American as Apple π: Defragging the First 35 Years of Personal Computing
On this, the occasion of the 35th birthday of personal computing — or rather — the 35th anniversary of the birth of the Apple I computer, I bugged my friend Craig of @S33Light to recount some of his personal computing history for my hinternetz. I often enjoy these anecdotes from him, but I thought others could too & his story is as American as (techy) Apple Pie.
Below, I’ve edited his piece freely, bolding my favorite parts, placing some content into footnotes & adding pics and my commentary as I pleased. Hope you enjoy! //
I had been exposed to computers before anyone else I knew. The first time was in the mid 70s when my friend’s dad had brought home a briefcase with an acoustic coupler modem and a printer in it. He showed us how to put the phone receiver in the rubber cradle and dial the 800 number for it to connect. You knew it was connected when the printer began spewing type out on a roll of paper. I grew up with an electric typewriter in the house so the keyboard was familiar, but it was interesting to me that this one provided only plastic to tap rather than a small steel hammer snapping down with a life of it’s own. I don’t remember a screen, but I remember playing ELIZA and Lunar Lander on it for several hours on a couple of occasions.
In 1977, I had never heard of ‘Silicon Valley’ or Apple computers. I recall watching the premiere of Star Wars at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood [1] that summer.Had I known that somewhere in Northern California, the real science fiction future had been born in the form of 200 brand new Apple 1 computers 18 months earlier (on April 11, 1976), I would probably have run away from home to see what those guys were up to — that real life Star Wars adventure they were beginning.
Later on, I watched my friend load a program from a cassette recorder into his dad’s computer [2]. It was a regular cassette recorder and you could hear it making modem noises during the 20-45 minutes to load a programs like Scott Adams Adventures from a LOAD prompt…if you were lucky.[3]
Shortly after, in 1980, computers began showing up in school. My middle school had a couple of TRS-80s and an Apple IIs. Only the alpha geek math students seemed to have access to the TRS-80s, which seemed less impressive than the steel blue painted homemade Ohio Scientific Challenger. The TRS-80s seemed like Christmas presents: plastic with ribbon connectors. One time I was playing with one of the Trash 80s and I wrote a line of code that kept checking the memory. Just something like FOR I = 1 to FREEMEM: PRINT I: NEXT I. I watched the numbers scroll down and down, decrementing actual memory until it went down to zero and then crashed. Lame, hilarious & unexpected. [4]
I had no idea that a year later, I would have my own Atari 800 computer, and would be playing, hacking, and writing games and adventures. We’d prank call people with a speech synthesizer program on five inch floppy. [5] We’d write Robelaisian adventures about our middle school, fight over the good joysticks, pirate hundreds of great games, follow esoteric copy protection breaking workarounds, edit disk sectors in hex. The world was my digital oyster. [6] What Apple II had been to the TRS 80, the Atari was to the Apple. It had better sound and color, graphics, and games, although Apple had become the standard. Every game came out for Apple, only some for Atari.
By the time the Macintosh came out, I was well into high school and the big thing at that point was the mouse, and graphic printer. It was surprising that they had seemed to have gone backwards in terms of being black and white, but wow, they were fast and had a lot of memory - a full MEGABYTE. The Macintosh had cool 3.5 inch floppys - very elite techno cred: crisp, miniature. Floppy disks were always cool and computery, because only computers used them, but these were really science fiction with a practical edge. Impressive. The whole thing was undeniably impressive. Mouse, built in monitor (no tv switchbox), the Japanese-esque iconic/ modular style. Good stuff. A little less inviting for teenage hi-jinx, but you know, you can’t have everything.
It would be ten more years of computer upgrades and Macintoshes, graphic design, desktop publishing. Ten years watching Apple get better and better but less and less popular compared to the rising beast of Windows-PC. What happened to Apple was just like what happened to Atari. The creative fun platform got beaten down by the more aggressive, business-friendly marketing. But even on the eve of the internet, in 1992 and 1993, we had no idea of what was right under our noses. I was working in TV Media buying and we went to a convention which was focused on the new revolutionary media happenings: what was being called Interactive Television, promising to combine ‘your telephone, your computer, and your tv.’ There was already email, and there had been for a few years, but people just used it at work mainly. It was part of the wave of business accelerations that came out of the late 80s, with FAX machines, Federal Express, and Cellular phones - all boring and made for the work that required them. [7]
I’ll never forget listening to repeated demos and pitches on the coming revolution: on-screen interfaces will be the future! you can can order a pizza from your computer! Browsers (or search engines) were not mentioned. Even after Netscape and Yahoo, then Ebay and Amazon, the promise of actual functioning ‘Broadband’ was a remote Santa Claus living only in imaginations. There were years of trying to squeeze extra bandwidth out of [8] modem hardware and optimizing web pages to avoid heavy [9] graphics.
It’s hard to imagine that it happened, but it’s much harder to imagine that it ever could or would have happened in the first place. None of them foresaw anything that would become what we know as the web just two years later.
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[1] it’s Mann’s theater now.
[2] An Ohio Scientific Challenger 2P that his Dad had built from a kit.
[3] 1/5 times there was a data error (serial bus dataframe checksum error) and you had to abort and try again. Sometimes it never worked. There were magazines with programs you had to type in by hand (the precursor to being able to save on cassette). I remember sleeping over there many times, playing those games and marveling at how the computer was supposed to be left on all night. Totally unlike any other piece of electronics, which were always encouraged to be turned off as soon as they were not being used.
[4] The school computer dudes later said that they had to degauss the computer to fix it.
[5] We’d call up BBS’s on the 300 baud modem, re-write the DOS menus. I got up to 48k— the maximum, even though the 8k memory modules were probably $250 each (in 1981 dollars).
[6] Editor’s Note: AWWWW!
[7] Serious: Shrouded in seriousness to match the serious work purpose. Interesting.
[8] Editor’s Note: Tragic
[9] Editor’s Note: GEOCITIES?
