Comments on: Take a Stroll Down Computing Memory Lane

By: KellyK-S

KellyK-S — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 07:12:19 +0000

What a great story! So many memories came up for me reading this article. I learned to use computers in the mid-1980s, on an IBM similar to the one pictured at the top. The first thing I had to learn was to type! I played a sort of video/typing tutor program that was similar to an old Atari game. I would sit at the computer for hours playing that so I would learn how to type properly.

It was many years later when I finally enrolled in college, and majored in Automated Office Management. The primary operating system then was DOS 6, and all of the software was made for DOS. Back then, you could only run one application at a time - running multiple applications was unheard of, and when Windows 95 came out, I couldn't believe someone could run more than one app at a time.

Needless to say, as far as Windows was concerned, I felt it was making computers way too easy for the common person to use. I believed the mystery should be preserved, and keep computers complicated using command line only. I would exit Windows and use DOS anytime I could.

I also had a Commodore 64 as a kid, and had one of the first Pong games. What fun!

I remember seeing the first 66MHz computers, thinking they were blazing fast with 14.4 modems and 32MB of RAM.

Life was grand when technology was brand new...

By: Tom_Arnold

Tom_Arnold — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 01:10:02 +0000

NCSA Mosaic was not the first graphical web browser. That honor goes to WorldWideWeb which was created a good two years earlier.

By: nulink

nulink — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 13:30:37 +0000

I was scouring the net to find infomation about my compudyne 486. Your site answered an important question about this computer as I didn't know that it was a 'house brand' for Compustore. You bring back memories of my first computers, and learning to use them. Thanks for making the effort to put down your thoughts

By: Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Carsten aka Roy/SAC — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 23:07:42 +0000

Nice post and thanks for the mention of my "nostalgic" aerhm... historic & extinct art preserving website .

Hey, you picked my (personal) favorite ANSI from all the hundreds that are available on my site.. sweet!

I extended the content of my website a lot and its worth paying another visit. Some of the new highlights..

http://www.roysac.com/bbs.asp
http://www.roysac.com/learn
http://www.roysac.com/asciinudes

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

By: RioRico

RioRico — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 19:46:34 +0000

I think I started with a cheap EduComp(?) plastic-cam non-electric 'computer' around 1977. Then in 1980-81 I built a Heathkit H8-H19 system - 1 MHz 8080 processor, 16Kb RAM (quickly upped to 80Kb), an octal (base-8) keypad, a 300 baud modem. And three 91k 5.25" floppy drives for US$1200, for total storage of 273k, just enough for WordMaster and the MS Cobol-80 compiler with CP/M 1.4. (My wife, with no previous soldering-circuitboarding experience, successfully built the HeathKit H14 printer. But she was already a professional programmer, proficient with wire-programmed circuit cards and punchcard coding, on mainframes where data-drum rotational latency needed to be considered in I/O timings.) I quickly moved up to a Heath-Zenith HZ90 system (twin 4 MHz Z80 processors, MP/M multitasking, twin 360k floppy drives) and a 1200-baud! modem, blazing fast! Then I went hogwild and got a Godbout-Compupro S100 box with an 8 Mhz Z80, 258kb RAM, twin 1200kb 8" super-floppy drives, and even a 5Mb hard disk. Ooh, expensive... Then some other CPM/MPM systems, including the nifty little PMC MicroMate, and a couple workhorse Televideo semi-portables. And Sinclair ZX80s and ZX81s, for which I commercially wrote financial software. And an Atari 800, a TI99a, a PET-20(?), And various other boxes and terminals, details of which I've forgotten. Networking and interoperability? Rudimentary at best. And then I started on PC clones and had to leave all that old stuff behind, except some ANSI terminals as remotes. I tried an original Mac and was completely unimpressed. It's been downhill ever since. Now I stick to WinTel laptops, so I'm not tempted to constantly upgrade minor hardware and rewrite BIOS's and tweak interfaces. Actually accomplishing stuff - imagine that!

