In view of the charming thread that has resulted from Legal Eagle’s discussion of earliest political memories, let’s open a computer-related thread.
Prolly anybody born from about the mid-70s onwards had some encounter with computers during their childhood or adolescent years. But mebbe some of our more senior readers were “fortunate” enough to encounter some kind of punch-card contraption in a gentler era?
I’ll go first: The P&C at our primary school managed to scrape together some funds to buy a batch of Microbee green-screen computers for our school. For one hour a week, we got to have a go.
Apart from the elementary arithmetic, spelling and typing-tutor programs, the one that us kids found most immersive was a ‘desert island’ game where you had to move your character (I think it was an ‘@’ symbol) around to forage for survival necessities; food, water and shelter. At some randomly determined point between days 30 and 40, a rescue ship arrived, if you lasted that long.
But thinking back, the program that now seems most impressive was a ‘Lemonade Stand’ simulator, perfectly pitched at 7-9 year olds. You had to purchase the ingredients (lemons, sugar, ice), combine them in a palatable proportion and also manage to have enough of each on hand to make a batch, which required some cash-flow and stock management. Then you had to set the price at a level high enough to make a profit, without causing a crash in sales.
So while those poor English teachers were expending their best efforts in all that “left-wing indoctrination”, the tech crowd were teaching us to be good little capitalists. How sweet!
Another well-to-do family in our neighbourhood actually owned what was probably one of the first ever IBM XT machines in a private home. It had a suite of green-screen games that included a space-shuttle CAD/CAM program (ooo, fun!), and a golf simulator (interesting that it wasn’t NASCAR or basketball…)
It’s remarkable how many class indicators were embedded in those early programs.
10 PRINT “MR MASTERS SMELLS”
20 GOTO 10
I loved ‘Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego’ which was actually quite educational. And there was some kind of Robin Hood game. If you typed a swear word in it, you had to then type “sorry” otherwise it wouldn’t let you move on.
My favourite computer memory, however, involves my sister playing battleships at the age of about 6 or 7. We didn’t get a home computer until I was in my late teens, but at one point Dad bought a work one home for a few weeks. When you lost this game, it would say something to the effect of, “Captain [X], your ships have been lost and now they have sunk with all hands” or something. My sister was shouting at the screen, “You in there! You just shut up! I hate you! Don’t say that! You just shut up!” I think she thought there was some person in there telling her she’d lost.
But yes, one day I want to write a post on how many computer games involve ‘Lemonade Stand’ like assumptions. My daughter has become obsessed with “Farmville” on my facebook. We have to check in to see whether our “crops” are ready to harvest or have died. It’s actually fascinating from a psychological point of view to see how different people organise their farms and to think about the philosophical underpinnings (work more, get more money etc).
Working for the then War Service Homes Dept; a computer was installed in the machine room to replace the ledger machines and most of the operators in the late 70s. Those were the days of punch cards-do not bend, spike or fold and the computer occupied the entire room and had to have its own air conditioner, dust filters and humidity control, unlike its human counterparts who froze in the frigid summer a/c and boiled in winter.
Borrowers who paid their monthly installments at the city office had to produce their unbent, unfolded etc to the rather eccentric cashier who was unimpressed with the new regime to put it mildly. He could be heard all over the 4th floor complaining bitterly to everyone’s amusement.
Word processors were introduced at the same time, halving the number of typists in the typing pool.
Needless to say, redundant typists and machinists weren’t too impressed with the new technology.
I had an Amstrad CPC 464 with a green screen and a tape recorder from about 1990 to 1994 (I was born in 82). Before that we had an MSX (Microsoft used to make hardware), another BASIC machine similar to an Amstrad or C64 that you plugged into the TV. It ran carts or tapes.
In 1978, I used to accompany my then boyfriend, carrying stacks of cards down to the University computer. We’d stand there about 10 minutes, then the whole thing would stop because he’d punched the wrong hole in to one of the cards, and he’d have to go back and do it all again.
In 1979, a friend of mine enthusiastically explained to me what PCs could do – exciting things like ‘cut and paste’ and ‘move’ – and I said, “I’ll have to get one of those”. He told me it would cost at least $15,000 (the cost of my first home, which admittedly was a ‘renovator’s delight’). I still wanted one.
In 1985ish, the school I was teaching at got a room full of Apples. I would take my English class there (thus countering the capitalistic influences cited in the article above), and stand in front of the class saying: “Press the button there to turn on the computer. Insert disk. When you see XXX, turn disk over. When YYY happens, remove disk and insert next disk.”
Everyone thought I was a computer genius (I could even get recalcitrant machines to work by removing the cover and wiggling the disk drives).
I had exactly the same level of knowledge (we used to compare notes) as a friend of mine who got a part time job supervising the computer room in a University department. He’s now in charge of the whole Uni’s system, I’m regarded as someone with limited computer know how!
Ah, techno-nostalgia…
Aside from my HP25C, my first programming experience would have been in Fortran IV on an ICL-1904 (probably some Pure Math assignment). Batch processing/Punched card/15″ Line Printer interface. We got 20min slots on the card punch machines, then had to wait hours in line to get on again. We all learnt to touch-type very quickly.
My first assembler experience would have been on the Fairchild F8, a beast I’m very glad to have never met again.
It all led to a life of sin of course.
“You have died of dysentery.”
