The IBM 4331 processor (the long box the size of a small kitchen counter) had 512K of memory. The twin IBM 3310 disk units in the corner each had about 64M of storage. The IBM 3277 terminals displayed green text on a black screen.
I was at a tweetup at the Village Cafe and Sweet Shoppe last night and a few of us geeks started talking about the computers that introduced us to the careers we would eventually have. It was a fascinating conversation, and nostalgic in a way. Some of us had similar backgrounds and some very different, and some of us discovered we lived within striking distance of each other in the Silicon Valley and didn’t even know it. (Not unusual for the Valley.) We were all kindred spirits.
I thought it might be fun to start a conversation where we offer up the computing machines that shaped our careers and lives. I’ll start with mine.
Early in my freshman year at Pomona College in 1979, I was bored one night (meaning I really didn’t want to study) and started exploring Oldenborg, the dorm I lived in that year. I came across a room that wasn’t usually open, that had two mainframe terminals in it, one connected to an IBM 4331 and the other to a DEC 10. My discovering that room on that night was a defining moment in my life, and probably determined the course the led me to where I am today.
I spent my college and early career years in and out of machine rooms like this one. (Photo: Bob Resnikoff)
Every spare moment I had (and some that weren’t so spare) I was in the machine room in the math building. I even got a part time job there so I’d have access 24/7. What really hooked me was when I discovered the Colossal Cave Adventure game. I played that game for hours on end, and eventually got curious about how it was created, which led to my learning Fortran and IBM Assembly Language. That knowledge led to my first real job after graduation, at Syncsort in New Jersey, in 1983, where I worked with updated models of the same mainframes.
Apple IIe with a color display.
Around graduation time, an Apple IIe came into my possession. Around that same period, my dad got a Commodore 64. Being a mainframe geek at the time, these “toy” computers were enchanting. They taught me BASIC and introduced me to graphical games. I remember spending many of my weekends in New Jersey tinkering with my Apple machine—installing a hard drive (my first ever that was smaller than a washing machine), giving it more memory, a color display, etc. I balanced my checkbook using an early version of Quicken on that machine, and it helped plan my wedding several years later, after moving with me to the Bay Area.
Commodore 64
The Mac vs. PC wars were in full swing by the time I took a job with Amdahl in Sunnyvale, California in 1989, but I largely ignored them because I was in the throes of acquiring Unix by way of SPARCstations from Sun Microsystems. Amdahl was a mainframe company, IBM’s largest competitor back in the day, but the engineers needed a way to run several mainframe systems from separate windows, thus the Sun gear, with X-Windows.
By this time, getting into the guts of machines, pulling boards, replacing hard drives and such was second nature to me and all in a days work, so building my first PC was a natural progression. Not that I had anything against Macs, but at that stage in my geek development, I didn’t care much about “easy to use.” I was more fascinated with “fun to build.”
Sun SPARCstation IPC
During my Netscape years, I had to be ambidextrous. The browser behaved differently on Unix vs. Windows vs. Mac OS, and I had to switch among those without thinking, so it didn’t really matter to me what I was using, though I stuck with the PC line for personal use because I’d become fascinated with Linux several years before, when it was still being distributed on floppies.
Now, in my present day life, the majority of my computing happens in a browser, or some Web based application, and my iPhone and iPad have become almost as important to me as my laptop or desktop. I still need a conventional computer, but aside from applications like Photoshop or Lightroom, or the ability to have several large displays, I do most of my computing in the cloud, so I see myself moving away from those more and more in the near future.
So… your turn. What’s your computing history?
I love this, Peter! Its a great bio!
My Dad worked for IBM in the 70′s, 80′s and part of the ’90′s. I remember him telling me that the memory that was on a ZIP disc (remember those) 100MB, was so remarkable, because it the ’70′s had he sold that much memory, it would have been worth an entire year’s commission. He sold those mainframes that so inspired you and told stories that so inspired me. I also remember him telling me that someday, no one would carry cash and that someday, every family would have desktop computers.
I got my first computer in 1994, it was an IBM laptop, and I carried it with me to school to write papers and take notes. The damn thing weighed more than an average college text book, but I didn’t care because I was so determined to use it. Right about this time just about everyone was writing their college papers on computers, but most students were using the computer commons. I still had to go there to PRINT my papers because I didn’t have an email and neither did my professors. That was probably the last time I was an early adopter. I felt so burned by the limitations of that computer, especially as the age of the internet arrived.
