Guns and Guts

My Love of the Machine

December 5th, 2008

Once again Borepatch has inspired me to write something. He posted a picture of an old IMSAI 8080 in his appropriately titled Retro Tech post.

This is the personal story of my love and hate of technology. I have been messing around with these gizmos for nearly my entire life now, right at twenty five years. That thought is almost unbelievable to me. Having been a part of the first generation with computers in their home, is a unique experience in history. Having a computer at home was not a fact of life like it is now of course. They were not rare necessarily, but in 1982 they surely were not an everyday household item.

That was the year that my journey began. This post will cover my early years of being exposed to this glowing gadget of utter fascination. Later, I will discuss my years long hiatus from the computer world, and my rediscovery. For now, we look only at the early years.

One day when I was in the second grade or so, my parents brought home a strange box. It looked like a TV with what turned out to be a couple of floppy drives and a keyboard. Someone at work had given them this machine. It immediately perked the interest of my seven year old mind.

After setting it up, and turning it on my father could not get the box to do a damn thing. He had a box full of disks that the company he worked for had used for various purposes, but he was unable to get them to do anything. All he could do was type on the screen of the computer. After messing with it for about five minutes he gave up. Cautiously asking if I might have a chance to interact with this possible oracle, he said it was a waste of time, but that as long as I didn’t break it, he did not care if I messed around with it.

So there I sat for about an hour typing random stuff into this machine, and was equally unable to get any form of response. Over the next several months my intrigue led me to explore the fairly large programming manual that came with the machine. Amazingly GIS had a picture of the manual. My very first programming manual. Seeing it brings back so many good memories.

That is right folks, my first foray into the larger world of computing was confined to the realm of a 48k TRS-80 Model III Micro Computer.

This big heavy brick of a machine was not new tech at the time I started messing around with it. The model III was an upgraded version of the Model I. It had more memory (a whopping 48k), a faster processor (a z-80 heh), and mine came with two internal floppy drives. This was the hot rod version and cost about $2,500 new.

I never understood how to get the drives to work, so for about a year I simply typed in the applications in the book, or made up my own. Once the power supply was turned off, they were gone. This led to me plotting on ways to end my sister one day. After about ten hours of laboriously inputting the BASIC code for a graphical chess game, I took a break to get something to eat. My sister took the opportunity to run over to the computer and turn off the power supply. She didn’t know how to use the computer, but she knew that it would not save anything, and that my labor would be in vane.

She purposefully ruined my project. After all that work, I never even got to see it run! It was obvious that she must be punished for her treacherous act of technological sabotage, but my parents intervened before my revenge could be exacted. After this depressing episode, my soul could not bear typing all the information again, so chess was never to be played on my beloved trash-80.

After about a year of this, I was introduced to the wonderful Commodore 64 at school, and a friend that lived down the street had one. This is where the concept of a disk operating system was picked up. This was the missing link! If only there was an available DOS for my computer, I could save all the wonderful little BASIC programs I had been coding up until that point!

About this time my Dad decided to use the computer for bookkeeping purposes for his small company. He bought something akin to QuickBooks, and set out to install it. Hours later he called their tech support line, and was told that he needed TRS-DOS to mount the drives so that the accounting software could be loaded. Upon hearing this news, we made the journey to the mall to the local Radio Shack. They did not have a copy that was compatible with our ancient machine. This was probably in 1984 or so, and they tried to sell my Dad their latest computer, which I of course was in full support of. He chose to order the magical disk instead and a few weeks later this bit of wonderment arrived.

Finally, I could actually save my programs, and run them whenever I wanted. Mwahahahahah! My world was complete. All I had to do was leave the TRS-DOS disk in the primary floppy, and boot up the computer. It loaded DOS, and allowed me to access my other drive. This jubilee only lasted a short time, as I got more and more into the Commodore 64.

The Com 64 was so much more than the lowly Trash-80. It was newer tech, and had a color screen! There were tons of games available, and I had dozens of them stored on my precious collection of 5.25″ floppies. A friend at school and myself were the local computer nerd contingent. We spent every moment we could in the library glued to the screens of our technological wonders. We also became the school’s tech support. We did not realize it at the time, but we were indeed computer dorks of the highest order. Who else smuggled illicitly gotten games into the school in our backpacks? We each had a hard case that held ten floppy disks, and they were our prized possessions at the time.

The school administrators did not approve of normal video games being played on their hardware. The only software available at school for the Commodore’s consisted of lame math and reading learning games. Our wonderful librarian at the time, turned a blind eye to our shenanigans. I begged and begged for a Commodore for Christmas. Santa was asked as well, but it was not to be. I was stuck with my crappy TRS-80 for several years.

I lived vicariously through my friend’s machines, found occasional software and stuff for my 80, and got addicted to my NES for a couple of years. We played all kinds of games on their old 64s. There were lots of text based role playing games, and tons of D&D stuff on the Commodore.

Finally, sixth grade came along and my parents bought a Tandy 1000 TX. This was quite the machine for its time. It boasted a flaming hot 80286 processor, even thought the machine was still only 8 bit. There was generous memory to be used as the wonderful device had 768 KB of memory I believe. The TX was a nice machine. It came not only with 3.5″ and a 5.25″ floppy drives, but also included a whopping 10 MB hard drive. I remember thinking that I would never fill that thing up.

The neat thing about the Tandy was that it had DOS built into its ROM, so it booted without a boot disk and was very fast in doing so. The computer came with Lotus 123, and Deskmate. Deskmate was a neat little attempt at a graphical interface with several tools built in. You could draw pictures in a paint app, compose simple music if you had a sound card, keep a calendar, and several other features.

My main purpose for the machine was of course computer games. There were tons of games for these things. Some favorites I remember include the King’s, Space, and Police Quest lines. My favorite game for it was Silent Service II. It was the last good submarine game I played. That is pretty sad considering that was about twenty years ago.

Chuck Yeager’s flight simulator was another big favorite of mine. You could fly so many different planes in that game. It spanned the years between the Sopwith Camel, and the F-18. There were all kinds of fighters, cargo, commercial, and experimental aircraft to play with.

This reminds me of another blast from the past, the keyboard overlay. Heh. These were card stock cutouts that fit over your keyboard. They had notes on them to remind you what action was tied to a certain button. There was no mice to use, so you had to make as much use of the keyboard as possible. They were neat items and there was a different one for each game.

The Tandy had 16 color video graphics. This was awesome for the time of course. My friends and I all copied each other’s games and game manuals. At that time the only way a company could keep you from copying their software was to, make you enter some word contained at a random place in the manual every time you ran the software. We got around that by photocopying the manuals of course.

Well that covers the first part of my technological adventures. Next time, we will talk about my time away from computers in high school, and my reacquaintence after high school.

Categories: Life, Tech | Tags: geekery