

Ask HN: Computer nostalgia - tonteldoos

After spotting numerous &#x27;Learn To Code (tm)&#x27; articles today, I&#x27;m in a nostalgic and reminiscent mood.<p>What fond memories do HNers share of their early computer days (especially if you&#x27;re over 30).<p>Mine include learning to power up our first IBM PC XT and start FriendlyWare (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Friendlyware), before I could read (involved detailed handwritten instructions from my dad, and matching up keyboard keys).<p>Oh, and only being &#x27;allowed&#x27; on the computer for an hour a day :P
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danelectro
I always wanted to get to be over 30 so I could gain enough respect to do
advanced things that were always discouraged for youngsters back home where
most people have always been over 65.

Well, in 1982 when the IBM PC was not very popular yet (under 50,000 sold) and
non-businesses were still using their Commodores and Ataris, I decided to
improve my programming abilities and build a small game for my Atari 400.

Earlier with arcade games I never thought Pac-Man was very interesting, but
when Centipede appeared I liked it because of its trackball interface. I guess
I'm just what they would nowadays call a natural UI/UX guy.

When the 400 came out it was attractive since it was not just a game console
like the earlier 2600, but a full computer that also played some of the same
games from its own series of cartridges which were more advanced than the 2600
anyway. BASIC programming was also available in cartridge form.

I wanted my own home computer mainly to continue the machine-learning I had
pioneered a year earlier during the Houston oil boom where I had procured
expensive Hewlett-Packard benchtop oil & gas analyzers at my employer, but was
having more breakthroughs developing "software" than I was on the hardware. It
was a petroleum engineering laboratory startup where I was operating the
instruments in the lab during the day, then writing code at night by hand on
paper, to be typed into the terminals at work once the module was complete.

After the crude oil & gas (exploration & production) boom went bust, I was
luckily able to move to a traditional employer, who was in the refined
products (fuel & petrochemicals) measurement & testing field. This was a
100-year-old service corporation, not a research place.

Anyway, even Apples and the new IBM PC's were not powerful enough for my
former pursuit, but after they came out with a Centipede cartridge for the
400, I decided to get one, plus since I was employed I figured I could afford
a trackball in addition to the joysticks that came with the Atari.

To code my first game I did not expect to be able to achieve very fast action,
which was dependent on machine language, since I was just using Atari BASIC.
So I settled on "MasterMind" which I selected for its pure logic base and its
particular two-user operation where only one participant at a time is the
actual player, and the "opponent" merely qualifies the player's progress among
successive determinations against a hidden pattern. To emulate the "opponent",
the computer would select the hidden pattern at random and provide feedback to
the player, reducing it to a one-player puzzle.

All I had was the 400, the BASIC & Centipede carts, the trackball & joysticks,
plus a fairly good Atari reference book. I had to leave the 400 powered on all
the time since I had no data storage, but eventually got the Atari cassette
after it became affordable.

Trying to make the most of the hardware I had, I ended up with an intuitive
point & click, drag & drop, player scenario using the trackball in a way that
years later would be very common once the computer mouse appeared for Apples &
PC's, and especially after Windows came out and became popular because of
pointing & clicking.

Meanwhile, like most employers, mine was more interested in status quo rather
than maximum utilization of resources, but I became informed that they were
going to embrace computers first in the tank calibration department. I was in
chemical analysis but I knew the ASTM calibration manual fairly well and
thought this was an excellent choice, there were geometric calculations based
on physical properties & measurements, with a resulting report tabulated into
an 11x17 inch chart having entries in fine print for each depth of fluid that
was to be inventoried in that tank each time for the following decade. It was
text output, looking like a spreadsheet, but these were traditionally reduced
from a blueprint master which the cells had been typed in with a manual (non-
electric) typewriter having a special wide-carriage.

I was naturally disappointed when I found out the project had already been
underway since before I was hired, an established Northern consulting group
was doing the work, they were being paid over $100,000 and already delayed
well beyond the target date.

You can only imagine my feelings after the project was finally delivered and I
found out from the calibration guys how they thought it was quite a time-
saver.

They loved the way it printed the final charts in fine print using the new-
fangled 17inch wide PC printers without having to go through the
typewriting/blueprinting process.

But the raw data entry, calculations, output, and manual typing of final data
into each cell was still done by hand.

The consultant had merely provided a replacement for half of what the
typewriter was doing, the mechanical printing function of the typewriter, but
not even the hand keying :-\

there's more but that's enough for now . . .

~~~
tonteldoos
Speaking of printing...who remembers those early tractor fed dot matrix
printers released about the same time as the PC XT?

------
greenyoda
Writing an assembler in PL/1 that used up a whole box of punched cards (I
think there were 2000 cards to a box). This was for a class project in my
first year of college.

Using Unix for the first time on a PDP-11 and seeing how much nicer it was
than the IBM mainframe operating systems of that era. Later being trusted with
root on that machine.

Learning C and Pascal simultaneously to write a Pascal compiler in C using Lex
and Yacc (another college class).

Writing code for a 6800 microprocessor with only 512 bytes of RAM (with the
instructions entered on a hex keyboard).

Hacking an IBM operating system to be able to read files that I wasn't
supposed to be able to read. This involved disassembling (by hand) one of the
system programs and changing one of the machine instructions to make it an
unconditional branch.

Writing code for one of the first IBM PCs.

Getting my first e-mail address with an "@" in it - on the Arpanet (precursor
to the internet) in 1982.

(Yeah, I'm well over 30.)

------
vtd
In 2003 our school still had a class with old machines what should boot from a
ROM into some BASIC environment. I was actively reading books on computers at
that moment, however, without any access to the hardware, so I was using any
available option to walk into that room and to fix errors in someone's code.
Then we started learning graphics, and I actually tried to draw something on a
sheet of paper with 1x1 mm cells and then code it by putting points in these
places. Other folks did strange things too --- the pixels in the displays were
not exactly square, so someone tried to make a circle out of points, adjusting
them so that it looked more round than the standard one.

A year after the school bought about a dozen Windows machines and the fun was
over (just until we figured out some ways of obtaining admin rights there and
doing strange things like renaming all computers to what look like "COMP-12"
(all these letters are present in the Russian locale, so unique same-looking
names are possible)).

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notduncansmith
I'm not over 30 (turned 21 this year) but I do have some rather fond memories
of breaking, and subsequently fixing, my family Dell running Windows 95. I
used the internet, but not for anything major. I mostly just explored the
computer, learned how it worked, and practiced my creative writing in early MS
Word.

I did write some batch files really early on, thanks to my dad's answer when I
asked how the computer worked: "It's just a bunch of text files". After that,
I didn't do much other than explore networking stuff at school (and use the
school's LAN to distribute games, but I was 12 at this point and well into the
2000's).

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mparrett
There are so many good memories to choose from. The other day I played some
random 4k video on YouTube. I then remembered the library computer at my
elementary school. It had Encyclopedia Britannica on CD which included
mindblowing minutes of video clips the size of postage stamps. MULTIMEDIA!

------
NameNickHN
Around 1990 I wrote Basic programs on an Amiga 500 that moved sprites, draw
lines etc.

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goshx
installing Age Of Empires from 24 floppy disks and it failing in the last one.

~~~
tonteldoos
Hah! Or sitting up all night to download the 7 stiffy shareware Quake (I) on a
28.8kbps modem, and having it disconnect on the last file.

------
waterfowl
Microsoft Golf on 3.1(I was probably 3 or 4)

~~~
tonteldoos
Microsoft Flight Simulator on same wasn't half bad either...

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tonteldoos
One word: BBSs

~~~
mparrett
That sweet sound.