By: Tiny Dancer

Tiny Dancer — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:30:15 +0000

About 12 years ago my autistic son showed a talent for working on his school's Commodore 64, so his father decided to buy us a PC and pay for "Windows lessons" for me. Before that, my last encounter with computers was in high school in Data Processing class. All I remember is filling in boxes on data cards with a pencil, feeding them into a HUGE machine that literally took up a whole room, and waiting breathlessly as it spit out the results. Magic, it was. Never guessed all these years later I'd be an award-winning webmistress! An awfully old webmistress, apparently, but still.

By: ajk

ajk — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 07:34:19 +0000

my first computer was a ABC 80 Luxor Z80 with 16K RAM 1977, it cost in those days the equivalent of 2000 US. I spent lot of time hacking in listings in BASIC and learned programming that way. Then around 1986 I got a PC taiwanese clone with no hard drive but with a 5"1/4 floppy drive. Later that year I got a discarded 10Mb harddrive from Ericsson - yes they did PC's back then) but it was damaged and had only 7MB usuable bytes, but for me that was enormous! Remember borland turbo basic/ turbo pascal, now that was real compilers!

By: ajk

ajk — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 07:26:27 +0000

what set aside doom to the other fps programs was that it was the first fps shareware that allowed for network playing - that was made it so fun.

By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 11:53:12 +0000

Your screen grab of 'Doom' looks more like Duke Nuke'em... Doom was more like Wolfenstein, more pixelly. That's Duke in the little picture at bottom...he'd shift his eyes back and forth. My first machine... RatShak Model 1. Cassette... 16K RAM. Boy I had fun hacking that thing... with help from TrashUG. First job had a Data General Nova 1600... boot using front panel switches to load paper tape, then that loader loaded the 9-track mag tape application (radio telescope, UTRAO). Haven't seen Crystal Cavern mentioned... xyzzy and all that. "You are in a maze of twisty passages, all different"... my first text adventure. I think I first played it on a PDP11. Still got the Model1, as well as a PCsLimited clone with Windows 2.0. HS science project used relays to count to 7 in binary... got third place (!) out of only three competitors at regional. Bet that's changed...

By: Mikko

Mikko — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 13:03:28 +0000

Memories, eh.. I joined the PC bandwagon in 1989 with 386sx machine made by Osborne. Exact model was MiStation16, it was pizza box -styled and came with whopping 40Mb hard disk. 16 MHz and 4Mb of ram were amazing improvement against my (still trustworthy) C64. It had 3,5" floppy drive, which accepted both 720kb and 1,44Mb disks. Later on, my storage capacities upgraded due bearing failure up to 80Mb. There was also a program called 2Format, which allowed to store 2Mb of data to a single 3,5" floppy. That was great!

I did my first complete system install was MS-Dos 6.22 + Win 3.11 at age of seven after I messed thigs up with DoubleSpace. Boy, my father was angry because of that and equally surprised when I fixed it all by myself. 4Dos rocked my world of MS-Dos and I've missed it since Win95 came along. Until recently, of course: Linux fixed my aching.

Cool games from that era were (but not limited to): Commander Keen series, Wolfenstein 3D, Street Rod 1&2, Ducktales, One Must Fall 2047 and F1 GP. I also recall lots of Autodesk Animator & Triton FastTracker usage.

BBS:es surely were the thing and we ran our own BBS with my friend too. Our bbs was replicated on two different machines and depending from my or my friend's parents, we switched the location of our 9600 baud modem between our houses.

I blame my current level of geekism to that 386 and my father. Thank you both. Since our next computer was 1st gen Pentium, I had to learn to code and entertain myself with an aging system. Ultimate consequence of that is my current job coding with Delphi and C.

By: cosmic

cosmic — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 02:33:05 +0000

I remember doing punch cards in college, as mine was one of the early unis to have an actual on-campus "computing center". Learning Fortran and watfor, what a hoot. 5 years or so later, I was using BASIC at work and wrote one of the early quality control cusum charting programs applications on some kind of HP machine, with RPN, of course. We bought an Apple IIc for home use, although I can't remember why.