I can remember what I think I had a C64 and spent hours typing out the programs found in magazines.
After 12 years in IT, things have moved so far. I can remember the excitement when V90 modems were released when working for an ISP. And how impressed we all were when in corporate land, the company I worked for then bought a 500GB SAN for 50k. And that was just around 2000.
I got to see a lot of PC’s n other kids rooms but somehow, I don’t know how, my family managed to scrap together enough money for a C64. I loved that machine and being quite impovrished used it daily over the next ten years.
I was pretty much a video games nut before that. Arcade games, Atari’s (I had a 2600) one well of friend had a Colecovision which was arcade perfect!
But I knew I had to get a C64 when I was invited to a mate’s place and he showed me Uridium. It was this silky smooth shoot-em up where you flew this ship (called the Manta but it remind me a bit of a smaller version of the Millenium Falcon) and you flew across the surface of this massive ship taking out parts of it while shhoting/avoiding other craft and bits sticking up from the craft.
And when you changed direction the ship didn’t just flick the other way. It performed a loop and half twist. OOnce you got good enough you could actually flip the craft on it’s side at full speed to squeeze through gaps.
Early 80′s PCs were great but the C64 was so far ahead of it’s time it seemed like black magic.
Fmark. You need to play this neat spoof of Oregon Trail.
Let’s Find El Dorado. Physics based remake of Oregon Trail
My first computer was a ZX81. My uncle in the UK sent it out to me in the early 80s. I was spellbound.
Sure, it only had 1kB of RAM and every program had to be typed in (and saved to tape), but I was happy. I was even fortunate enough to later get the 16kB RAM expansion pack. I could type in even longer programs then!
Slide rules rule, OK!
Wordperfect 5.1. Memorising the control keys was like memorising a series of bus timetables but it worked extremely well and had the superb editing control ‘show commands’ so that any glitches in the text could actually be seen. By the time it moved to a windows structure (Wordperfect 6. I think) it incorporated a capacity to analyse prose against a variety of other written standards including some official US public service standard. Extraordinary. The first time I used the function it compared my prose (unfavourably) to Dickens.
Like LE @ 2, my father brought a work one home during the school holidays when I was 11. I played Tetris so many times (“Play again, capitalist pig? Y/N”) that I suffered a nasty case of the Tetris effect.
I played Leisure Suit Larry as well that summer, which was also a favourite of my parents. I was first in the family to finish the game, and called my mother at work triumphantly to inform her (or, as it turned out, the random colleague who answered her phone) that I’d just had sex with the prostitute, remembered to take the condom off, stolen the Spanish Fly to get into the penthouse and lost my virginity to the lovely Eve.
Certainly remember mainframes, magnetic cards, magnetic tape – missed the punch card era though. I remember the first desktop computer arriving in the office. But my first home computer, and the first one my children used, was a 286. Load programs from disks, shipdisk to shut down, screen saver took minutes to load. Kids from around the neighbourhood used to watch it, fascinated. I wandered off to community college and learnt DOS, didn’t have windoze.
Now if you take my mac away, it is like having my right arm cut off.
Ahh memories! From Apple IIc (think tiny green screen) through Commodore Amiga (my favourite), various PCs and then back to Apple and their gorgeous iMac.
Who woulda thought in 1982 that technology would come so far, yet somehow be less exiting.
Yeah not as exciting either!
I started work for the Treasury in 1971 – we coded in ForDapp – a variation of Fortran and our desks had a coding sheet pad, pencils, an eraser, a sharpener and an ashtray. The computers (CDC 3300 and CDC3600) were in the basement. Data was stored on Magnetic Tape – the cost of disk storage was prohibitive.
My OMG moments were:
a) My first program compiling and running correctly on my first attempt – it was a very basic program;
b) the first time I saw a spreadsheet; and
c) the first time I connected to the internet.
A Microbee as my first PC – it used a portable cassette player/recorder as the storage device!! – Australian owned & made, Microbee succefully competed against the Comodore 64 there for a while in the early days of the publically accessable PC
Dad’s a teacher and before the purchase of our precious AT, he used to bring home a gigantic Apple with a Hercules green monochrome monitor. We whiled many an hour away playing Scavenger Hunt, making posters with Print Shop, and then a couple of years later Carmen Sandiego. Good times.
Peta @18 “CDC 3300 and CDC3600″ Classic series with discrete components, pre integrated circuits and all that jazz. Oh and who can forget core memory (32×32 bits), should have kept the spare board and framed it, would look great on the wall.
My first computing:
FORTRAN IV in 1971, manually punching holes in the punch cards (first year undergraduates were too lowly to warrant time at a punch card machine), and submitting it via a man in a white coat to the biggest computer in the southern hemisphere – an IBM 360 with an incredible 64K of core memory.
Funny! I had that same game on the microbee computers in my primary school (though we had an amber screen monitor, not green screen).
If you owned an apple in the 1980s, then you might really like this website – the website has a built in emulator, and you can play almost any game that was available on the apple in the 1980s. some of my earliest memories of playing some of these games:
http://www.virtualapple.org/
Anyone remember lemonade stand?
http://www.virtualapple.org/lemonadestanddisk.html
My first job was in the banking industry (1981).
I started in data entry (lovely green screens) and worked my way up into the computer room, which involved waiting until you were told and then pressing F9 or F10 or whatever.
