[vox] Hello from my Atari

[Bill Broadley]

A walk down memory lane ...

In 1978 or so I was tinkering in my dad's computer lab.  Including an IMSAI 8080
(later made famous by war games), a tektronix 4051 (interesting beast with a
vector storage display), and a PDP 11/02.

Yes, I actually toggled in a bootloader in binary on the toggle switches to get
the IMSAI 8080 going.

Not to long after that we built (as in soldered together commodity parts onto a
motherboard) an x86... *before* the IBM pc shipped.  It ran DR-DOS, which was a
port of CPM I believe.  It was years before compaq started competing with IBM
and shipped a basic that didn't require IBM's bios to work and allowed running
99% of basic software (which most software was then).

Still off the internet I did use BB's, and would even *gasp* mail off for
software, trade floppies, etc.  I started programming because wumpus, and star
trek got pretty old.  Back them I played on printed paper... I think 110 baud.
Watching or even listening (*** sounds quite different than "." for klingons on
each scan).  Did eventually upgrade to a hazeltine 1410, although 300 baud on a
screen seemed slower than 110 baud printing.  I guess it was just less dramatic.

Tektronix was based on basic, had lunar lander, land mines, and other similar
games.  Ones that I ended up cheating at, then using them for the basis for my
own programming projects.

The EGA adapter came out, was featured on PC Tech Journal for a VERY low level
review.  I ended up writing the first turbo pascal driver for it, at least that
I ever found on usenet or BB's.

Things slowly progressed, extra ram on ISA cards, Deskview for multitasking,
even tinkered with OS/2.  Tried windows 3.1 (which was clearly just a desktop
like layer on top of dos).  Hated it.

I was in highschool in 1984 or so.  They had some apple IIs in a computer lab.
I had placed out of a typing class (hrm, wonder why), so had room in my schedule
for *gasp* a college pascal course.  One that included a VAX account for mail, a
unix account, and a bitnet account for file transfers.

Suddenly it was quite urgent that I scrape together every penny I had, found an
ad for a VERY cheap 1200 baud modem (hayes modems of the day were the thing to
get, but very pricey, and in the $400 range).   My off brand clone that you had
to assemble yourself was $180.. but worked great.   Upgrading the internet
connection by 4x the bandwidth was pretty dramatic.

Somewhere around there it wasn't hard to read 100% of usenet.  IRC didn't exist,
but there was a similar irc like chat.  The more crafty of us would use bitnet
file transfers to ourselves to avoid disk quotas.

I think that's where I heard of this new OS from Finland.  It was at version
0.11.  I emailed the author about it, asking about the state of the TCP stack,
PPP, and x87 support for X11.  Got a lengthy email back explaining the current
state.  During that week or two linux jumped from 0.12 to 0.95, and I downloaded
the mcc-interim distribution from University of Manchester.  It started with a
boot and root floppy and then 6 more for things like LaTeX, X11, etc.  My mind
was blown when upon inserting the second floppy it said:
  Hit Alt-f2, login, and read the docs and watch the disk full.
Better multi-tasking in the installer than I'd seen any other OS at that point.

Most importantly Linus confirmed the 386DX-40, a 387, linux, modem, PPP and
S3-801 card (with accelerated 2d vectors!) let me run various popular games from
home.  Including nettrek, xtanks, and other multiuser games that were quite
novel for their time.

Suddenly my interest in ham radio for communication was dwarfed by being on the
internet.  One without webpages mind you.  Finger existed, usenet, and bitnet
for chat.  Years later I compiled NCSA mosaic, but at the time the network
component wasn't included by default.  It was designed for hyperlinked documents
from a local disk.

That right around when things got pretty normal.  Web browsers, decent
multitasking, GUI based computing became the norm.  Windows was the ugly ducking
of the group, unreliable, mostly toy like.  Serious computing folks used
decstations, suns, next, SGIs, etc.  Linux was already competing pretty well
though, even a 486dx2 66 started running real world benchmarks again much more
expensive unix boxes.