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LoC #54 with She
On the latest episode of Land Of Confusion, the member show for members, by members where we interview members, we finally sit down and interview She.
We start as we now do with our members questions and learn a lot of information on the state of the wool industry in the USA and the culture of southern PA. We then learn about She’s growing up in Nigeria, under the adventures of her colonial administrator father, and the life of a free roaming child in that West African Nation.
We then travel to the USA and learn about her time in school and living in the wilds of the heart of major PA city.
Then She talks about her life at the frontier of micro computing and how she helped bring about the introduction of word processers to that corner of the world and her love of the Atari 800.
Be sure to watch it all, and we will see you in the comments.
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Published in General
What a life! Thank you all for this conversation!
Man, love me some @she. Outstanding. Thank you.
Tall Tales: Gagara Yasin!
No formal computer science training? Just as well. Those guys are all flakes anyway.
Great to see and hear @She! The first part of the discussion has inspired me to watch Babe. I imagine that @She’s life in Pennsylvania resembles the Hoggett Farm.
But Word Processing on an Atari 800 was… not a serious endeavor… given the 40-character TV line length.
@she your experience programming games with the kids reminds me of my experience teaching an introductory computer course to 5th and 6th graders as part of Community College of Allegheny County’s noncredit curriculum. We worked on Apple IIe computers at a local high school on Saturdays. I found a Marvel Heroes book containing simple games written in the Apple BASIC of the day. We used that as a resource for the classes. It was fun.
Lord. Dreadful photo on the thumbnail. Going forward with eyes closed, mouth open. Story of my life. Will I never learn? LOL.
Thanks for the kind comments all. And particularly, thanks to @torywarwriter and @dontillman for making this so easy to do and so much fun.
Apple II? Youngsters!
You are correct. No-one in his right mind would do word processing on an Atari 800. Nor did I. It was a great game machine, a terrific tool if you wanted to develop games (Mr. She was quite good at this) and I still have the old Atari 800, the Rana disk drive, and the original cassette drive (I think that’s an Atari model)–for a price. As well as the 2600. But a word processor, the 800 was not.
The NBI? Now that was a word processor! And as I said, if I were a power typist interested purely in text, I’d take my 1984 model in a heartbeat over anything manufactured today.
However, honorable mention must go to the TRaSh-80 Model 100 which, although it only had an 8 line, 40 character display, was a tremendous keystroke-catcher and well ahead of its time.
I worked for MCI Mail (a very interesting concept, also ahead of its time) for eighteen months, from home (telecommuting, before Covid made such a thing fashionable). We had to provide our own equipment. My setup was a TRS-80 model 100, an Okidata ML-92 dot matrix printer, and an acoustic coupler. Somehow, I made it work.
It was fun. We collected magazines (BYTE! Compute! Antic! Others!), and typed in programs from all of them, as well as writing our own. The users groups were fun. The people were–umm–odd and quirky. And even at work, in those early days, there was a spirit of iconoclasm, eccentricity, and fun. The three guys who founded NBI exemplified that.
And then the IBM PC came along, and all that changed, and not always for the better IMHO.
Thanks! Some days that’s true. Other days–well….
Babe is one of those absolutely perfect little movies, and one of my all-time favorites. I’m really sorry it lost out on the Academy Award to Braveheart, much as I enjoyed the sight of Mel Gibson’s bare bum.
The Lexitron word-processing systems were really excellent, but they never seemed to have much of a market share. The Qantel (no u) business systems that I worked on in the 80s had a special model of “terminal” – besides the usual ones – that could have a word-processing program downloaded from the main system and used the main system for document storage. That was pretty slick too, and the main-system storage was faster and more reliable than floppies…
I set up a couple friends with Atari systems – one 800XL and a 130XE – that they wrote some sci-fi novels on, a few were even published, using the Paper Clip program which still might be the best from that time. They both used daisy-wheel printers because no agent or publisher would accept anything in dot-matrix…
I have a copy of Paper Clip that I found on ebay, including the manual and the little “dongle key” that had to be kept in a joystick socket at all times to prove you legally owned the program; plus a couple 600XL still new in box, a 1200XL that was for my own use, and an 800 that I bought used to replace the 400 that I bought new and returned because I just couldn’t stand it… We all used Indus GT floppy drives because of the double-density/double-sided capacity. I also have a couple of their direct-connect modems (plus one with the acoustic coupler), and a few other accessories.
I never cared for Commodore, it was always Atari for me. But none of them could hold a candle to the SERIOUS systems that I worked on, so I didn’t really get the “bug” to have a home computer until later than most people.