I also fired up AOL for the first time on that veeeeeeeeery slow lap top. But the screen was color, and the internet seemed so exciting and beautiful. I remember getting on the internet for the first time and my boyfriend saying “is that it?!! is that the internet?!” We learned very quickly how to settle disagreements by “going to look it up.” Little did we know what Google was or that it would eventually become a verb!
When I graduated college, I got a desk top for at home. It was an IBM PC and that bad boy lasted me almost 7 years with some up grades. I really used it for too long and asked far too much of it. I played with photo manipulation, and learned the ins and outs of Mircrosoft Office on it. But I also did use it for lots of AOL chat – which if you think about it was the early version of social media. I met people from all over the world many of whom I used to chat with regularly. When I finally upgraded that old beast, I did it with a lap top and a wireless connection.For the first time, I was finally unhooked! I loved it! I could sit anywhere in my house and respond to client emails. About this time I also got my MySpace page, and about a year later, my Facebook profile. I remember thinking that Facebook was really for college students, but that I would at least get my profile. . Ahhh. I could never have imagined then the role that our smart phones would play in our lives. That was 2 laptops and 6 years ago.
Today, I have a desktop, a laptop, a smart phone and soon an Ipad. I no longer have a MySpace page, but I have 2 Facebook profiles (shhhh!) and Facebook Page and a Twitter account not to mention several geolocation accounts. We keep most of our lives on a storage drive and perform most daily activities online in some fashion. I recently had to break down to get a checkbook because my new landlord doesn’t have a PayPal account and I was bent out of shape. I haven’t had a checkbook in over 6 years.
With respect to hardward, its amazing how my needs have changed and evolved. My laptop is the computer that I sit in front of the TV with, cook with, and watch movies on. My trusty laptop will probably be relegated to a dark corner once the Ipad arrives. And surely many other pieces of “needed” technology will find their way to the graveyard too. But I’ll continue to be inspired not just by the elegance and speed of technology but the many ways in which it enhances my life and my relationships.
Thanks for starting this, Peter! I love it!
That’s remarkable that your Dad and I worked with the same equipment back then. In a way, I’m glad I started with that. Few people have actually seen what “core” memory actually looked like before it became something ethereal.
I still use my laptop, even though my iPad is my couch device. I don’t think yours will end up in a dark corner for too long. Tablets haven’t reached that point yet, but I suspect it won’t be long before they do.
Thanks for sharing!
Aloha!
lol too much fun. I totally forgot about zip disks! They were saving us from floppies…
I just remembered that because I worked in the computer center in college, I had access to printers for my papers, so my friends used to hit me up for typing and printing access. If I knew then what I know now, I’d have charged for it! LOL!
Yes, it was amazing to discover such a common experience among us… but then gain it really shouldn’t have been much of a surprise.
I have a BA in math and MS in geophysics. After working as a geophysicist for a couple years when the mining & oil industries crashed, I switched careers sort of and went to work at the University of Arizona Medical Center, the Arizona Cancer Center and the University of Arizona. I was responsible for the operations and systems support of the Digital Equipment platforms (PDP-8, VAX/VMS systems). Being in the education environment meant that we were on the leading of the internet before businesses were really allowed to participate. Eventully I wound up at Cisco Systems in San Jose – spent 15 years with them in numerous positions but I enjoyed my last one the best as a business liason to the IT organization.
Now I own a restaurant on Maui with my husband…
And a great restaurant it is! I’m glad I know where it is now! Thanks for sharing your history. Wish we’d known each other back in the Valley days.
I don’t remember the specifics of my first PC, but I know it was around the fifth grade. My grandfather had a setup in his basement that I used a few times, and our family inherited on of his older machines during an upgrade. We also had Apple IIe machines in grade school, too, and I remember Number Munchers, Oregon Trail, Odell Lake, and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiago.
Back to that first PC, it was DOS based and wasn’t strong enough to run Windows 3.1 at the time. Most of my time was spent learning Q-BASIC, and I wrote a problem that cataloged my entire CD collection at the time. I came up with a concept of storing album titles in one file and then the song titles for each album in a second file (which I later learned was a basic relational database premise). I also spent most of 8 grade honors math writing programs on my TI-81 graphing calculator, including a slot machine, solitaire, and a crude Mandelbrot generator.