I asked my supervisor at the time why it was we did these things – what we were doing etc – and he said, “no idea. Just do it.” It turned out to be because the main computing functions were happening in Melbourne; we just had our little bit to do our end. But after 4 1/2 years, I still never had explained to me just exactly what that was …
I think people in computing are considerably more computer savvy these days!
Where’s little brick-out on the Apple simulator?
I’ll see your core memory, and raise you the ICL-1904′s Drum Memory.
First computer I worked on: IBM System/360 Model 30, 32 KB memory, 2 x 7.25 MB disk drives, card reader, printer, console typewriter – a quarter of a million dollars worth. An interesting oddity: the microprogram for the processor was held on punched cards. A fixed binary add took 29 microseconds, a decimal add took 75, and a single precision floating point multiply, 312 microseconds.
Thanks for the link SCPritch, and Lode Runners there.
I could have done a computing unit at Monash in mid-60s but opted for something else instead. Some of my friends did the computing, all I remember is them having to punch holes in cards which were then fed into a mainframe to verify.
When working in the public service in the late 60s my area used to get daily print outs on continuous feed prints, numerous pages in large folders which we would have to go through and read to extract info we needed.
Not quite computing, but I recall an OMG moment in the late 80′s when one of our typists got an IBM typewriter with a memory tape which recorded work as she went along to allow for corrections. Wow!
I bought my family a Commodore 64 in the mid 80s. Drove me nuts typing programs in BASIC. One error in one line could stuff a whole program.
Had a few games on cassette which the kids enjoyed.
Ah, the good old days.
The first time I sat in front of an Apple Mac 128k changed my life.
“I bought my family a Commodore 64 in the mid 80s. Drove me nuts typing programs in BASIC. One error in one line could stuff a whole program.”
As opposed to which programming language?
The first experience I can remember was Mum having to work back late at BHP, and not being able to find a babysitter for the night. She plonked me on the mainframe terminal next to hers, and set me a bunch of innocuous tasks to complete. I was hooked, and it became a regular thing for us to do after that.
Not long after, her then boyfriend bought me a Learning Basic book for my birthday. I had the whole thing memorised, but the only times I could ever put it into practice were when she’d very occasionally bring an IBM Portable home – or, and this was the big one – on the Vic-20s (then later C-64s/Amigas) at Myer whenever we went shopping there on the weekend. I’d happily spend a couple of hours in front of them while mum was busy elsewhere in the store.
The first computer related thing I saw was that computer game where you pressed buttons and these little mouths used to run across the screen and eat each other up. That was in the UNE Bistro.
When I was doing post graduate research in Canberra in the mid eighties I used to stare at computers in shops and wonder what earthly use are those bloody things. It wasn’t until I finished my Masters and got a job as research officer with UNE SRC that I actually got close to the fearful monsters in the Neucleus editorial office. I used to watch the editor and resident computer geek with fascination but I wasn’t game to go near the bloody things. Even when I was editing the Orientation handbook for I think 1989, I wrote all the articles by hand and had some-one else type all the stuff up on the computer. This so-caled computer exoert, not the abovementioned geek, who was quite bloody brilliant, decided to “tidy up” the Neucleus computer. I can still remember the editor’s consternation and rage the weekend after my so called computer expert had been in there all weekend. Apparently hee’d deleted numerous programmes and generally stuffed things up.Fortunately, I wasn’t blamed for it. Anyway, eventually, at Jobclub a few years later (run according to the philosophy of Ayn Rand would you believe, but that’s another story) i got onto a computer cum electric typewriter except it wasn’t as fast as an electric typewriter. The fascination had begun. The next year I enrolled in a basic computing course at TAFE and learnt how to do word, spreadsheets, and use data bases. There was some incredibly complicated stuff on how to name files.
After that, I went up to uni and used the uni computers to re-write my Masters thesis in book form with the idea of getting it published. That done I was back at TAFE doing a course in Desk Top Publishing. This was a little difficult as I didn’t have a computer at home to practice on. (i was still using a typewriter and computers seemed terribly expensive.) Eventually I got an old Mac and started to do all my writing on that. It was a revelation. It wasn’t internet ready but, what use was the internet anyway. Obviously it resulted in people stealing your bank account and identity and I wasn’t going to go near it.
But all the people I knew were on it and were sending each other these things called e-mails. I was out of the information loop. A friend of mine who was on-line said To come round to her place. She’d teach me all about it. The first thing I discovered were the Old Bailey transcripts. I was hooked. I was around there at least once a week. To cut a long story short, I got a computer that could use the internet. Windows 95. Not a lap top but a computer, nevertheless. I used dial up for about a month then got myself connected.From that I graduated to the one I have now. Got onto Facebook, found you guys, learnt how to create my own blog. I’m registered on Twitter but I still haven’t worked out how to use it.
btw, people might be interested in this:
http://www.journal-online.co.uk/article/6273-amazon-kindle-academic-review
I was in year 8 in 1971 in Melbourne where Monash had devised a cut down Fortran called Minitran (there was a Miditran also). We got to devise programs one day, punch out the cards, and give them to the maths teacher. He (poor long-suffering but dedicated fellow) would drop them off to Monash and then collect them the day after. We would then receive print outs two days after programming. As I recall, not one of my programs ever ran!
I started in High School in the 60s, like DD @22 with literal punch cards, that is, we had to punch them with a hole punch. We’d send them off to be run and wait a week to discover there was a bug. For real work, my early experiences were like those of Mehitabel @5.
