we all know the 80s were great :)
1981 - mid high school
my OWN first computer! No more electronics for ME! Timex Sinclair ZX81
I hooked it to my TV and an old casette deck.
Learned why it's important to have a BACKUP after plenty of retyping.
More RAM
2K was a little cramped.
New 32K battery backed expansion pack.
Bump it even slightly, and FZZZ - reboot.
At least boot time was zero back then.
I learned about "screen memory" - the grid of memory that you could use "poke" and "peek" to set and get the screen characters. Could do 64 x 48 (black and white) block graphics.
Read through TONS of books and magazines.
Learned Z80 assembly language to control ALL. Basic was for wimps. Drew a shrinking square flipped onto the screen memory in FAST mode.
1983 - graduating high school
The Commodore 64 was within my price range.
But I stole it from the Bon Marche, too.
Another BASIC dialect at which i scoffed.
Learned it's 6510 assembly language immediately (a 6502 variant).
Read Compute, C64 Gazette, and Dr Dobbs Journal magazines.
Magazines of the time were REALLY GOOD! (no internet yet.)
Plenty of memory (64K of which, umm, was it 24K was usable)
I learned the different graphics modes and the SID sound synthesizer.
It had sprites, dual mode graphics capabilities via split screens occuring on raster interrupts.
I spent sooo much of my life learning about this machine.
I don't regret it.
I went from the tape drive to the disk drive.
I bought a mouse for it when they came out and scoffed at it. (It's just a lame joystick, right?)
I could finally PRINT stuff!
Fanfold paper with feeder strips on the side to rip off.
I could see my 66 lines of code on a page!
The screen was 24 lines, 40 columns - eye MURDER.
1984 - University of Washington - aiming for Computer Science major
I got IN! It was big and fancy and I felt pretty proud of myself. But I was lost in a sea of people I didn't know. (and would never know - too shy.)
Summer job in Cordova, AK
flipping fish onto the 1 lb can line. All Summer :(
16 hour days filled with smelling fish, standing up, not much else. Got to see a glacier up close.
did this for 4 summers. Worked at burger places between.
There were a lot of Mormons. We discussed atheism at length.
VAX computers...
Interesting, but was not a fan. The weird terminals were terrible. At least it kept each edit of a file as a new version.
Pascal, then Modula 2
Had to do commenting and modularizing which I did not see the point of. If it works, it works, right?
OH!! So you can understand it LATER. Good point. I learned the one true way to indent, too.
THEN they brought in the Apple Macintosh. All jaws dropped hard.
I refused to admit that it was better than my C-64. But it was.
But I'd never be able to afford one of those. (Till 1995)
The 20 minutes in computer lab were no thrill. But I had my C-64.
Wrote a text editor: NEd (Nifty text EDitor). All 6502 assembly.
load "*",8,1 booted it up off the floppy disk.
It took about 3K of memory (at $C000)
Wrote cool graphics programs with NEd.
Had a start on music on the C-64, but kind of minimal.
Just playing a melody. Trying out "ring modulation", etc.
Expanded NEd into Ward. (word processor for college papers.)
Mom finally divorced my Dad (his manic depression). Life got a LOT less stressful for me. Manic depression is brutal.
Talked to advisor about majoring in Computer Science. He saw my 3.10 GPA and asked me about majoring in Sociology or some other stupid crap. Good DAY to you sir. I'm a computer programmer. Started SPU.
1986 - Seattle Pacific University
Yeah, this place was costing me hard, but at least they had PCs !! (clones !)
I scoffed at the IBM PC. It was nothing to my C-64!
My courses forced me to use them.
Turbo Pascal was on em! And there were plenty! Like 20-ish.
Turbo Pascal had an editor built right in. And it was FAST!
WAY less hitting ENTER and such.
They had a PDP8 Unix mini that I never touched.
Mr. Tindal filled me in on Int 21.
BIOS interrupts - the way to make MSDOS actually do something.
You could read the disk, write the disk, display text on the screen,
get into GRAPHICS mode...
Learned to make printers do graphics using escape sequences.
HUGE pixel resolution compared to screens.
C
Mr. Tindal introduced me to this new language, too.
Almost as good as assembly language. Turned out to be better.
Took me several years to quit assembly due to my C-64 needing it.
80x86 assembly
Learned it for accessing hardware. But memory was segmented - ugh.
I used it with C to keep my source code more compact.
I learned the graphics adapters of the time: Hercules, CGA, that killer EGA, VGA.
SQL
Took a course or two about SQL. RBase... EeeeYUCK!
Storing data is dumb. Put it in a file and be done with it.
Senior computer science project
Me and 2 other guys wrote a Forth interpretter that actually worked.
TONs of hours of writing and testing it.
Found out testing truly sucks when you've got a deadline.
Job at "Berta-Max"
A small Mom n Pop educational software company.
Owned by Max and his wife, Berta. Best job I've ever had, I think.
got my hands on the infamous Apple II, TRS Color Computer, and IBM PC.
Got hired because I knew the C-64 and an employee.