My first IBM really was an IBM - IBM DX2. As I recall it cost nearly as much as my first new car ~$4K . 15 Megahertz, with a push button "turbo" to run at about 25 MHz!! About as much memory as a cheap cell phone.

In the early 1980's I got hooked up at work - which utilized a mainframe and a field of IBM dumb terminals. My job required access from home, so I had a 70 pound dumb terminal (372 ??) on my bedroom floor. Acoustic phone coupler at 300 baud. I could literally watch each letter or number form on the screen.

Now I complain because my work system takes 30 seconds to boot up, and I have a 1 Tbyte HD at home.

I guess I've dated myself clearly enough......

By: Dudeldi

Dudeldi — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 19:40:23 +0000

My father was a teacher for business calculation. Before computer time (EARLY 70s), I had a lot of fun with a mechanical calculator. I still own it and I am sure that my understanding of algorithms origins from those number wheels turning in front of your eyes if you move the crank. If you wanted to do a division, you had to start from the highest number, turning the divider wheel backwards, substracting the divisor from the dividend once every turn, until a bell rang to tell you that the result was below zero. Then you turned it back one turn to bring it back into the positive, shifted to the next decimal number and so on... When he bought his first Sharp calculator, we all thought this would be sufficient for all calculations a person could possibly need to make in a whole life: sinus, cosinus, logarithms, all by the press of one button and without having to memorize all those many steps for calculating it just by using "+" and "-" in endless combinations...

By: NiteOwl

NiteOwl — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 09:45:07 +0000

Step 1 - Atari PC with a plastic "soft" keyboard overlay. Step 2 - Radio Shack Color Computer (COCO) with a blinding 8 bit speed. BBS access with a 56k modem telephone. I loved all the old games (some with no graphics). Saving and loading programs was done on a cassette tape recorder. Then came the "advanced" soft floppy disks with a clunky so-called hard drive controller. Step 3 - RS 286 and learning RS DOS and basic programming. Step 4 - upgrade to a 486 machine, 60 mb internal HD(wow!). The biggest thrill then was MS DOS, learning it from scratch, writing your own menus and a sort of operating system for your own machine. Leisure Suit Larry, how I miss you. Todays "Instant Messaging" was begun way back in the beginning with the BBS access, just type away and switch your modem, send/recieve. You could even have a mailbox, no spam, no viruses, no advertising. Along came Bill Gates with his Windows, hello commercialism, say good bye to the good old days. Wish I kept my COCO 3 and all the floppy disk games. Oh yeah, most were pirated (early warez don't ya know)... Thanks for the memories...NiteOwl

By: Shish

Shish — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:28:11 +0000

I was in a large singles group on Prodigy. We used to hold weekend parties in hotels where two hundred or more would show up, and one time Prodigy sent down its own representatives with a bunch of freebies. But then they started charging by the hour... We painstakingly moved the whole group to BBS, FidoNet. It was difficult for the less technical members and we lost a lot, but fortunately it wasn't long before we had Internet and IRC. The Prodigy screen above brought back some, er, interesting memories.

By: vmos

vmos — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 22:43:32 +0000

8-bits FTW!

READ ERROR B
Please rewind tape

also, the first computer game with graphics was the first computer game*, a thing called "space war" made wayyyyyy back in the sixties

* with the exception of computers playing chess and draughts

By: Thomas

Thomas — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:44:23 +0000

I am sad for you.

By: Jimbo

Jimbo — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:40:24 +0000

A standard modem rate is 56K even in Pennsylvania. You might want to try another service provider.

By: Pandu das

Pandu das — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:21:31 +0000

Where I live in central Pennsylvania, broadband Isn't available yet, and the fastest dialup connection we can get is 28.8

By: SparkS

SparkS — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:31:43 +0000

Moon: Was that by any chance a MicroProse game?
or maybe SS!? MP was my all time favorite simulation
company. I just tried to get Silent Service II to run on this POS Vista. No luck. Now I'm trying on an XP Pro system.