I then took a summer school class prior to freshman year of high school to learn HyperCard, and then took more programming classes the rest of high school. Pascal was the trend at the time.
I scored my first laptop senior year and it was 333MHz running Windows 98 (2nd edition, I believe). That’s when I really started getting used to a PC with a GUI and started discovering the Internet and all it’s joys at the time. I started college (DeVry) just 3 weeks after high school graduation, which began with a year of COBOL (snore). Year two featured Visual Basic 5, MS Access, and C++, before taking a course of Java my last course of my 3 year term. It was actually extra credit for making my Java apps to run as applets in web pages that got me working with HTML for the first time, and after doing our senior project in Front Page 2000, I was on my way.
Even then, I know Front Page was awful, and started working on webnelly.com just around graduation from college in 2001. I started a website for my former high school hockey team in 2002, installed the old version of the PHP community forum software my web host at the time and started teaching myself PHP and MySQL. In parallel, I landed a support programmer job in November of 2001 and transferred my separate VB and JSP knowledge to learning ASP and MS SQL. 4 years later I was leading team of developers building eCommerce sites with ASP.NET for some of the largest software publishers in the world. Nice!
My PHP and MySQL work continued as a hobby, and while taking my first formal web design class in 2007 and preparing for a 2nd trip to Maui, I created my first Maui website, and well, the rest has been a giant wave of Aloha and staying on top of the latest tech (which is almost a full time job these days).
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Thanks for the memories, Kris. I forgot about programmable calculators. I had a few along the way. Still have a reverse polish HP 16C somewhere around. You reminded me I loved Pascal too, and I used APL to help with my math problems in college. Not that it made me any better in math.
Mahalo for sharing!
Our first computer at home was an Osborne. Anyone remember those? It was the size of a microwave but was considered “portable” since the keyboard folded up and snapped on to the rest of it and you could carry it around by the handle. But if I remember correctly it weighed a ton! And the screen was tiny, black and green. I remember writing Basic programs on it to make it do cool things (at least I thought they were cool back then) like ask for a password, or spiraling a word over and over on the screen. Ah, the good old days………..
I remember the Osborne. Thanks for reminding me. I loved that thing. It’s amazing what stages of innovation it took to get us here. Mahalo nui, Kendra.
Well, regardless of the risk of dating myself…
Studying for my undergrad in computer science, we had assignments on DEC PDP-11s. The university academic computer system was a Honeywell DPS-7 which I would get to know intimately (little did I know at the time) – programming projects using TSS (equivalent to TSO) in Pascal, LISP; eventually I had a student job as a computer operator for our Honeywell until graduation.
Who can remember ‘the BUNCH’ without looking up on the Internet?
With Bachelors degree in hand, I accepted a job with Honeywell LCPD (Large Computer Products Division) in Phoenix, AZ as a software engineer; I spent the next 18 mos learning to program in GMAP assembler on Honeywell’s GCOS 8 with my eventual job of maintaining the executive modules for DMIV-TP (Honeywell’s equivalent to CICS).
Having had enough of sitting in front of a green-tinted monitor for 9+ hrs a day, twiddling bits in assembler I took what turned out to be the best job of my career in tech – starting out as a Systems Engineer for Apple Computer in the Phoenix sales office; the time I joined was the the intro of the ‘fat Mac’ – the Macintosh 512K. For a couple of years my job was playing with Apple products (Lisa’s, Macs and Apple IIs) and giving sales preso/demos to customers, resellers, user groups – everyone who wanted to hear about Apple. The mid-80s thru early 90s were a high time at Apple and I cherish the memories and great times.
I eventually left Apple in the late ’90s – Apple was having difficult times, Steve had just re-joined as ‘interim CEO (for the next decade or so), the stock price was @ $13 and my options were well underwater. I’ll stop there before tears start welling up whenever I hear about current Apple stock price.
I joined Sun Microsystems on the software/platform side – by this time Sun had transitioned from being a workstation company to a server company timed with riding the huge Internet wave. At the exec level the right things were being said about needing to make the transition to a platform/services company for survivial but that word never got down below the Director and operational level. Long story short – Sun is no more and is now consumed by Oracle. Needless to say, they never successfully transitioned to a platform company even with the promise of Solaris and Java.
