Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Infant Moses Owned an IBM Computer. Now It’s Mine
“Computer user” defines the limits of my expertise. I can’t describe them with the fluency of @hankrhody. I can’t build precision electronics like @SkipSul. I can’t program them the way @judgemental or @arahant can. But people like me had an important part to play in the microcomputer revolution: We’re the suckers who paid for it, usually cheerfully. I flipped through a few quarter-century old computer magazines, noticing just how wildly expensive everything was in 1994-’97, for much less performance and far fewer capabilities than today’s computers. Still, to a non-computer specialist like me, the mid-Nineties is a world that’s almost two thirds a modern one. There were slick magazines advertising laptops and desktop machines with color monitors. Accessories like printers and modems plugged right in. The software was by then largely standardized on MS-DOS/Windows 3.1. It was already assumed that you’d want a modem for online use, although it would be for contact via plain old telephone lines with bulletin board systems, not the World Wide Web just quite yet. 1994 or so, in other words, is a primitive but recognizable world to a computer user of today.
Recently I acquired a copy of Byte Magazine from August 1982. This is a lucky find because it’s from a brief, in between period in the history of personal computers. 1982 is most of the way back to the crudely printed newsletters and bulletins of the geeky computer clubs of the Seventies, like the one in northern California that spawned Apple. This issue of Byte runs to 512 pages (!), an amount of advertising that demanded filling in with a whole bunch of dry-as-sawdust technical articles about object-oriented programming, and defining characteristics of sprites on mapped x-y coordinates. That was Byte’s readership.
There’s very little here yet about what actual end users might do with these machines. Almost every article and ad page in the 512 of them would be incomprehensibly challenging to anyone who innocently stumbled in, hoping to find out something about using computers. In the early to mid-Eighties, the only true ease-of-use was found with toy computers, the Sinclair, Commodore, Atari and ColecoVision ones you could buy for $99-$199 and hook up to your living room TV. They didn’t do much that was useful. Even the games were lame.
There are applications for sale in Byte, plenty of them, selling at jaw-dropping high prices by today’s standards, but they are either programming fragments that you have to stitch together yourself, or they’re simple turnkey packages dedicated to one purpose, like printing dry cleaning tags. Like the microcomputer newsletters of the Seventies, most of these voluminous ads are black and white, crudely hand-drawn, with a variety of cheap typefaces that would do justice to a 1950s church bulletin. Apple, as well as IBM and Microsoft, are among the few advertisers who’d still be widely recognized today, and they have color ads (still an expensive rarity in computer mags in 1982). These ads are surprisingly ordinary-looking, not that different than nearby pages for Ashton-Tate’s dBASE.
I attended the second Applefest in Boston, May 14-16, 1982. Some friends of mine worked for a new magazine, Softalk, so I had a floor pass. The two Steves were still doing their buddy act at the conference, but almost everyone at the show skipped the Friday night opening in favor of the premiere of “Conan the Barbarian”. It was quite a weekend. Across the street from the Hynes Center, a giant Jolly Roger fluttered in the wind, marking the Pirate’s Convention.
At Applefest, voice I/O system cards and magnetic storage media were all the rage that spring. 1982 was a peculiar half-and-half era, feminism-wise. The term “sexism” had already been in use for a dozen or so years. Women were already writing software for micros and running start-up companies. Yet even in liberal Boston, an Eighties computer show was also full of “booth babes”, like the young women who pose at auto shows. One group of models wore tight t-shirts that proclaimed “We’ve Got the Best Twin Floppies in Town!”. Undeniably eye-catching but rather crass. But another, more subtle approach worked better with this crowd: a booth of nice, but normal-looking women giving away shirts that merely promised “No Bad Memories”–a romantic ideal that both sides can agree on.
There’s an amazing variety of vendors of products that few people in today’s world have ever had to buy. In ’82, regardless of who you bought from, you probably had a green-and-black or orange-and-black monitor and not much to do with it. You couldn’t just plug a computer into a printer. Usually, you needed an add-on circuit card that had to be configured via tiny rocker switches to run with your specific computer and your printer, each end of which could be almost impossible to straighten out. Speaking of printing, a far-from-exotic business necessity, if you didn’t want your expensive machine to come to a stuttering halt while it printed things out, you needed a print buffer, a costly block of outboard memory that accepted full files from the computer and doled them out to the printer, a little bit at a time.
But then, the outlay didn’t seem like all that big a deal when your printer already cost you $1300, and your computer $3000. That $4300 starter system would be about $11,292 in today’s money. To add insult to financial injury, the computers you bought for that kind of money were no great shakes, and that wouldn’t even have included the main software you’d want to make the thing minimally useful. For example, the first really successful word processing software for microcomputers was WordStar. At a hefty $400; say a thousand bucks in 2019.