Eric: I vaguely remember that but that's about all. I suffer badly from CRS* disease.

Regards

* Can't Remember Squat

By: Kelly

Kelly — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 04:35:12 +0000

the only thing that my first computer was capable of was running a Never Ending Story themed coloring book.

By: James Schend

James Schend — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 04:16:26 +0000

Great article, but Doom wasn't the first Shareware game (if nothing else, id's first earlier game Wolfenstein 3D was shareware and incredibly popular, but there were many shareware games before then also.) And Mystery House is far from the first computer game with graphics... maybe the first Apple ][ game with graphics at best.

By: Tavit

Tavit — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 01:24:26 +0000

What a great article! My first computer was an Apple II+ (I was working at Wang Laboratories back then as a COBOL programmer). When I finally upgraded to the 286 I was ftp'ing files (games)from funnet.fi. To download files I used Archie, Veronica or Jughead (yes, they ftp'ing software). Since there was no web, you didn't know what you were getting (you had to go by the file names)until you ran the downloded files. Yep... so much has changed. And it's been a real blast to have been along for the ride.

By: Eric Haas

Eric Haas — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 01:23:48 +0000

SparkS, Quantum Link had games you could play. They had an online casino (no real money involved, just some kind of tokens), and an MMORPG of sorts. I forget what it was called, but you could wander around a virtual world, interact with other players, and buy and trade things including different heads for your avatar! You could buy a shovel and bury things, or dig up stuff other people buried. No leveling or combat, though.

By: Mattie

Mattie — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 22:19:37 +0000

I would've put InaComp as the computer store and not CompUSA, but each his own.

The first computer I worked on was an Apple IIE.

By: Fran

Fran — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:51:28 +0000

Wow. How nostalgic. Thanks. I remember all of this and I also had Prodigy. But how old does it make me to admit that the first computer I worked on (a shared one at my first job after college) used 8 by 8 floppy disks? There were 2 slots for these ginormous floppies on the side of the computer monitor. Come to think of it I think the monitor, hard drive, and keyboard were all one machine....

By: Jimbo

Jimbo — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:45:16 +0000

Anyone remember when you had to be Novell certified?
How about Lantastic?

Does anyone remember Commander Keen?

Wildnet Echo Mail ring any bells?

By: Woogie

Woogie — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:42:26 +0000

FIDONET! Man I loved the BBS days. Downloading my messages for that day. Good times. I still remember being in absolute awe when I wrote to someone in America and they WROTE BACK! Albeit it took about a week for my message to get their and their reply to make it back to me.

I really miss the BBS days. The net in all it's shiny glory just doesn't hold a candle to the excitement of those days. Remember calling up a BBS in Ireland to get the "Jesus on E's" demo on my Amiga.

Those truly were great days.

By: heather

heather — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 19:46:50 +0000

Aaah, this takes me back. One thing though: you forgot Oregon Trail! That game was my grade school introduction to computer games.
The sad thing is, that in another 10-20 years, things like the ipod, laptops, land lines, and other now-modern technology might end up on this same kind of list.

By: Homer J. Simpson

Homer J. Simpson — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 19:22:13 +0000

I want a t-shirt with that "Mystery House" picture

By: Cate

Cate — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 19:19:14 +0000

The first PC I bought was from PCs Limited -- the precursor to Dell (I think Michael Dell ran it out of his dorm room). I sprang for the full 640k of RAM (512 was standard) and opted for EGA graphics. So cool.

I also remember building a heathkit computer with my dad -- he sprang for 4k of RAM vs. the standard 2k, and I think he paid hundreds of dollars for the privilege. No monitor -- it had LEDs and you programmed it with switches.

Then again, I also remember when calculators cost hundreds of dollars. Three years later they were a pop tart prize.

Good times back then, when the dinosaurs still roamed the earth...