It's hard to believe that there was a time before high-speed Internet access, wi-fi, or even USB. Back then, the word "computer" meant a big beige desktop box with a bulky CRT monitor - not a sleek notebook - and being online means you're tying up the phone line to the consternation of your mom.
Here's what I remember from the good ol' days of computing:
IBM PC Compatible
The original IBM PC (Model 5150)
My first computer was an IBM PC, except it wasn't made by IBM - it was a Taiwanese clone, euphimistically called "IBM PC compatible" or an "IBM clone". In the 1980s, IBM marketed the PC (or personal computer) as a response to Apple's products - to grab market share, IBM decided on the open architecture and many manufacturers rushed their own computer brands to the market.
My old PC compatible computer looked similar to the original IBM PC (Model 5150) shown above. It had a green CRT monitor and ran MS-DOS the operating system. Sometimes when I turned the computer on by flipping the switch at the back, I'd get a mild electric shock.
The two black squares in the front are floppy disk drives (A: and B:, respectively) - if you ever wonder why your hard disk is called C:, that's because it comes after the two floppy drives. Even after the floppies became obsolete, the hard disk is still called C: out of convention.
By the way, IBM PC was developed in a very short time by a "skunkworks" project, called Project Chess, at IBM's Boca Raton Florida facility, led by Don Estridge and Larry Potter. The team of 12 engineers was authorized by the company to bypass the usual (and lengthy) IBM design process and get something to the market quickly. Within one year, the team managed to use off-the-shelf components to build the first IBM PC.
Sadly, once the IBM PC became a commercial success, the company put it under the usual IBM management, which decided to restrict the performance of the computer as not to "cannibalize" profits from higher-priced models. As a result, competitors selling PC clones quickly took over the market.
Mystery House
Mystery House is the first computer game I ever played - in fact, it's the only thing I remember about our Apple II computer.
In the game, you are an uninvited guest locked inside a Victorian mansion with no way out. Inside, there are seven guests and a note about a hidden treasure. While exploring the house, you start finding dead bodies ... and you have to discover the murderer before becoming the next victim.
Mystery House was created by Ken Williams and his wife Roberta. It was the first computer game ever to contain graphics. Before it, computer games depended entirely on text to tell their stories. Ken coded the game in a few nights and Roberta drew the graphics. The game caught on quickly and became the most popular game for the Apple II computer, selling over 10,000 copies. Shortly afterwards, the Williams founded a gaming company called On-Line Systems which would later become Sierra On-Line and then Sierra Entertainment.
Links: Play along at SydLexia
Macintosh Classic
I didn't own a Mac until grad school, when I was forced to buy one to write a thesis (blue iMac, btw) - but I did play mahjongg on my uncle's old Macintosh Classic (128K? I don't remember...) when I was growing up.
It was so different than my PC at the time: the Macintosh had a graphical interface and a mouse! I remember fondly the little mac icon that smiled when you boot up the computer.
Floppy Disk
Before hard disks became affordable, we had floppy disks. They were called floppy disks because, well, they were floppy... The 5.25 inch diskette could hold - get this - 360 KB. Twice that if you punched a hole on the left side of the disk and put it the drive in upside down. To protect the disk from being re-written, all you have to do was put a sticker over the notch and the disk drive wouldn't write on it.
When the 3.5 inch disk came out, we all thought that it was so cool that you could store 1.44 MB worth of files on the things. So much space, what would we do with it all?
LOGO
Ah, Logo - now that was a fun computer programming language!
Logo was the first programming language I've ever learned, and to this day, the only one I like and probably the only one I was ever proficient at. Well, at least in making simple shapes :)
The language is all about the turtle, an on-screen cursor that you use to draw simple line graphics. You can tell the turtle to go forward 100 units, then turn left or right, and so forth.
Dot Matrix Printer
Ah, the screeching sound of a dot matrix printer! There's nothing like it ... One minute you're printing (noisily), and the next minute the darned paper got off the reel and suddenly you're printing at an angle ... before the stupid printer jammed. But if everything worked out, then there's nothing as satisfying as ripping the little strips of "holey" paper on the sides.
