Sharp as a Marble - When I was your age

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When I was your age

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We only had 64k of memory and we considered ourselves damned lucky when the tape drive didn't chew up the cassette after 45 minutes of loading. I reveled in 16 colors (not 16 million… Six-fraking-teen) and 3 channel, polyphonic sound. Hard disk? Hell no, they were floppy, and large and we were thankful we didn't have to use tapes any more!

Armed Canadian knows what I'm talking about.

It's something my children will never understand. Last year or so, we went to visit my mother in Atlanta who, at the time, didn't have a DVR. My girls simply didn't understand why they couldn't pause the show they were watching to go eat breakfast.

I bought them their own computer to play Noggin and Webkinz on so they'd leave my wife and my PCs alone. It was a cheap box, only paid like $200 for it yet it has 2 gigs of memory, a dual core Athlon processor, 500gigs hard drive, and puts the super computers of the old days to shame.

Eventually, we'll stop measuring memory in gigs. My girls will have 256 petabytes which they will complain about since all their friends have exabyte systems.

And I'll remind them that at one time, it was actually said that you would never need more than 640 kilobytes of memory. Then they'll look at me like the old fart I am, plug the Universal Brain to Computer Connector (UBCC) into the socket behind their skull and study the Paleozoic era by interacting with dinosaurs.

And I'll be thinking how cool Crysis looked.

posted @ 3/17/2009 8:00:12 AM

Comments

Sailorcurt says:

on 3/17/2009 9:33:05 AM

My first computer was a Timex-Sinclair ZX-80. It had 2k of memory and no monitor or storage device...it had an rf output that you connected to the antenna terminals of a TV and you used a standard audio casette deck for storage.

I remember every computer iteration I ever owned and even ever used.

When I had my Commodore 128, a friend had an Apple IIe and I remember how cool it was that his Apple used a joystick with potentiometers rather than just switches...by changing how FAR you moved the joystick, you could control how FAST the system reacted. This was an amazing innovation at the time.

I remember the PC magazines printing programs in their mags in the form of Hexadecimal number matrices...having my wife read out the hexadecimal numbers and me manually typing them onto the keyboard to recreate the program, then saving it to a floppy disk after painstakingly entering all the numbers.

I remember notching single sided floppy disks so you could flip them over and use the other side to double storage capacity.

I remember taking hours to load floppy after floppy to install big games before CD-Rom drives became ubiquitous.

I remember how excited I was when 3 1/2 inch floppies came out because of the increased capacity and smaller, sturdier package. (and I distinctly remember how unhappy my wife was when I spent over $250 on my first 3 1/2 inch drive...$250 was a LOT of money back then).

I remember drilling holes in the sides of all my old Double Density disks to allow them to be formatted as high density.

I remember paying about $250 for a 20Mb hard drive, and then paying about the same for a 250Mb just a year or two later...then repeating with a 500Mb, 750Mb, 1.6Gb, etc etc etc...with prices getting lower and lower as capacities got ever higher and higher.

I recently bought a 1Tb external hard drive for just over $100

I remember one of my earliest computer classes in college...we were working with Intel 8086 processors and I remember the professor talking with awe about the recently released, latest and greatest 80286 processor.

I remember the first time I put together a system from the ground up. It was a 80386DX, 16Mhz system. I think I still have the motherboard in my attic somewhere. That was a SCREAMING fast system in it's day.

Remember Bulletin Board Systems before the Internet? I had a friend who ran one and I helped him out with hardware and software issues from time to time.

Many fond memories revolve around computers and computing. I still have a few of my favorite old DOS games. I found a free program for the mac called "DosBox" that creates a virtual 486 based dos machine that can run many of those old games. I still enjoy some of them even with their primitive graphics and simplistic interfaces. Ever play "Empire Deluxe"? It's a turn based war game and it's one of my all-time favorite games.

Matt says:

on 3/17/2009 11:21:27 AM

Shockingly, Curt, my experiences parallel yours.

First computers are like first loves: You never forget them.

