've now gone full circle from the computer and keyboard being one unit to separated keyboard/computers to the modern iMac which again combines hardware, usually the monitor, with the actual computer.
I have photos of myself around 10 years old (so that's 1991), holding a Color Basic programming guide. A nerd even then. I used to type out the Basic programs in the book and was really excited when I got a cassette drive for Christmas one year. You had to save the programs onto a cassette, then rewind or fast forward to that point on the cassette again when you wanted to load the programs again.
I then moved on to an amazing monochrome IBM 8080, then finally my first Windows PC, which was a badass 486 with 8 Mb of RAM and a 420 Mb hard drive. That thing cost $2,000 when I was 13, around 1994.
Posted by: george | October 26, 2007 12:51 PM
The first computer I worked on was an IBM 360-20. This was in 1967. The computer had 16K of memory, a card reader and card punch. An advanced feature of this was that there were 5 card stackers so cards could be sorted (sometimes inadvertently). It had a massive line printer that was noisy as hell and 4 tape drives. That’s it. No screen, not even a teletype machine (that came later). No disks. It had 4 rotary switches so we could make changes to the code on the fly (always a risky business if you forgot to make the changes to the source code as well).
Most programs were written in Assembler but it also had an RPG compiler. We looked down on this as too effete for real programmers.
We really had to number the source code punch cards (there were a few columns at the end for comments that were used) in case the deck was dropped. This was not an infrequent occurrence. Of course, we were often too rushed (or too lazy, I’ll admit) to number them. These were usually the decks that that hit the floor.
Posted by: Peter Tibbles | October 26, 2007 5:57 PM
b. 1961.
My husband had a Vic-20 in 1983. It was very cool. I think there was 8 K and 6 was taken up by Basic. We had a cassette drive, there was no floppy. Later (1985?) he bought an extremely rare Portable Commodore 64 and took it with him on his Navy Med cruise. It came in a case that gave it the look of a rugged old time portable oscilloscope. I think the built-in monitor was 5" by 7", and it had a floppy drive. And it was luggable! Sweet!
Posted by: Ann | October 27, 2007 10:38 PM