Never heard a dot matrix print before? Count your blessings, but if you're curious, here's a YouTube clip:
If you remember dot matrix printer, you probably remember creating "Happy Birthday" or some other silly banners with this iconic software that had since gone the way of dinosaurs: Broderbund's Print Shop.
Dot matrix printers are actually still around - they're now called "impact" printers, and, surprisingly, are more expensive than ever!
Modem
Ever heard a modem "handshake"? No? It's just like a fax machine. My first modem was a 2400 baud (240 characters per second!), and over the years I upgraded to 9600-baud, then to 14.4K, then 28.8K and so on. With every upgrade, I felt that the speed improvement was incredible!
How fast is a 9600 baud modem? Consider this: after 1 minute of downloading at 9600 baud, you'll get 72 KB. A cable modem can download that in less than a second.
With modem comes connectivity, which brings us to to our next item:
Bulletin Board System (BBS)
Remember the Buggles' song "Video Killed the Radio Star"? Well, Bulletin Board System was the Radio Star, and Internet was the Video. For all of you who are too young to remember BBSes, they are computer systems that you dial in (with a phone line, and yes, you get the phone bill at the end of the month if it's not a local call) to connect. Once you've connected to a BBS, you can do things like post messages, upload and download software.
BBSes often have highly detailed ASCII art - some are black and white, but others are in full color, like this one below:
Image: Carsten Cumbrowski aka Roy/SAC
This one is for an elite board (which traded in warez or pirated softwares) with two nodes (2 phone lines) run on two Intel 80486 or simply "486" computers with 8 MB of RAM and a (then unbelievably huge) storage of 1 GB. And no, I wasn't cool enough to be invited into an elite board ...
See Carsten's website roysac.com for an amazing collection of ASCII art.
Oh, and this invariably happened at least once to those who have dialed into a BBS: your mom picked up the phone while you're online and thus disconnected you just seconds away from when the file was supposed to finish downloading!
Prodigy
Before the web, there were Prodigy and CompuServe. They were premium online services, much like a proto-Internet, except they provide proprietary content (and were both heavily censored - more on that later). Of the two, I subscribed to Prodigy, which was more kid-friendly (and cheaper - CompuServe charged by the minute!).
I remember fondly perusing their message boards, which were very popular at the time (what was I doing? Looking up NES cheat codes, actually!). I cancelled the service because of heavy-handed censors who admonished me for having the word "damn" in one of my posts. That was enough to put me on their watch list and I got harrassed for innocent words like "cockroach." When Prodigy went out of business because of the Internet, I wasn't sad.
Doom
Doom took the computer gaming world by a storm in 1993: It wasn't the first game in the FPS (or first person shooter) genre, but it was unique that id Software, the creator of the game, marketed it by ... giving it away! Doom was distributed as a shareware that you could download and play for free (once you're hooked, you have to pay for subsequent versions).
Doom was so popular that during lunch times, computer networks in university campuses sometime grind to a halt as people log on to play the game!
CompUSA
CompUSA store in Santa Clara, California. Photo: Coolcaesar [wikipedia]
You guys probably remember it as the retail chain that went out of business a year ago, but I first remember them first as Soft Warehouse. I even bought a 486 "Compudyne" computer (their house-brand) for college!
In an effort to restructure or rebrand or whatever, the company changed its name to CompUSA but forgot to change their horrible customer service ... Their service was so bad that ultimately the once largest chain of computer superstores in the world went out of business.
NCSA Mosaic
Before the Internet Explorer, and Firefox browsers, there was the NCSA Mosaic. It was the first graphical web browser (which was an improvement over the text-only Gopher and telnet protocols).
Mosaic was designed by Marc Andreessen (then an undergraduate) and Eric Bina. Even though you may not be familiar with this browser, you're viewing this webpage on a browser that is its legacy.
We haven't talked about many things - Amiga, MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons), IRC (Internet Relay Chat), and countless other topics. And obviously, your trip down computing memory lane may be different than mine (and if you're young enough, none of these things above - perhaps with the exception of CompUSA - are familiar). So, tell us what you remember - share your computing memory lane!
Although most things on that list are long since obsolete, there is still a thriving MUD community online.
Anyone looking for a richer and more imaginative gameplaying experience than the likes of World of Warcraft, I'd advise you to check out http://www.mudconnector.com and the current top mud www.3k.org (my personal favourite).