Not surprisingly, I bought the first Mac when it came out in 1984, and have owned nearly every model since.
Some memories:
* My sister and I harassing my mother when out shopping to give us 20c each to play the Frogger arcade game. I was about 7 at the time. Being angry at my sister for telling me I had to make the frog jump directly onto the car (instead of avoiding the cars!)
* Space Armarda on the Intellivision console, circa 1983
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellivision
* Being 8 years old and laughing at my dad for continually trying to change the channel on the family’s first VCR, but always accidently hitting the off/on button instead. Happened time and time again. 1984.
* First home computer, Apple IIc, 1985. Programming choose-your-own-adventure type games that me and a friend used to make up, using multitudes of IF THEN statements and PRINT and READ commands.
* Wasting large amounts of paper and printer ink doing ‘computer art’ using Apple Mousepaint, the first drawing program I ever used 1985.
* Being asked by my dad to show him the computer. He sat down in front of it and said “First let me see if I can get it to do something.” and then proceeded to randomly hit keys to see what would happen (He’s much better now). 1986
* Having my bike stolen from outside a milk bar where i had stopped to play video games (double dragon I think), and getting strips torn off me by mum as a result 1987.
* Thinking that text-based MOOs and IRC were the fun 1994. The MOO I used to dabble in was called the ChibaMOO, like the Chiba Sprawl out of the novel Neuromancer.
http://www.usc.edu/users/help/flick/Infofilter/chiba_moo.html
* 1994 First weird online-relationship experience. Became friends with a gal in Omaha Nebraska after chatting on IRC. She was 18, i was 19. But she was married, and had a child. It didn’t seem real to me, seemed like a lot of fun, but then she wrote to me one day and said she’d had a big fight with her husband and said that she had yelled at him that she could talk to me better than him. She said she felt it was no longer a good idea to talk to me. I never saw her on IRC again. That early experience brought it home for me how real the people on the other end of the internet actually were.
* 1995 Getting into stupid arguments with friends over email because we hadn’t learnt proper email etiquette yet, and would flame too quickly or be sarcastic without smileys etc.
Mehitabel @ 5 reminds me. Was it only yesterday, in 1978, that I was shot down in flames at a Deputy Principals in-service course on timetabling when I asked about the impact of “these latest computers” which could sit on a desk. A guest speaker who had somehow found a spare hour to answer our questions was the boffin in charge of the University Computing Centre. “None at all.” was the response. Silence followed. I stayed standing hoping someone else would comment, almost overwhelmed by the waves of suppressed schadenfreude emanating from the men in the room. What a silly question. See! Look what happens when you let women in on the timetabling!
The struggle for Women’s Liberation was everywhere, especially in schools. There had just been a name change to “Deputy Principal (Female)” from “Principal Mistress”. Some DPFs were considered strident as we tried for an even more equal role. Aside from caning, which any sane woman wanted outlawed, timetabling was the main power base of male deputies. And guess what? I was “allowed” to help.
My job was to take to the University Computing Centre those bundles of punched cards over which the man had laboured long and hard with his hole puncher. I’m sure there was a knitting needle involved somehow too. Unlike Mehitabel I didn’t get feedback within ten minutes, but had to leave my bundles and come back an hour or so later to get a print-out. Which was very annoying. It meant I had to hang around in nearby Subiaco reading the paper over coffee and a croissant from that new fangled French Bakery. And I had to keep going back! I expressed my frustration every time we had to do another “run” before we had a timetable that worked.
Nowadays female equality is accepted far and wide. There are pcs on every desk and countertop and software programs for school timetabling by the hundred. There are also stylish coffee shops on every street in every suburb. Is it a better world, I wonder.
Took my son to the Game On (computor gaimg retrospective) exhibition last year, and even for a non-gamer such as i, it was wicked!
http://www.slq.qld.gov.au/whats-on/exhibit/past/game-on
First comp? Parents Commodore Vic 20.
FDB @31
As I recall, the C64 used only BASIC, at least for non-geeks at beginner level. Maybe others used other programming languages but I never heard of them.
rossco, I suspect FDB’s point was that a typo in any programming language is apt to stuff it completely
First computer memory: not sure which would be first, though I certainly remember Lemonade Stand on the Apple IIe. First serious experience: the family VIC-20. I was disappointed that we didn’t get a “real” computer like the C64, but then I was an ungrateful little 10 year old who didn’t realise just how much it must have cost my dad. And it still worked 15 or 20 years later, and Star Battles was just as much fun …
My first real home computer was a much-hammered Exidy Sorcerer. Quite a decent machine for 1980 – user-definable characters, 64×30 character display, 48k RAM, a real keyboard, pluggable ROM packs.
I soon tired of its character-based graphics &abominable tape interface and jumped for the Apple ][‘s bit-mapped display & floppy drives in 81.
Cautiouscowgirl, I went to that as well. Amazing exhibition, it was like walking into an old arcade/department store (depending on what side of the exhibit you were in) circa 1985.
Makes the current Powerhouse Museum back to the 80′s exhibtion look a little pathetic with its two PacMan machines and one C64 running Wizard of Wor.
First computer at school was an Apple IIe. It was kept in a special little room. Our favourite game was something about hunting for the giant squid..? A little later, we got a slightly fancier one in the classroom proper, and for good behaviour were allowed to play Carmen Sandiago. I’m sure that’s how I learnt flags of the world!
