Defunct computers from days of yore

[sonia]

Lots of days left in December if you want to add a question or prompt! Or you can ask any time of year, really.

jesse_the_k asked

What was your first computer?

Did you teach yourself how to use it and/or program it?

My first computer was an Amiga 500, purchased as a grad student around 1990. I mostly used it to dial in to the Berkeley campus network and get my email, and to play many hours of dungeon video game Larn, which I just learned is available in a browser simulation, but I'm going to pretend I didn't see that.

If I remember correctly, the computer had one (1) whole megabyte of memory because I got an expansion card. Or maybe that was the disk drive. Very small numbers compared to what we can get nowadays, in any case.

I guess I taught myself how to use it? Mostly I applied what I had learned on school computers, so it didn't feel like teaching myself. No world wide web back then to look up problems and error codes.

I did my programming on Sun workstations on campus, and I don't remember doing any programming on the Amiga. It had its own operating system, AmigaOS, which I just found out is still maintained by Hyperion Entertainment.

Amigas were great machines that did not deserve to die out. I chose it because of some campus incentive or maybe a friend had one - I don't remember the details but I didn't do an extensive analysis or comparison shopping. It did what I needed it to do, in any case.

I replaced it a few years later when I won a ThinkPad laptop at a computer trade show. I had dropped my business card in a jar, and the person who called me to tell me I won had great difficulty in convincing me they weren't a spam call. Lo and behold, a laptop did arrive in the mail! I really liked the little nubbin of a mouse pointer embedded in the keyboard.

Comments

[thistleingrey]

1 MB sounds about right for RAM-including-expansion then. 640 KB: enough for anyone. :)

[sonia]

Thanks! Interesting to notice how the details have gotten fuzzy over the years. I guess it's been a while!

[silveradept]

I never got to experience a lot about Amigas, but everyone who has says they are wonderful computers, and from the preservation efforts of the operating system and programs, it seems like there general consensus is that Amigas are wonderful computers.

(A whole 1MB of RAM. That would have been a luxury to work with. And remind me of the nostalgic stories I told of computers past in a previous December Days.)

[jesse_the_k]

I've never seen an Amiga F2F. It does sound like a wonderful machine, and the preservation efforts are impressive. (As an Apple II Developer, we were in the line for the first Macs, so sisters in 68000-hood.)

The little nubbin pointer was a brilliant idea!

So your formal programming instruction was pre-internet? Did you work with mainframes or minis?

[sonia]

I enjoyed your nostalgic computer stories!

[sonia]

Yay for early Macs! My college roommate had one with a tiny screen, and an editor that didn't repaginate, so if I deleted a paragraph early in a paper, I had to move everything up by hand.

My education was pre world wide web, which debuted in around 1994, but not pre-internet/ARPANET, which debuted a lot earlier than I thought, around 1970. Johns Hopkins (JHU), where I went to undergrad, had some timeshared mainframes with terminal access running VM, VMS, and Unix (named jhuvm, jhuvms, and jhunix respectively), and I remember we had to do some tasks with a PDP-11 simulator.

There were computer rooms with ranks of terminals on tables, kind of like open offices today. On a terminal keyboard you had to hit BREAK (pause) RETURN RETURN RETURN in a particular rhythm to get a login prompt. Funny how some things stay with me...

Our student accounts had email access, but we had to know which computers talked to which other ones to reach the recipient's computer. It looks like DNS has also been around longer than I thought, but I remember being surprised and impressed when email@domain.com could reach someone automagically without having to know the path between here and there.

bang paths!

[jesse_the_k]

I didn't learn about them until sometime-in-pandemic*, when I inhaled Keith Houston's book Shady Characters: The secret life of punctuation symbols and other typographical marks.

That's where I read about Ray Tomlinson's insight in 1971: there was a little-used character ripe for the deploying--most of that chapter is hosted for free at Houston's blog. Also pilcrows!

Houston's next work, The Book is somehow even better.

* Have you encountered a useful phrase that evokes the confusion of the last three years? The Grand Pause? Borrowing from the Sherlockians, The Hiatus?

[jesse_the_k]

...and speaking of muscle memory, I spent a long autumn working as an LTE keypuncher in the state of Wisconsin's student loan division. I was the computer tape librarian, documenting the movement of open reels from the tape-drive cabinets to the rails where they hung like bats.

Wisconsin no longer provides student loans, of course.

Re: bang paths!

[sonia]

Those posts on the @ sign are great! Thanks for this whole invitation to poke at internet history. Yes, bang-paths, fondly remembered. :-) Apparently there's still a spot for them in packet headers. I was chatting about bang paths with some young programmer at a meeting who was enlightened about what that vestigial header line was for.

I tend to say "during lockdown" for the time period when many of us stayed home. I correct myself firmly if I slip and say, "during the pandemic," since of course we are still in the middle of all that, much as people want to pretend we aren't.

[sonia]

Wow, that's cool! Documenting the tapes, and that they hung like bats, that is. Not cool that Wisconsin doesn't provide student loans anymore.