First personal computer nostalgia

From: John Tinker <jtinker_at_coin.org>
Date: Sun Nov 26 19:09:57 2000

My very first computer was actually the Heathkit EC-1 from Iowa City that just
traded last week on ebay. When I saw Iowa City in the listing, I wrote to the
fellow, and sure enough, it's a small world. I had purchased it at the
University or Iowa Surplus outlet for next to nothing, maybe $5. I sold it
about 20 years ago for $25. I played with it slightly, but never had any
attachment to it, and hardly knew what it was, at the time.

Next I got a Scelbi 8h. I traded an EKG machine, that I also got from
University Surplus, for it. This has 1k of ram, with an 8008. The very first
kit with a microprocessor. No keyboard, video, paper tape, nothing. And all
entry is via front panel switches. This was my introduction to processors, and
I managed to load a program that made the data lights sweep from left to
right. That was quite an accomplishment, because the "step" switch was so
noisy that it was difficult to load very many instructions without screwing
something up. This machine has 14 I/O connectors that look like octal sockets,
but have 11 pins. My most ambitous project was to wire up a series of
oscillators, hoping to build a music machine.

My next machine was an Imlac PDS-1. I got it at a community auction for $25,
bidding against a guy in farm boots and overalls who couldn't have had the
slightest idea what he was bidding on. I barely did myself. But it had lots of
switches and lights, which were neat. The manuals didn't come with it, but I
picked them up at the Surplus several months later. By then I had bumblingly
erased any resident bootstraps or character generators it might have had in
its 8k of 16 bit core. So I spent about a month writing my own character
generator and keyboard routines. I really got into the guts of this machine
once when it developed a problem with the ALU. It was spread out over 4
boards, 4 bits each, in TTL. I drew the whole thing out and tracked down the
bad chip. It was exhilarating when it finally worked, but it took about 40
hours.

Next I got a Commodore Pet, It had 4k of ram and a tape unit. But I didn't
have it long, because a friend really wanted to give it a try, and I was so
rich in electronic junk that it would have seemed selfish to deny it to him.
Besides, he was a philosopher, so it seemed like outreach to let him toy with
it. He liked it so much that I couldn't ask for it back.

After that, I got my first "real" computer, a Commodore 64. Wow, what a
machine! Totally modern. A electronic friend had wired a torque sensor to a
voltage to frequency converter that plugged into the user port, and convinced
a factory in Ohio that I could solve their statistical quality control
problems for them. So I bought a disk drive at K-Mart, and started
programming.

Soon I upgraded to twice as much memory and greater speed with the C-128.
Years later I traded it for a trap dipole. I miss the C-128, but the dipole is
on my roof to this day.

The same electronic friend had created an infrared thermometer that required a
Motorola 6805 and look-up table to compensate it, but he wasn't into
programming at all. He sort of thought processors were a sort of dishonest
approach to electronic design -- so he had me do it. I borrowed a Compaq
Portable that had an eprom burner board in it, and wrote a 6805 emulator in
BASIC. Another friend had written a cross-assembler for the 6805, also in
BASIC. I became quite fond of the Compaq along the way. Very nice keyboard.
The processor had been upgraded to the NCR V-20 (10 MHz) and the drive
upgraded to 20 Mb from the original 10. I sold my grandfather's baseball cards
(1909 tobacco series) and bought it. It was a career investment, and I was
hoping he would have understood. Along the way I developed a project (Peace
Parts) in Nicaragua during the Reagan war. I was a "sandalista". So I lugged
the Compaq there and back several times. I used it to print mailing labels,
and to write a newsletter.

I know this is a hardware thread, but maybe software comments would be
interesting to some. Database engines were barely available and were
expensive. The mailing labels were produced from a text file that used the
left-most character as a key to the function of any particular line in the
file, so I could have conditional output. I did everything in BASIC. Finally I
bit the bullet and learned dbaseIII. Then I learned Clipper. That lead to
writing a water billing program for a small town in Iowa, then to the
development of state database for industrial recycling, then to a billing
system for MCI, all in Clipper. Last year I designed a "billing verification
system" for a web-based insurance brokerage integrator, and lead the team
effort to construct it, which we did in MS Access.

 Currently I'm self-unemployed and trying to use the time to unload several
buildings worth of priceless antiques. Well, actually they do have prices,
bargains in fact. Just several months ago I got a dollar each for 20 cga
monitors, from a fraternity that wanted to throw them off of their roof so as
to impress new pledges. What could I say? I would have had to pay good money
to take them to the dump.

My greatest regrets along this line would include the drum storage I
disassembled for the motor, and all of the vacuum tube logic cards I pitched.

My collection includes:

Scelbi 8h
Imlac PDS-1
Microkit 8/16
IBM 5110-3
Commodore 8032-32B
Commodore 64
HP-35 calculator
HP-85
Timex Sinclair 1000
TI-74-S
Compaq Portable
Apple IIc
Apple Macintosh 512k
NEC PC-IV
Guidance computer from Minute Man missle (1961)
Received on Sun Nov 26 2000 - 19:09:57 GMT