At home we had a PC which was one of the first to use the 3 1/2 inch disks, the little square solid ones, rather than the larger floppy disks. It was very cool, and IN COLOUR. A couple of years later the most amazing thing was when Mum got us a colour printer – how brilliant could home computing get? Surely not better than a colour dot maxtrix and paintbox to ‘draw’ with.
Punch cards? Let me tell ye laddy we used to dreaaaaam of punch cards.
Actually in my first year at Uni we had mark sense cards (you use a pencil on the card rather than punch a hole). They’re really unreliable because the reader tends to rub the marks off, so at lunchtime we used to sneak into the CompSci 201 lab and use the keypunch machines.
But my earliest experience goes back to a PDP 8 I encountered at a summer school. To boot it the teacher had to load a short boot loader via the front panel toggle switches – by hand, entering and storing each octal number – then run a paper tape through the teletype to load the operating system and then load the BASIC interpreter from a second tape.
College – 1978 – Environmental Science and we had make use of a weird arrangement with CSIRO that involved booking satellite time, cranking up the computer which resembled the flight desk on the USS Enterprise, and hoping something useful would come of it. Can’t recall it ever did.
I worked for Telecom in the early 70′s in a business office in Randwick.. We used to mark cards with a HB pencil. Name address, phone number, service connection, change, etc.
We would mark all the cards transferring data from forms and batch them up & send to the North Sydney data processing facility. The turn around for the poor customers was 8 weeks (yes eight) and if we made a mistake or misread a poorly scribed form 8 weeks later it would again be processed …. if another mistake was detected … you get the idea.
Got seriously involved with computers in the early eighties .. still a devotee just love them …
I’m with derrida derider but earlier–1969 or 1970. Fortran IV:
Introductory computer science at Sydney Uni, “Basser Computer Facility” and the magnificent mainframe with the capacity of a pocket calculator today if I recall correctly. We had to create a program to recognise resistors and capacitors in series, or parallel (or triangular configuration?), then calculate overall resistance and capacitance. Team of three and marry up our combined efforts.
We passed that course, but it was a struggle. Wish I kept the printouts.
When I was at Sydney Uni I found myself programming SILLIAC in an attempt to compute the stresses around Comet windows. How’s that for dating myself? We punched the Assembler code onto paper tape with a teletype. That was in the late 50′s.
Later, on a much more modern machine – but still using paper tape – I had my most puzzling bug. Strange things were happening, but the suspect piece of code printed out correctly. After wasting a lot of time, I thought to look at the tape.
I had been careless with my lunch, and got some butter on the paper tape. The teletype used pins to detect holes in the tape, but the fiendish modern computer (a Ferranti, I recall) used an optical reader, which could see through the buttered tape, and so found a different instruction to run.
I could continue with 50 years worth of stories, but that would be cruel and unusual punishment.
I learned to program in FORTRAN on BHP’s second computer. I would punch my program on cards and send them down to the steelworks to run over night. The program would run until the first mistake was found so next day it would come back saying I had left out a comma here. For some reason the cards would come back with a dump in octal to help me sort out was wrong. This sending down and receiving the the bad news would go on until it was all right – it would often take a week to do something that would take a few minutes in EXCEL these days.
A few years later we (the central research labs) got and “online” computer that gave us direct access via the phone to a computer in Sydney. Had to learn the new basic language to use it. The program was not actually running on line but you could sit there and systematically debug so it took much less time to get a program up and running. The program was written on tape.
I also remember the labs getting a “programmable calculator” for $1200. This amazing toy could be programmed to do up to 12 steps – add, subtract, divide, multiply AND DO SQUARE ROOTS! To put the price in context a graduate engineer would have been paid about $4000 pa.
I also remember the blast furnace control group had a control computer about the size of a fridge that was going to all sorts of amazing things. Memory was only one Kb – so most of the effort went into working out how to fit something useful into the space while moving temporary memory and subprograms back and forth between the computer and the tapes.
Ah the good old days – at least you had to think hard to program almost anything on a computer.
I remember playing Pong at a ‘rich’ friend’s house in early primary school in the late 70s, then being envious of various friends’ Commodore 64s and Dick Smith ‘Cat’ Apple II clones. Used to spend hours making up clunky text-based adventure games in BASIC, then getting frustrated when the machine ran out of memory and couldn’t run the game. Didn’t actually get a computer of my own until 1994 – one of those pre-Power Mac Macintoshes (I can’t remember which model exactly).
@PeterS I love stories like that, how computing used to have real physical idiosyncrasies. How terminals and disk drives seemed to have been invented by committee.
I missed the beginning of the computer revolution, although I have a vague memory of a computing class at high school, but cannot remember what the computer was. I bought a 486 for $3000 in 1993 with the awesome (for that time) specs of a 200MB hard drive and 4 whole meg of RAM! After six months I got bored with DOS and decided to check out this Linux thing. My two most geeky moments from that time is learning how to repair FAT tables manually and figuring out the XOR encryption scheme of a certain large corporation’s office package.