Regarding TRS-80, I think you’ll find this interesting. This guy on YouTube goes by LGR, and he does tests and reviews and stuff especially of vintage computer and other tech stuff. People even send him stuff to be reviewed on his YouTube page.
When I started selling PCs (shortly after IBM introduced them), I sold to the corporate market. The dealer I worked for also had a sales force that sold to schools (Apple), and the (slowly) developing home market–whatever was making inroads at the time.
We had a saying, back then, as we worked our way through the generations and iterations (the worst of which was exemplified by the IBM PCJr, which was supposed to ignite the rush towards home computing, and which failed miserably at the task):
We used to say, “This is the year of the “home computer.” It always has been, and it always will be.”
It took many years for the trend to catch on.
Orion Clemens, Sam Clemens’ older brother, had been appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory by Abraham Lincoln in 1861. The pay would be handsome, but there were no funds for relocation, and Orion was skint. Sam had been a riverboat pilot. Unfortunately this had been on a river that had guns – big guns – pointed at it for just about its entire length. This had a deleterious effect on commerce. Sam was also coming off of his brief military adventure (see “The Private History of a Campaign that Failed”). Sam had money saved up since piloting had been lucrative, so Orion proposed a deal: Sam would pay for them both to travel to Nevada, then Orion would hire Sam as his personal secretary. Thus did Mark Twain find himself in the Nevada Territory from 1861 to 1865.
The account of most of this appears at the beginning of one of my favorite books, Roughing It.
I did some development work on PCs too, mostly as part of my contract/consulting work after leaving Qantel. In fact at the place I did some development work on building-energy-audit software for utility companies (some kind of federal requirement at that time), I got the first regular IBM XT – the one with a hard drive inside the main unit, rather than in a separate box – sold in the Pacific Northwest, they told me, from Sears Business Center. I kept the “master copies” of all the source code that other people were testing and stuff, because their systems only had floppy drives. As did the “field” systems – mostly Compaq “Portables” – that were used to run our/my software by Southern California Edison and others. A few places used Otrona Attache, and I have one of those very nice condition in padded case, etc, just because they were so cool.
But especially at that time, as far as I was concerned, a real computer, especially a real BUSINESS computer, had to be able to handle multiple users or it just wasn’t serious. So in terms of the TRS-80 that would have meant only the Model 16, which allowed for adding a second “dumb” terminal. And even that still wouldn’t really work for me. I developed business software at another place that used IBM AT systems with added multiple-serial-port cards that allowed for adding extra “dumb” terminals. So people could be working on payroll or whatever, at different terminals, at the same time. Sharing files etc. I came up with some time-saving and system-optimizing “tools” for those setups, which ran a system called “Bluebird,” that wound up being bought and used by Bluebird dealers all over: screen-handling and file-handling “pre-compilers” etc.
And yet it’s been so long ago, certainly nobody is still using that now. But I picked up some multi-port serial boards along the way, just for fun. :-)
After that, I did some development work for a company that had developed their own 4GL programming system, that ran on Xenix using at that time Compaq 386 systems. (The Bluebird systems were proprietary, closed-source.) One of the least interesting parts of that job was their 4GL system had numerous bugs, and all the applications developed in a hurry to start selling systems, had to use work-arounds. And then they couldn’t fix the bugs, because it would have broken all of their applications! Geniuses…
They wanted me to adapt a financial reporting and budgeting system that I’d done on the Qantel systems, for their systems, which I did, I also set up a special deal to help their customers which were mostly title companies. They wanted to use laser printers for all their reports and stuff, but HUD required a 2-page legal-size closing document for each transaction, which was only available on a set of 2 2-part forms using carbon copy. So their customers usually wound up having to get a separate dot-matrix printer just for that form, in addition to a laser printer for everything else. They didn’t like the cost, or the noise, or the taking-up-space…
At first they wanted me to make it so a scanned copy of the HUD document was fed into the laser printer, and then the numbers added. But that was very impractical: at that time the scanned image was a couple megabytes, which would have meant upgrading the laser printer memory a LOT – which wasn’t cheap – and since they were using serial interface (with multi-port cards like Bluebird), it would have taken quite a while to load the form each time it was used. Seems like a couple hours, I don’t remember now; and during that time nobody else could use the printer!