Man we thought we were living in the FUTURE!
My mom used to bring home her 80lb portable computer and set the phone receiver on the computer hook to download the latest code every night and print it out on our dot matrix. I'm still astounded that our family slept so well during those years.
And Prodigy! Oh my god! I recently downloaded MadMaze. Then there were the NOVA "specials" on there. Man, I loved Prodigy.
My first job after school was designing dialog boxes in Visual C++ 2, and later in 4.2, and the computer ran Windows 3.51 with 4 MB RAM and 180 MB hard disk. When they upgraded my RAM from 4 to 16, I sort of threw a party, just for myself and a buddy :).
Everything has improved by about 10,000% in speed and durability. The only thing that hasn't changed must since the early 1990 is Unix/Linx.
I had an Amiga 500, then a 1200. I paid a small fortune (out of my allowance) for a 20 MB (yes, megabyte) harddisk and that was a cleap clone to start with. I've still got it and I've made an image of the WorkBench that runs on an emulator on my PC now. I still remember modems quite well: we had an extra telephone line installed and my uncle paid for that in exchange for me being his companies webmaster. I'd made the most Godawful website for his company: one very long page with job openings. Yes, I was one of the worlds first Webmasters, when that still meant something ;-)
Mind you, I kinda stopped learning about new stuff somewhere around the introduction of stylesheets and its gotten to the point I'm testing out a Mac these days, because I can't be bothered trying to get stuff to work. And I'm... 34.
I was the only one of my friends to have such 'internet access' - which meant that every one thought I was weird and didnt understand chatting via the 'instant messgenger' type program. I remember being able to change my screen name every other day (or everyday if I chose) because there were so few users it didnt really matter. What amazes me is that I did all this at around 11 or 12, and now I wouldnt even be able to do anything I thought was fun (joining chats with older users, randomly searching profiles and having mine searchable) with all the age restrictions. I still talk to one friend I met on Prodigy; we met by one of us randomly searching profiles for other users that lived in our area and
were similar age, we then moved to talking via AIM and now we usually communicate via Facebook!
Ah, the good old times...
http://www.compusa.com/
Uh.... the 3.5" floppies in the original 128k Macs held >400k<, not 1.4mb. The OS, a small application like Write or Paint and a few documents would fit on them, but usually a LOT of disk-swapping was involved.
And yes, CompUSA has returned. TigerDirect from Miami has bought the name and are re-opening stores under the CompUSA name. They just opened one in West Palm Beach but I haven't been able to get to it yet....
The best thing about computer classes in elementary school, though, was playing Oregon Trail on the Apples after you finished your typing lessons.
It was a bigger job than you might think. Each of the 3 DEC PDP-1170's was the size of 5 soda machines, cost over $1 million, and had an ENTIRE MEG of RAM!
The Hard Drives were the size of washing machines, and took a stack of seven 14" discs in a tiered platter. The drives held 750 Meg.
We ran 4 provinces worth of retailer terminals off this system...which is probably the source of my frustration with bloated code. If we could do so much with so little, why do modern programs have to be so huge?
My first computer was a Sinclair ZX-81 with 1K of memory! I eventually upgraded to a Commodore Vic-20, and then a Commodore 64. Programs were saved on cassette tape before Commodore came out with a disk drive. My first modem was 300 baud; it seemed as if I could almost type as fast as the modem could download. The first commecial online service I was on was Quantum Link, which was strictly for Commodore computers. I never had as much fun with an online service as I did with Quantum Link. When I finally moved up to a PC, it had a whopping 640K of memory, and a 5MB hard drive.
(a) give away and see if people will pay
or
(b) give away the first level and see if people will buy the others.
Wolfenstein is an obvious example since it was also by id.
Mystery house was certainly not the first computer game to contain graphics. It was the first text adventure to do so though.
In one place I worked we used a computer the size of a Honda Civic for testing microwave oven controller boards. The "drives" on that thing were as big as a jumbo pizza at Godfather's. Held about 100MB if I remember correctly. Or was it 10MB.