When I arrived in the mid-70′s, my odd but academically way-ahead-of-the-game secondary school in the UK had just replaced their teletype link to the local university with a minicomputer of their own: a Data General Nova 3 with 4K of RAM. To become a qualified Computer User, you had to learn how to start it up and turn it off. Start-up involved using the 16 toggle switches on the front to load the ‘Bootstrap Loader’ program in binary, by hand – once this was running, you could load normal programs using punched yellow paper tape. BASIC was The Only Language, naturally.
In 1979, we got our first modern micro – a 4K Commodore PET. This didn’t need bootstrapping, but had a useful operating system permanently on board. It also used normal Phillips cassette tapes for mass storage, and actually had a MONITOR SCREEN on which you could draw pictures, even animated ones (sort of)! The next year, this was joined by a 32K PET with a 5″ floppy disc drive. You no longer had to fast-forward through hours of tape to find your games and other programs – this was mind-boggling at the time. I got into serious projects like trying to use BASIC to write interpreters for other computer languages, and was chronically irate with our Space Invaders fans, who used to wear out the ‘A’ keys on the keyboards.
After a bit of research, a few friends and I worked out exactly how and where the BASIC programs were stored and processed in RAM, and started to write programs that rewrote themselves as they ran. Don’t think it would ever be possible to attain the same sort of byte-by-byte intimacy with a modern desktop. But tell that to the Youth of Today…
Then I left school. Wasn’t able to keep up the hacking, since the university would have taken a dim view of doing that sort of thing on their mainframe. Probably as well
Various educational authorities wanted to teach me cutting edge computer knowledge – I remember learning BASIC and Pascal at High School in grade 9 and 10 (81-82) on computers at the CAE next to our school. And in 1995, when I was on the dole, Paul Keating paid for me to learn WordPerfect and MS-DOS!
I first encountered the internet in 1992, on a computer at the student newspaper, Semper’s office at UQ. And I started using a Mac at home in about 93-94.
1967 – same as ootz@12, a slide rule. I loved the way it smelled.
1970 – same experience as mehitabel@5. Except after the punched cards didn’t work, I didn’t try it again – queues for weeks at the uni. As a result of this and certain other eerily similar experiences in the computing unit, when I fronted up for the exam, it may as have well have been physiology or Greek. It was a sunny Saturday morning and I owned a sports car. I waited the mandatory 30 minutes minimum, and that was the end of a potential career in computing. Very potential it would seem.
1982 – same as jt@11. We had one game, The Hobbit, on tape. It was graphically based with rudimentary text bubbles for interaction. Sometimes after loading the tape, the monitor would show the code instead of the game. I don’t think we ever finished the game.
1987 – first PC. Twin 5 1/4 floppies and some bootlegged software from head office. Teach yourself database construction in Braille is a fair approximation.
1994 – doing an MBA, some geek blabbering about the World Wide Web. We ridiculed him.
1995 – same MBA, typing ‘sex’ into the now ubiquitous PCs in each study/breakout room.
Was impressed by a large mainframe in a hermetically sealed and airconditioned room at ANU some time in the 60s. Probably more impressed by aircon at the time. I remember making a punchcard that represented my name.
In the 80s I learned to program in Fortran and Pascal at uni and proudly learned the logic of traffic lights and how to program that. I think about that often when sitting idly at a traffic light. Sometimes I bore people with my knowledge of traffic light logic. Shortly after I bought an Apple Mac that cost $4,500, a huge amount of money at the time and probably about half my AUSTUDY or whatever it was called then. I borrowed the money from the credit union and worked out a business plan to pay for it with (illegal but lucrative) sales of home brew.
My first calculator was a Ti Datamath I got for my birthday in 1973, same year I was introduced to the slide rule. Must’ve cost my parents a fortune; 8 character red LED display, 4 functions, no memory, went through batteries like water. Some b* nicked it from my locker in early 74 (welcome to Lyndale High) so it was replaced by a Sharp Elsimate that had green LEDs, had memory, and is still functional and in a drawer somewhere probably next to the slide rule.
Started work at Govt Aircraft Factories in ’78 where we filled out input forms for the fortnightly pays. There were different codes for the pay elements (HTAX for high tax, LWP for Leave without pay, FTAX for manually calculated tax for a newstarter, etc) and we used everyone’s AGS number as the key. For closedown, we could advance everyone’s pay (all 2500 of us) with two lines on a single input form, but then we would spend days processing all the exceptions.
The input forms were processed in the computer centre in Swanston St. Because I had a motor bike and could get in there the quickest with late changes I became the computer liaison/expert.
Later moved into the IT group. My introduction to computing was “Brett, this is a computer terminal. We want you to write a user guide for the Supply Department..”
My boss at the time had started work at Woomera. Her original PS job classification was “Computer, Grade 1″ working the range calculating machines logging test firings. She was only about 5 years older than me.
Finally got to work on the mainframe, punching run cards (I’ve dropped the nightly run deck and seen all the cards spread themselves over the floor) and spooling tapes etc. Remember picking up a multi disc platter that was 4 Meg of storage.
Worked with a couple of programmers who resented the new IT Mgr’s promotion of structured programming: muttered if it wasn’t in assembler it wasn’t really programming.
When one of the other defence factories shifted to Mulwala their Burroughs mainframe, identical to ours, was up for disposal. For only a hundred thousand dollars or so, we were able to double the mainframe’s CPU to 512K of RAM and add megabytes of storage. Very few years later, we couldn’t even give the mainframe away.