Another approach to personal computing was briefly popular. The Kaypro and Osborne computers were similar packages–a (damn heavy!) “portable” computer with a built-in monochrome monitor, two floppy disk drives, and—the dealmaker!—a library of name-brand business software guaranteed to run. Both companies were too small and ill-managed to survive, but they had a great idea for making computing as non-threatening and worry-free as possible 35 years ago. For $1795, either company gave you a complete package that you didn’t have to be a computer hobbyist to use. My own office was first equipped with Kaypros, which became a great Hollywood favorite. Arthur C. Clarke and Peter Hyams used it to send each other overnight drafts of the script to “2010: The Year We Make Contact”. William F. Buckley liked his Kaypro so much he did all his writing on it almost to the end of his life.
The IBM AT series and Apple’s Macintosh would appear in 1984. That generation of the personal computer would grow over the years into being a powerful step up in usefulness, as well as ease of use. But it took time. Alfred Sloan, the longtime chairman of General Motors during its glory days, confessed in his memoirs that the unsung hero of early automobiling was the patient, long-suffering customer, who paid for the progress we all benefit from now. Personal computers were no different.
I owe you an explanation about baby Moses’s very own IBM computer and how it ended up in my hands. Here it is: Charlton Heston was one of the most influential of trustees of the American Film Institute. Like a number of other industry big shots, like Ray Stark and Jerry Weintraub, he donated filmmaking gear and then-current office equipment to AFI. One batch from the Hestons included a few family-owned personal computers, still very expensive at the time.
AFI had just received a massive grant from Apple, both in cash and in-kind contributions, and one requirement was Appletalk wiring and an all-Apple AFI campus. That meant they couldn’t use donated IBM computers anymore, so they quietly asked a few people if they had use for them. I walked away with Fraser Heston’s 1983-vintage XT, a big heavy thing with two hard drives and two floppy disc drives.
Fraser had been pressed into service in 1956 to play his own father as a baby in Cecil B. de Mille’s “The Ten Commandments”. And that’s how come I have Moses’s computer in my storeroom.
Published in General
My favorite part of all tech revolutions is how the Justice Department manages to stay three miles behind the curve and then pounces at the worst possible moment, creates momentary chaos that the political class slaps themselves on the back for and then the market reconstitutes itself.
The DOJ went after the movie studios just as television was about to disrupt them anyway and they broke up AT&T and their long distance monopoly just before the cell phone revolution made that service obsolete. Now look at them. A reconstructed AT&T now owns one of the legacy movie studios.
They’re now talking about going after the tech companies. That probably means we’re on the cusp of going into an entirely different direction that nobody sees coming.
Expertise varies significantly between different “computer users”.
I liked the first season. The second season felt dull to me. I’m only part-way through Season Three.
Like many pieces of historical fiction, I find the show can sometimes be frustrating if you have pretty good knowledge of the real history of that era. It sometimes suffers from irksome technological anachronisms, like a character using a computer that was already obsolete by the time the episode takes place to develop software that wouldn’t appear in the real world until many years later.
Also, the way they jump between products and platforms in such short spans of time feels off to me. Like, in the first season they’re trying to build a portable IBM PC clone and then later they pivot to developing online services for the Commodore 64? Firstly, that seems like a step backwards hardware-wise. Secondly, I wanna scream at the characters, “maybe you keep failing because you’re incapable of sticking to a strategy!”
I find I enjoy the show more if I ignore the history and just focus on the soap opera aspects of the characters and their relationships.
You forgot “And I can’t play games on them like @stad.”
Gary,
You old dog you! Damn, you really do have Moses’ pc. In honor of this fact, I will now give you my lecture on backward compatibility. The original IBM pc (including the slightly more powerful XT) used an 8086 intel processor. The 8086 was an 8-bit processor with a 16-bit data bus. The IBM-AT was the next model and it used the 80286 processor a full 16-bit processor. The AT could be used in 8086 emulation mode. This meant that if you had software that was written for the original PC and data disks that you have made with that software, you could boot it up, as is, onto your AT in emulation mode. This was and still is called backward compatibility. Although I don’t have a 5″ floppy drive on my 7i pc running Windows 10 at home, I could get a 5″ drive on the net for under $10. The drive would plug right into my case and take the existing data cable and power cable hookups already there. I could then get into 8086 emulation mode and boot up software written for Moses’ computer and use it to edit data disks made at that time. In other words, after 36 years I would not have lost one byte of data or been locked out of a piece of software that I had learned to use. That’s backward compatibility!!
BEHOLD! GD SAVES THE DATA! (and the Israelites while he’s at it).
Regards,
Jim
HomePak?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePak
Good for you for at least striving. Timing and Luck are capricious. S-100 bus products are all over the 1982 copy of Byte but even then were on the way out. Funny thing about the IMSAI 8080; if people recognize it at all it’s probably because it was the kid’s computer in “WarGames”, but by the time the film was made in 1983, the IMSAI was already a museum piece. They chose it, no doubt, for its looks (hey, this is Hollywood, even for computers).