The first true PC I bought was an ancient PC XT. The hard drive had a problem where it wouldn't spin up when you first powered it on; a little percussive prompting (a whack to the side) would usually get it going. The first Mac I bought for home use was a second (or third) hand SE. It had 2MB RAM in it and a 20MB HD. I ran QuarkXPress on that thing, doing multi-page color layouts for commercial printing. Yes, multi-page color on a 9" grayscale monitor. No wonder my eyes are the way they are.
Before those two I had an Amstrad Word Processor -- basically an all-in-one computer with a green-on-black monitor, a floppy drive and a dot matrix printer. Ran some variant of C+ (I think) and used a weird proprietary floppy disk design. It got me through college though. And before that I had an Atari 2600 (I think); attempted some programming on it, but because I couldn't afford the floppy option, I used a cassette tape for data storage instead. Slow, slow, slow, then wait, wait, wait, then slow...
Another random memory... We had a Mac LCII, and I found a stellar deal to max out the RAM on that thing for $65. It had 4MB, and I added another 8MB (even though it'd only recognize 10). Just the other day I bought a 1GB stick of RAM for way less than that. One of the first things I had to do in my first tech support job in a print house was buy a replacement drive for a Mac Quadra 950. That 1GB SCSI drive cost well over $1,000.
Oh, also, I have an old Mac clone that I was able to rescue before my old employer sent it to the recyclers. It's a 68000 dash 30fx, basically a hot-rodded IIfx in a large case. That thing, when purchased new with a 19" CRT, a scanner and interface card and 96MB RAM cost over $40,000.
Cheaper, faster, more compact.
Pros: Easy to use, print clear readeable letters everytime without any mess, works with ink ribbon that almost never runs out of ink, cannot be destroyed
Cons: Takes a long time to print ( About 10 - 15 min for a page full of text ), can't print colors, can't details like facial detail very well, noisy
I got a Epson Stylus photo RX620 now and i'm afraid to use it because it drinks ink... litteraly... like some sort of printer who came back from a trip through the desert or something.
I wished I had kept an article that I read once, in Time magazine that said that with T1 speeds, the internet had reached its limit!
Thanks for the post!
THANK YOU for compiling this beautiful post!
Oh, and I was using some very very old dot matrix printer paper I'd found in my classroom the other day to rip up for ballots in a classroom vote. The high school students were confused that the edges had to be ripped off!
10 run
20 something
30 repeat
40 etc
programming language, I could never do anything special with it as a youngster but my brother managed to program a pretty addictive simple racing game using huge pixel blocks.. figures he makes money with computers now actually.
!
Later, I used paper tape to record and enter programs.
The Commodore 64 with its cassette drive was a HUGE advance in technology!
By time I was 17 I went on to further education in one of the few schools that had decent computer technology. They had 4 terminals connected to a mainframe a few miles away via modem, it was some sort of business partnership with a few local schools. The modem was basically a device that the old fashioned telephone handles had to plug into.
In the computer room there were paper tape and punched card readers/writers for storage and programing.
The game we played growing up was Mask of the Sun. And there was no way to save Raoul, which was very frustrating.
I also had these Choose Your Own Adventure-type books that required you to write in BASIC-provided programs to get clues. Neat.
Mask of the Sun:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/apple2/mask-of-the-sun
I tried to locate these books I was talking about, but couldn't find them online. Did I make this up in my head?
My favorite text-only game was Ballyhoo:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballyhoo_(computer_game)
CUL
PS My lousy memory just stirred up something else.
Must have been related to the Vic-20. You could buy huge soft back books that had a TON of Commodore Basic
programs. Then you could spend hours and hours hand typing all this code into the computer and then saving it to a cassette. Used to take me AGES for one lousy program. Invariably they wouldn't work because all it
took was one wrong character and you were up the creek until you then went back and checked it out letter by letter which took even longer! The "good old days" of computing. GGGGGGGGGGG
Now I have MS Vista Ultimate (they forgot to add "piece of crap") which is about the most disgusting OS I've ever tried to use. This is called "progress"!
Wow. I spent many days and nights playing that.
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...
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.
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.
How about Lantastic?
Does anyone remember Commander Keen?
Wildnet Echo Mail ring any bells?
The first computer I worked on was an Apple IIE.
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
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
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......
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.
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...
(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!
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
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...