1974, DG Nova (1K available for program and data for us mortals, no disk available) and Cyber. Punch cards (go to basement of TAFE to something the size of a wurlitzer), or, pre-punched cards where you pushed out chits with a paperclip… so your batches folded as they fell down the hopper and jammed the thing, so the operators would ALWAYS leave those decks until just before their shift ended and pass on the mess to the next op, meaning you had a 2-or-3-day turnaround for a run for an assignment due in 7 days – so you deskchecked everything before submitting any decks to ops), paper tape (yah! still got some, used to be able to read them by eye, and did minor edits when there was no TTY time or the lines were down with a compass and sticky tape), and…
*** a paper computer ***
(boxes for the registers, and memory locations, you “ran” the assembler by pencilling in and rubbing out data/instructions in the relevant boxes – a method used for use in classes, which of course had no terminals).
Friends a couple of years older than me were still bemoaning their recent loss in the analog wars.
Didn’t get to use a CRT (VT52 I think) until about 1980 I think.
Oh, and my first proper non-internal email (much much later) was “.oz” turning into “oz.au”, about the time I knew munnari’s IP off-by-heart and you would have most of the world’s decent FTP sites in your own /etc/hosts.
But my real claim to fame is the system looking after contracts at VicRoads, written 1987 (Oracle 4/VMS/VT100), still running (Oracle 10) reports for the board without a DBA and with on average 2 days a year (most of that was a migration to NT). Some of the techies coming down to support PCs in that department are younger than the system. I visited for a 21st birthday party – cake and all.
Most hated systems? Honeywell GCOS and Primos (wth would anybody have a parity bit ALWAYS on?) Most loved system? Pyramid Dual Universe (you basically did your own BSD/SYSV merge for your “working” universe, but programs from both universes were always available to run in the other… the engineer looked at mine and said “You’ve sysadmin’ed HPUX, haven’t you? We set ours up the same”.)
But a couple of colleagues older than me went back to programming with a patch panel, and actually having to fix core memory (i.e. wrap wires through little iron rings). Never played with drum memory.
Weirdest thing I’ve done? Putting a off-station radio on top of the main company CPU so I could hear how fast the loops were, and know when certain routines/jobs were completed.
Weirdest thing I wished I’d done? Played races in my control data laundromat.
Happiest about? Never having had to write even one line of COBOL.
I go back to writing up the economic justification (complete with DCF analysis) for an electronic calculator. Could not get them to OK the printer tho.
Fortran; linear programming punched cards all past glories.
I could even use a slide rule.
Big up the 8-bit VIC-20 and its tape drive!
To think we’ve only added 56 bits in 30 years…
I was in love with my Apple IIe. Some of my favourite games included:
Transylvania – where you dodge a werewolf and vampire, and end up finding a spaceship. The commands were like GET BULLET, SHOOT WOLF, OPEN SARCOPHAGUS etc.
Sherwood Forest was a similar concept.
Karateka – A great fighting game, you had to get past all these dudes then face the Shogun, then the girl you are meant to rescue kills you with a chop to the neck.
The Space Quest and Leisure Suit Larry series were lots of fun too.
Ahhh, the memories….
I started my BSc in Computing Science in 1975. Games circa 1976: Wumpus, on an IBM 370 mainframe circa 1976. Lunar Lander, a text based game played on a DEC PDP 11/45 mini-computer and a DECWriter dot-matrix terminal fed from the recycling box.
I had such an ugly series of experiences with a dodgy punch-card machine (no ink left on the ribbon) and a buggy FORTRAN IV compiler in about 1968, I turned into a complete luddite. Then, in 1979 at the School of Military Survey, I got introduced to the HP25. Heaven on a stick! I got to program Simpson’s Method for calculation of volumes.
I’ve never looked back. I even like FORTRAN.
I had a Sinclair ZX81 in about 82 or something. Before that we used to play games like ‘pong’ on my friends Atari console. circa late 70s or 1980. Sometime after 82 I worked on a missile fire control system but on the radar part more than the computing part (Honeywell IIRC). For a brief period I was in gunnery fire control and there the computer was properly analogue. Also very interesting where the navigational plotting systems we were briefly trained on which were also analogue computing devices.
I had a boss who once tried to impress me with the company’s old minicomputer core memory rusting in the back of the warehouse but I disappointed him because I identified it straight away – the missile fire control computer worked with core memory.
The first computer I used was a MONECS (MONash [for Monash university] Educational Computer System) in 1976 & 1977. It was a whole room-full of gear with mark sense cards as input & a bloody big line printer for output. It was also the first computer available for student use in a Queensland (Australia) high school Later when I did my first college studies it was another MONECS that we did our work on so I had a head start over my class mates.
BTW… The Microbee was an Aussie engineered computer & I still have one although it’s been so long since it was started that I have no idea whether it still works.
You folks make me look like a luddite but it appears your just plain older than me.
First experience with a computer was a C64 in the late 80′s. Yes, I remember Leisure Suit Larry (on windows 95 amirite?) and I remember my father expressly prohibiting me from playing it and having no idea why. We also had good times on the Paint program on the C64, and I’ve been in love with digital art ever since, there was also, if you remember, a computer voice program where you type in words and the computer “speaks” like Steve Hawking. I thought that was pure magic….but i was only little….