So these days it’s all about Web 2.0 (Web 3.0), Cloud Computing, social media, tablets and incredibly smart mobile devices, etc. It’s great to see Apple riding high once again and leading the current wave with ‘insanely great’ products – I’ll always be an Apple fan at heart.
Waiting to see what comes next – The Singularity?
Maraming Salamat, Royce. You’re not dating yourself anymore than I did, which is why I went first! Age before beauty, or some such?
We sure experienced some good times, the both of us. A “singularity” sounds a little too Star Trek to me, but I think we are headed toward something where the user gets more of a say than we ever did. I’m pretty excited.
It’s actually ‘The Singularity’; this is pretty radical thinking but see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity
It has to do with a point in time (near future; 2045?) when technological/computational advances will make a non-organic computer surpass the human brain. It’s pretty sci-fi but we may see it in our lifetimes.
Fascinating. Thanks, Royce. Learn something new every day.
Peter, it kills me that you were playing Adventure at the same time I was (1979), though I was over on Pitzer’s campus (and Scripps – they had a little-known and thus little-used terminal room
). I’d had a little exposure to computers earlier than that, in Jr High in Virginia and even a tiny bit at IS (did you take the “business math” class that had us doing flowcharts and writing short Fortran programs for the mainframe at UP?), but that was my first big introduction.
I didn’t actually take a programming class until a few years later at Lewis & Clark, when I took a FORTRAN class on a whim. Seemed like fun, and then when most everyone else was dropping like flies around me, it occurred to me that maybe this was something I should dig into more. I managed to get a computing center job (24/7 access, as you said!) and access to the old, old ARPA-Net and Usenet (a few years later people were worrying that Usenet was quickly becoming too big, as it was cresting an astonishing 500,000 people worldwide).
My first computer was actually one of the very first Macs — my brother was at Stanford and each student there was allowed to buy one if they wanted at a cut rate price ($1500 instead of $2500 I think?). It was a huge step up over using the school mainframe, even though I had direct access to the only 9600 baud terminal on campus (the student terminal rooms all had 1200 baud terminals).
Before my senior year of college I started working as a programmer for Tektronix, and that really launched my career. I’m honestly not sure when I got my first home PC… must have been in the early 90s. I had had Macs and even an SGI machine before I got a PC (probably a 286?) of my own.
So from Tek to Mentor Graphics — first team to use C++ outside of AT&T, we were told — then into medical computing, UI consulting, and then games. It all makes sense when looking in retrospect, as things do. I’ve been in games now for 16 years. It’s still the area where things move the fastest.
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I remember that little-used terminal room! Or I do now anyway. And yeah, now that I think of it, I do kind of remember flowcharts in high school. Totally forgot about that.
Thanks for bringing back the memories.
Graduating from high school on Maui in 1975 I had little exposure to computers. My dad worked for Lockheed that held the contract on Mt. Haleakala with the Air Force. Having a 20 year career in the navy and then working with Haleakala, my dad was exposed to all sorts of computers, communications and satellite tracking equipment. So when it was time to make suggestions to me for a college path, he encouraged me towards electronics by teaching me the basics and getting me excited about this mysterious realm where unseen electrons could do so much.
After graduating from college in Hilo, Hawaii with a degree in electronics and now knowing enough about repairing TV sets to be dangerous, I set out to repair televisions for condo associations.
The opportunity came for my Father to buy a shop from a retiring owner and we ended up with a two-way radio dealership with General Electric.
Over the next few years my range of repairs went from power tools, golf cart chargers to pagers, two-way mobile and handheld radios, up to repeater stations located on hotels and mountaintop.
After a few years I took over the shop and also began doing some basic computer repair locally. This was done through informal education conducted by Steve Rose in the old Pauwela (Yap) store which became Keoni and Steve’s. I learned enough to be Steve’s eyes and hands in the field. Basically swapping boards for his clients.
This led me to eventually invest $3500.00 in my own computer. Quite a big step at the time, but I used it to produce sales proposals and bookkeeping. I also had my first experience with not backing up, when I lost everything one night while writing a proposal. I still don’t know how much the inadvertently pressed delete key dumped.
While concentrating on radio communications work, the radio became more of a microprocessor and integrated circuit device over time and eventually pretty much a full blown mini computer.
