[vox] Hello from my Atari

Tue Feb 14 11:59:37 PST 2017

Everyone has these cool computer programming stories. I took Pascal on
the Apple II in 1984. I spent so much time trying to write programs that I
swore I would never become a computer programmer and went into Mechanical
Engineering because at least you could move the pencil over a bit to
make it work! Even when I went to college, I was proud that I made it
all the way through college (late 80s and 90s) without buying a computer.

But then the internet came along! That changed everything!

On Tue, Feb 14, 2017 at 05:23:04AM -0800, Bill Broadley wrote:
> 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.
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-- 
Brian Lavender
http://www.brie.com/brian/

"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other
way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

Professor C. A. R. Hoare
The 1980 Turing award lecture