I did the same until it became clear that I could get better price / performance from a PC purchased at Costco without all the hassle of assembling the unit myself. One of the big cost items turned out to be Windows itself.
I played ADVENT on a Dec-10 at UCLA. The version I played was written in FORTRAN of all things.
There’s a lot of telescoping, but each season hits an idea – the first PCs, the second wave, the rise of online communities / gaming, then the internet.
“Autofocus”, Paul Schrader’s film about Bob Crane’s somewhat indecorous personal life, has a major hardware subplot of newer and newer home videotaping equipment coming on the market. The machinery on camera is real, but weirdly anachronistic. At every point in the movie, the equipment is several years older than it would have been in reality. (In 1967, he’s using a 1964 deck; in 1971 he’s using a 1968 camera. I’m guessing it just played up the past better. (“Ooh, look how big and clunky that recorder is! Did they really look like that in the old days?”)
The photo at the head of the post shows the binder that holds a copy of Microsoft’s Fortran-80. It’s a 1979 binder, but even in their August 1982 ads, Microsoft was still pushing CP/M compatibility rather than their own operating system. It’s a little like reading about the car industry in 1917, when Walter Chrysler ran Buick and the Dodge Brothers became rich selling components to Ford.
At Applefest, Jobs joked that he wanted to “kill” CP/M. Now nobody remembers it.
That’s pretty much why I keep my old Kaypro 2X in storage. I still hold on to the fantasy that some day I’ll be able to use it as a prop in a short film, or something.
Don’t do what I did with one of mine: switch it on. Instant snap, crackle and pop. The only safe way to do it is with a Variac, a variable transformer. Bring up the voltage very slowly to avoid cooking the capacitors (they dry out) and the coil windings of the power supply.
How frequently do these things get updated in the real world? I mean, I’m still driving a 2010 car, and at this rate I’ll be driving it for the next decade as well. In industry I’ve noted a tendency to keep doing the job with a decades-old machine as long as it’ll do the job. Does a three-year-old camera make that much difference that it requires the updated capital investment?
Exactly. My car is a 1993. Two of the computers I’m running are from 1999, or so.
As usual, a smart question from Mr. H. Rhody. It depends. At a time of rapid tech progress, especially early in a new technology, things get replaced much more often than they do with mature tech like automobiles. “Autofocus” is about a TV star with lots of money and an obsession with videotape, so in general he’d be the kind of early adopter who is willing to lay out the big bucks ahead of the rest of us.
I can dig that. You take someone like @SamRhody and you’ve got someone who gets amazing fast computer results at prices that are merely obscene by staying one generation behind the curve. And then you’ve got the rest of us, feeding off him like remoras, who get pretty great computers by getting used components from him.
Get a can or two of compressed air and blow the dust out of the innards first.
Ricochet Silent Radio lives off material like this.
So do the rest of us. You should see Mom’s new computer; it really zips!
By which I mean it was Sam’s old computer, and while it’s not fast enough to run Fallout IV on VR, well, that’s just not what Mom’s using it for. Yet.
Now tell us again how Moses parted the C.
He parsed the C. Then he compiled it.
Since James Gawron was kind enough to post the Parting of the Red Sea at comment #35, I’ll threadjack my own post and make a sidenote or two about it. Give Cecil B. de Mille this: in 1956, this was widely considered the most amazing special effects scene in movie history. AFAIK, no other Biblical epic has so electrifying a visual sensation, making it the “2001” or “Avatar” of its day–movie magic that says, “top this”.
And it obviously lingered in Steven Spielberg’s memory. I’m not saying by any means that “Close Encounters” or “Raiders of the Lost Ark” are ripoffs, but the appearance of the mothership over Devil’s Tower and the opening of the Ark of the Covenant have a lot of the cinematic DNA of the Parting of the Red Sea.
Wouldn’t you have to buy a floppy controller?
Doesn’t ring a bell.
Randy,
Well, one could be had for about $5 but I think my box still has one in it anyway. As you aren’t going to boot the whole system up from the floppy, just the software, you could just get yourself a usb 5″ drive. You wouldn’t need to open the case up then. All versions of Windows will instantly recognize it and provide the driver.
Regards,
Jim
From 1985 til the early 90s, the best productivity package was AppleWorks.
Word processor, database, spreadsheet. Reasonably fast. With the Beagle Bros. TimeOut additions, it had all sorts of fun extra features, like macros, spell checking and grammar checking.
The fun part was getting a Checkmate RAM card for the Apple II – it had a full megabyte of RAM. You could load up AppleWorks, dump it all into RAM, and work as fast as you could hit the keys, instead of having to wait for disk access.
Yes – I had an Apple IIe with 64k + a megabyte of RAM. In 1985.