As one of the first to offer cellular telephones on Maui at a time when the yellow pages had never even had a listing for such a thing. I progressed through various types of communications based computers as cellular telephones became smarter devices. I watched as pagers became obsolete and scarce after supporting thousands of them on the island.
I spent a short time doing repairs for AVCO the present Air Force contractor on Haleakala at the time. Here I worked with IBM computers that took up a whole room and had data cartridges a foot wide and shaped like a donut. These were used to communicate to other facilities around the world.
As the years went on I eventually became a technician in a small shop for Maui Electric Co. Here I put my IBM typ computer knowledge to work since Maui Electric had two huge computers set up as a redundant system. This was used just to monitor and control a handful of SCADA (Supervisory Communications And Data Aquistion) terminals located in substations and in control of the grid at those stations.
Today a technician no longer uses tools and tuning equipment, as much as a laptop to do their work on anything from islandwide microwave radio systems to the grid and now SmartGrid controlled system. The SCADA control system also uses computers that are a tenth size today and probably a hundred times more powerful>
This involved repair mainframe computers that some personnel had and now today there is a whole department overseeing the computer that have become individual workstations.
The world of computers has changed significantly in the past few decades and can now be found in almost everypart of our lives from a kitchen appliance to a medical device implanted in a human and we are still in the beginning.
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Mahalo for sharing Jim. The next few years will be interesting for sure.
I’m your age, Peter, and also used a DEC 10 during college. But was only because I had the right friends; the college computer was a PDP 11/70. (“Programmable Data Processor”). The PDP-11 was the device on which I built an interpreter using Macro 11, and also my ADVENTURE maps, which a couple years ago I found, and then lost again.
I’d already learned to program; my high school was lucky to have been gifted an HP 2100, with 8KB of core memory. (Kids, “core” is kinda like DRAM, but expensive and slow and ancient.) The terminal was an ASR-33, of course. I can still smell that faint odor of burning light-weight machine oil!
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I’m amazed how many people played Adventure. It really was a great game. Thanks for visiting and sharing the memories.
Hmmm, not sure I even want to go down this road
Just listing the computers dates me too much:
Did punchcards, paper tape, teletype, and every one fo the VT series terminals
PDP-11 CDC-6600
DG Eclipse Timex Sinclair
Atari 400 & 800 Solbourne
TRS-80 Tautung
TOPS-20
VAX cluster (about every one of them)
MicroVAX HyperCube Macintosh (original)
Cray-1s Intel Delta Macintosh SE
Cray-1m Intel Touchstone PowerMac (power pc)
Cray-2 Sequent Mac Pro (deskside – quad)
Cray XMP MassComp Meiko System
Cray YMP Connection Machine CM2 Kendal Square
Cray C90 Connection Machine CM5 Symbolics LISP
Cray T90 Sun 1-4 Sun E10K
Cray T3D Sun Sparc line (yep, every one) IBM SP2
Cray T3E NeXT Cube More laptops than worth mentioning
Even crazier is when you think about disk drives. I remember paying $10K for 5 MB (yes, megabyte) disk drive for the original IBM PC. It was down to only $2K for a 660 MB disk drive by the end of the 80′s. Pulling platters out of what looked like washing machines that only held 50 MB on the supercomputing end of things. By the earlier 90′s I was dealing with 50GB drives systems that took up an entire 19″ rack used a special connection to the host (hippi) and only cost about $350K on the supercomputing front.
Fast forward to present time – 2.5″ drive, 750 GB capacity, in a portable case and only costs $45 at Frys.
Mike! Dude! You been busy!
Thanks for sharing!
Great post Peter! Very fun to learn about you tech beginnings. I’ll work on getting my story up eventually. Thanks for sharing.
Mahalo Tommy! Looking forward to yours!
When I was in college, the computer was an IBM 360/50, with 512K of main memory and 1 Meg of LCS (large capacity storage – memory 4 times slower than main memory). It had 2314 (29.2 Meg capacity) and 3330 (100 Meg capacity) disk drives, 1401 printers, and a 2501 card reader – that’s right a card reader. We created all our programs on punch cards by typing them on keypunch machines! But that’s nothing – I worked on a DEC PDP-8 that used paper tape and we created our programs on teletype machines. But that’s another story…
Thanks Jonathan! Can’t believe we actually got anything done on those machines.