I asked them why they didn’t use the HP Laserjet line-drawing set, which never occurred to them even though it’s right at the back of the Laserjet manuals. :-) Apparently even with that, they had no clue. Anyway I measured out the HUD form, worked out line-drawing commands to lay out the boxes and stuff and fill in the regular text, which didn’t require additional printer memory and was very quick. Once loaded into the printer, the document outline was “called” as a “subroutine” by the program that prints the document (laser printers can do a lot of weird stuff), so it laid out the form, and then just dropped in the numbers same as before. :-) Those printers can also detect what size paper/tray is inserted, so when that document was to be printed it would wait for the legal tray. Once finished it waited for the regular paper tray to be returned.
I’m not sure how happy their customers were about that or how much money it saved them, but I’m confident both were “quite a bit.”
Speaking of laser printers, at another place I did some consulting work, I didn’t know it in advance but one of the salesmen who had been with the Qantel place before, had switched jobs there a little earlier. (That place used Basic/4 systems.) For doing their sales proposals and stuff, for some reason they really wanted to use “bullet points” in their documents. But they couldn’t get the laser printers to do it.
When the sales guy found out I was there, he told them more or less, “ask HIM to do it, I’ve worked with him before, he can make a computer do anything!” And I did. :-)
The problem was, the “bullet point” symbol wasn’t included in the regular document printing character set, it was only available in… “math and symbols” or something… But like I wrote previously, laser printers can do a lot of weird things, if you know how. And like with the “document subroutine” before, laser printers keep track of their current font and stuff, in interesting ways. Like a “subroutine stack.” So you can temporarily “call” a different font – or type size, etc – and then “return” to the previous settings, without knowing what the previous font was: the printer remembers!
So to make the “bullet point” available, I coded it as a multi-character character, which ordered the printer to “call” the “math and symbols” font, do the “bullet point,” and then “return” to previous settings. Easy-peasy. And since only the character set changed, if they had been printing headings in a bigger type size or in bold or something, the bullet-point was bigger or in bold too. :-)
Okay, I’ll be quiet now. :-) Just nice to swap stories with someone who has a similar technology background, or something.
I programmed one of these in high school:
DEC clearly had the edge over HP, heck, over everybody, in industrial design.
The HP had a decent industrial design, but clearly wasn’t meant to use used much with the switches. The bat-handle switches on most PDP-8 models (except for the 8/i) were wonderful for that. The 8/e style suffered from having a single area of register lights, which were switched to different purposes, rather than showing them all at once like the 8/l did.
I see that HP only had two rows of indicators too. You can’t tell much from that, if you’re trying to do front-panel-switch or other machine-language programming.
As far as great looks though, I think the winner has to be the PDP-12. Those beauties had a light on the front for just about everything! And could start a tape-based operating system with just two front-panel operations. I had a few in storage for starting a computer school, along with a bunch of other stuff (including a dual-KL10 mainframe system from Intel and a 2065 from Columbia University) before my medical disability began and I couldn’t work and lost all the storage.
And that TV tube on the front, was that a CRT monitor? No, it was a big OSCILLOSCOPE! Displaying text/numbers like in that photo, meant DRAWING the characters, dot-by-dot!
Oh, and those LGR unboxing/unpacking videos on youtube are pretty cool! He gets some amazing stuff.
Oh contraire! Those black squares are *touch switches*. No moving parts, you just touch them lightly with your finger and they alternately light up or turn off.
So you can just swipe your finger over the 16 bits to complement the value.
I’ve never seen that anywhere else.
Pretty nice!
The DEC industrial design style seems, to me, right out of Kubrick’s 2001. The white plastic bezels, the fonts.
I’m not completely sure which came first.
So nice to finally see and hear you She. I really enjoyed the interview.
Okay nice feature, but that doesn’t make it easy to use for front-panel/machine-language programming. It’s much more useful to have immediate, obvious, and even physical indication of the switch positions, which you get from the paddle switches.
“Complementing” those touch-switches might be easy, but if you want to set them all to 0, for example (or all to 1) you’d have to go to each one and either touch it off if it was on, or leave it alone. (Or, vice reversa.) With the paddle switches you can do THAT with a sweep of the hand. (Either way.) Setting the starting-address to all 0 or all 1 was easy, and 7777 (all 1s) was the starting address of the program-loader. Meanwhile I can’t think of a single instance where easily-complementing the switch settings would have helped me at all.
They were metal. :-)
Certainly; operation by feel is really nice.
Nonetheless, it was a cool feature. And, in practice, it worked really well.
Now, HP, at the time, was not really in the computer biz. They were in the instrumentation biz, and they got into computing through the needs of automated testing. Likewise, automated testing drove their development of pen plotters, which eventually evolved into their printer biz.