We then graduated to windows 3.1 and thought not having to insert floppy disks into the keyboard for every program was fantastic, as was Carmen Santiago, although I think that may have actually been Win95. got the internet not long after that. the concept of a “modem” and “talking to other computers in far away places” was even more exciting than a talking computer. by windows 95 i was a forum dweller and by windows 98 i was hacking the neighbourhood LAN that had been set up, and mucking around with xtreegold. I was also addicted to Doom and then Doom 3D. We loved Wolfenstein as well, oh, those were the days.
not much excitement after that. did computing in the HSC and walloped ass and wound up doing an IT traineeship after that. didn’t get any work though, apparently good looking 18 year old girls can’t hack. never mind. i’m just a run of the mill internet freak now and program animations for fun.
What with “GET BULLET, SHOOT WOLF” mentioned, I can’t resist pointing to the “How to shoot yourself in the foot” guide to languages, and pasting in a couple of examples.
http://www.eguiluz.net/Tonteria/shot.htm
370 JCL: You send your foot down to MIS and include a 400-page document explaining exactly how you want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot comes back deep-fried.
BASIC: Shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol. On large systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.
C: You shoot yourself in the foot and then no one else can figure out what you did.
C++: You accidentally create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical assistance is impossible since you can’t tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying, “That’s me, over there.”
COBOL: USEing a COLT 45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN place ARM.HAND.FINGER on HANDGUN.TRIGGER and SQUEEZE. THEN return HANDGUN to HOLSTER. CHECK whether shoelace needs to be retied.
FORTRAN: You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue with the attempts to shoot yourself anyways because you have no exception handling capability.
Sometime when I worked at the Barr Smith Library, University of Adelaide (1965-1967) they introduced punch cards as a borrowing record.
Later in 1978 I was promoted to a position in QED where I had supervision for the group that made films and stuff. In the 80s we set up a group of about 6 people to create software packages for schools. I recall Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? was one of ours. Nice to get some feedback!
We had another group that tried out equipment, recommended it to schools and helped them use it. I remember buying them an expensive and ultimately useless Apple Lisa, later superseded by the Mac.
I had the privilege of chairing the committee that evaluated the tender that recommended the tender to buy Sperry computers for high schools. The Department felt more comfortable with a neo-Luddite in charge of the geeks. Fair dinkum, it was the best deal on offer! Pity about the power packs that popped all over the state when the sugar mill or something down the road or something shut down.
Personally I bought a computer in 1997 to use for charting shares and stuff. I remember the Apple didn’t have a share charting package, so it had to be a PC. Someone in Adelaide invented a share charting package for the Apple but a fool lawyer told them if anyone lost money on their shares they might sue. This was at a time when there were at least a dozen share charting packages available for the PC.
Vic 20 – 1983, with 1k RAM. I had one.
With a joystick too.
@ 51
It still does. You just have to listen more carefully if you want to hear the electrons colliding and derailing each other
It would have been about 1982 that we were supposedly learning something about vectors, telling a little diamond “turtle” to go here and there on a green screen. I’m far from convinced we learned anything.
Fast forward a few years, and my first real immersion was playing games on 5 1/4″ floppy disks, and to double-side them you’d take a hole punch to them.
I posted the PeterS@48 comment to my sons. The reply http://people.kldp.org/~eunjea/jargon/ab.php?id=story-of-mel.html“>linked to this story about what real programmers did in the good old days They wrote in “machine?code. Not?FORTRAN.??Not?RATFOR.??Not,?even,?assembly?language.
Machine?Code. Raw,?unadorned,?inscrutable?hexadecimal?numbers. And they didn’t like swarmy salesmen who wanted their programs to cheat. Read on.
Just imagine the poor people whose first experience with computers was Windows ME.
That would have been enough to turn anyone off for life.
Ah, 1984, the computer had a cassette player of some sort attached… it was cold weather in the lovely Blue Mountains… I beat my boyfriend & his Dad at Meteor Storm… not sure how I got so good at it, I have not played computer games since.
I knew this was going to happen!
Late 1970s: going into the computer room at Dad’s work to see the “new VAX”, where the actual computer was merely the size of a washing machine. Playing Quest (You are in a maze of little twisty pasages, all alike) and Hammurabi on the PDP-11. One of Dad’s jobs was getting the PDP-11 and PDP-15 to talk to each other.
1980: My school has the Opportunity classes ferried to a nearby CAE to use the Apple IIs there. I think we used BASIC and we were two-to-a-computer.
1981 or 1982: Dad buys a VIC-20.
1986: Year 11 Computer Science in the new school computer lab. Still two-to-a-computer, but this time we are learning Pascal.
1991: A friend’s brother types my honours thesis up on his work Apple, because it has to be printed. No idea why I didn’t use Dad’s Amiga.
1992: Learning about Dialog in my Librarianship course, and MARC records. E-mail access, which enabled me to carry on my romance with the Geek, who was working downstairs in the same building, preventing the Maths students from MUDding.
1993 onward: I marry the Geek. Shortly afterwards, we get our first computer, a superseded Apollo workstation from his department. I have started work in a unit that provides computer support to librarians. WordPerfect is superseded by Word in our unit. Windows is installed by feeding ~15 floppies through each PC. I am setting up PCs with library-related software, so I know! I also learn to install CD-ROM drives and sound cards into PCs as they were not standard.
The last 15 years have been the same for me as everyone else. I occasionally text the Geek these days. Will see if I can persuade him to post his reminiscences here.