My first machine was a Timex Sinclair 1000, cheap version of the ZX-80. Likewise with 2K of memory, the RF adapter and cassette cable. I used that cable for years afterward. Ran it on an old black and white TV. I bought it for $32.68 at a local department store on sale and sold the machine years later for almost the same amount.

Like you, I remember every computer iteration. A VIC-20 after that then an Atari 800XL. Then a break for a few years and onto my first PC, a Bondwell laptop with 2 3 1/2 drives. That was a conversation piece in high school as NO ONE had laptops in school then. Those were business computers.

From there is a steady stream of PCs. The one I remember fondly was a Tandy 3000. 80286 processor and VGA. Bare minimum to run Wing Commander and the reason I bought it. Paid for it on layaway for 8 months. It had a 40MB Conner hard disk which I still consider to this day to the be the best hard drive I've ever owned. Designed to be and ran totally silent.

My first 80386DX dug out of a parts bin for $10 at a computer store at a time such a board was worth much more. It used SIPP memory (SIMMs with little pins). As Fate would have it, I had contacts at a computer service company that had supplied SIPPs and had some left over. Sold it to me cheaply and became the only kid on my block to have 4MB of memory at a time 1MB was considered standard and anything more was horribly expensive.

That machine taught me Unix. I had a Trident SVGA card and an NEC MultiSync display. Also played with MWC Coherent and the first versions of Linux. I learned X configuration by setting up modelines for the monitor frequencies. In that time if you got them wrong, you destroyed your monitor. Hence the luxury of a MultiSync monitor.

I wrote BBS "door games". Made some money at it too. Hell, my door software might still be sitting in an archive somewhere. Not bad for a teenager back then.

I still have a few old DOS games lying around. I was introduced to wargaming on my Atari with a turn-based, hex grid game of North Africa. Never won but it got me started on that path.

Bet many of you don't have experience with the 80186 processor. In Ontario, the school system bought a specialized family of educational computers called Icons. Had color screens, trackball mice and were smart terminals hosted by a 80186 based server running QNX. Shaped an entire generation of would-be computer nerds in my day. For many, myself included, that was the entry point into computer science. Those 80186 systems were impressive for that time and I won a regional programming contest using one writing Pascal.

I could go on and on. Today, I collect old hardware that was stuff of dreams in my teenage years like Suns and SGIs. I dreamed of working in high-performance computing such as on Crays.

Heady times indeed.

DJ says:

on 3/17/2009 11:35:40 AM

Youngsters.

When I was your age (*cough, cough*), I had a pencil. I wrote on paper with it, and I stored the paper in a file cabinet. Backups, schmackups; file cabinets don't crash.

When I wanted to add two numbers, I used a pencil and paper if there were too many digits to add in my head. When I wanted to multiply or divide two numbers, I used a slide rule.

There were four television channels available. Most of what they showed was in one color: gray. To change channels or to change the volume, I got off my ass, walked over to it, and turned a knob or two. When changing the channel, it had to be "fine tuned", meaning I could improve the picture quality at the expense of the sound quality, or vice-versa.

The telephones had a dial, not a keypad, and was connected to the house by a cord. There was only one in the whole house, and everyone's telephone was black.

I was born in 1953, back when gas was eleven cents per gallon. Now, I no longer design, embed, and program computers, I just use 'em.

Neanderthal says:

on 3/17/2009 11:47:25 AM

Oh please, when I was your age we didn't have math. We didn't even have written language. If we wanted to write anything down we had to crush stuff up and smear it on the walls of a cave to make pictures.

Hosers.

Weer'd Beard says:

on 3/17/2009 1:00:44 PM

Nethack is STILL the best game ever.

Graphics? Who fucking needs 'em! ASCII does all I need!

Matt says:

on 3/17/2009 1:44:52 PM

Then you'll LOVE Dwarf Fortress, Weer'd Beard!

http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/

PeterT says:

on 3/18/2009 11:34:13 PM

Hey Matt,

My first job after I retired from the Navy was software work for the Peace Shield project at Westinghouse. It was based on the 80186... the only time I've ever seen it used for anything...

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