Apple II was kinda lame and I didn't mess with it much.
Used Turbo Pascal (versions 4,5,6 and 7) on the IBM PC
BASIC on Commodore and Apple.
All hooked to Echo speech synthesizer box.
I spent months piecing together phonemes to make it sound right.
(And building the associated editing apps in Turbo Pascal, etc.)
Built a cool little slinky screen that'd sound out words and such.
Figured out how to make the ibm pc's speaker squeal. Using 80x86 assembly.
1988 - BS Computer Science
and a NEW home computer: Amiga500 - The new love of my life.
Had wrung the C64 dry. Was almost ready to buy a CLONE - horrors!
$600 for the CPU, $400 for the monitor.
Bought TV tuner to see TV on it's monitor.
A =MEG= of RAM! 3.5" disk drive! Mouse and a keyboard like the clones'
Superb graphics and sampled sound better than the Mac.
Amiga could multitask !!
Several modules to the OS. A user interface called Intuition.
Had several sweet graphic modes - defaulting to 4 color 320x200 pixels.
Could do a full 4096 colors 640 x 400 in "hold and modify" interlace mode.
Could split screen and do 2 graphics modes at once
Learned 68000 assembly language - very nice.
Bought Lattice C compiler: $250.
Ran it off floppy for 2 years. Painful.
Saved up BIG bucks required for a hard drive. $600 for 15 Megs!
Rewrite of NEd in C.
Took a looong time to learn the Amiga OS. A loooooong time.
Lots of magazines and books (still no internet.)
This one -sucked- but there were plenty that didn't.
GUI programming sucked. (called "Gadgets" on the Amiga)
Wrote a program called CLIed meaning "CLI in the past tense".
(CLI was the Amiga "command line interface" - dos)
File manager operated by the mouse.
Was jealous after seeing Norten Utilities on the clones.
ARexx
REXX language for the Amiga which i learned just after
coming across it on IBM VM/CMS at my first "real job".
1989 - Boeing
Took me 2 years of searching. Being shy is bad for the job hunt.
My buddy Dwight from church got me in.
Finally made enough to move out into an apartment circa 1991.
Learning how businesses used computers. A big let down...
Mainframes. Databases. EeeeYUCK !!
IBM VM/CMS operating system. (Kid sister to IBM MVS)
Virtual Machine/Conversational Monitoring System - like that means a lot.
IBM's try at being like MS/DOS - very weird.
FORTRAN and COBOL
Learned these at school but hoped to never use them. Nope. Used em.
Oracle 4.
Learned SQL. Pretty stupidly simple. Longwinded like COBOL.
Did not realize that THIS would keep me heartily employed forever.
Network!
After a while I learned that this crappy OS (compared to my Amiga)
=hooked together= lots of users.
Networking was a big deal in the business world.
PROFS was our email system. Everybody hated it, but we were all ON it.
Really got into Oracle's new PL/SQL and this weird IBM VM/CMS.
And REXX was a cool little "batch files on the mainframe" language.
I tried to flee "real" MVS batch files and was mostly successful.
C finally came out for VM/CMS.
I switched our shop over to it as FAST as I could. Took LOTS of convincing!
Compiler had bugs galore.
No square brackets in EBCDIC (IBM's version of ASCII). Had to use "unbroken vertical bar" and "cents sign" chars for [ ]
Rewrote NEd in C for MS/DOS to use it on my PC for editing code. MS/DOS had this wierd "IRMA" software to upload/download text files from pc to mainframe.
Oracle 5 was the (new) backend. VM/CMS "panels" were the front end.
Oracle Forms could be used for front end, but NOT by me - EeeeYUCK.
Went to a lot of Oracle training classes in the 90s.
Oracle had Pro*C, Pro*COBOL, Pro*FORTRAN and Pro*REXX so that your app could embed SQL while showing the UI.
I really liked Pro*Rexx - interpretted code running SQL :) No "pre compile" like the other languages.
Oracle came out with Oracle Call Interface: No precompile, just link!
Wrote a C wrapper around it with built in debugging of the SQL and the GUI (VM/CMS panels, remember?)
I could whip up a database system on VM/CMS so fast.
Got me a raise or 3 :)
My baby was FSS - "factory status system" for Industrial Engineering to
track "jobs behind schedule" across the factory.
Shamefully, it lasted long past the OS being completely obsoleted by PCs.
PC network arrived in the 90s, too. UngermanBass!
PCs and mainframes chattin, printing together, etc.
Wrote some software to use IRMA to
replace our existing mainframe based printing network.
Including graphical charts.
Then I learned of FTP - a PC, Unix, AND mainframe way to transfer files
MS Windows finally arrived - Windows for workgroups (3.1)
I was sceptical. It was glitzy, though. Disliked but grudgingly used it.
While working at Boeing, I finally acquired a =LIFE= (became less shy)
Met some friends. Some of whom were female.
Realized I'd better come across one of these for myself.
All the ones at Boeing were taken.
My sister had a baby girl. I got the bug.
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