Comments on: Happy birthday

By: Bill McNeill

Bill McNeill — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 22:52:53 +0000

Re. the pointer errors described in (16) there was a fun computer game/conceptual art project I used to run on the old TRS-80 machines that went something like this:

10 poke rand(16383),rand(255) 20 goto 10

I forget the exact value for the first argument, but you get the idea. The TRS-80s had a completely flat memory model, so this program would lob little bombs of disorder throughout the machine. Some landed harmlessly in ROM, a few hit the screen buffer and drew random characters, and eventually one would strike a vital part of the BASIC process, forcing a reboot. Completely useless, but I found the idea of a computer program that committed suicide fascinating.

By: Quo Vadis

Quo Vadis — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 22:29:50 +0000

In 1985 I bought a 512K Mac for ~1900.00 USD on student discount. At the time, it was a revolutionary user (and programmer) experience, but except for the lack of a hard drive, it was a computer that any PC user today would find reasonably familiar.

It was fun to write programs for because of the sophistocation of the user interface libraries and the bitmapped screen buffer. Because the screen buffer was in the same memory space the program used, one could actually see an errant pointer corrupting its way through the computer’s memory (apologies for the geek speak).

By: Ich

Ich — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 20:35:29 +0000

My Dad bought one of the very first IBM PCs and paid some ungodly amount to upgrade it with twice the RAM and double 5 1/2 inch single-sided floppies. It is still running to this day, although it is a little less useful. I quickly absconded with said PC and have never looked back.

By: Chuchundra

Chuchundra — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 18:07:01 +0000

< !>

By: Bill McNeill

Bill McNeill — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 17:58:05 +0000

…Sigh…overwiting character sequences of -!- characters bracketed by less-than and greater-than signs to form a TIE-fighter like shape which displays in the preview text but gets treated as an orphaned HTML tag in the published comment. I guess using your imagination to work around computer problems is still required.

By: Bill McNeill

Bill McNeill — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 17:52:55 +0000

…asteriks overwriting sequences…

Post 11 didn’t like my CODE tags for some reason.

By: Bill McNeill

Bill McNeill — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 17:51:15 +0000

Typo: “just go my MacBook” => “just got my MacBook”. [fixed: thanks Bill. cb]

Commodores were pretty cool (I fondly remember some text adventure game involving pirates), but my first love was the TRS-80 family circa 1984. There were three Model IIIs in the back of my math class, and I used to skip out on the last half of lunch to write video games on them that consisted of asteriks randomly flashing around the screen overwriting sequences, which I pretended were spaceships. What the hardware lacked back then you had to supply with your imagination.

My first home computer was a TRS-80 Color Computer. The color part was essential for writing a version of the Tron LightCycles game, but what was really great was the assembly language interface. Plug in a cartridge and you could write assembly language subroutines, which would be compiled into lists of integers that could be POKEd into memory and run from Basic. Fantastic, and as it turned out intellectually formative, though I didn’t know that at the time.

By: Rob St. Amant

Rob St. Amant — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 17:33:30 +0000

Along the same lines, I think about (and tell my students about) Dan Bricklin once in a while, the inventor of the spreadsheet, who in a just world would be richer than God by now.

By: Ted

Ted — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 17:24:49 +0000

I always like to thank the hundreds of thousands of MBA’s who bought PCs to crunch numbers using spreadsheets such as Lotus-1-2-3.

Thanks to them, the volume of PC production was ramped up. And the price of PC’s dived.

So today, very capable notebooks are priced in the few hundreds of dollars.

Happy Birthday indeed! Keep punching those keys everybody.

By: nick s

nick s — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 17:11:57 +0000

The Mac/PC era was held off in the UK, I think, by the price, and by the fact that there was the 16-bit stopgap of STs/Amigas in the home, and the ubiquitous Amstrad PCW for office applications. Not to mention the Archimedes in schools.

(Douglas Adams and the Greatest Living Englishman were among the first Mac users in the UK.)

By: Bill Gardner

Bill Gardner — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 16:11:38 +0000

My first computer was a Z80 from Xerox with two 8” floppies, a 300 baud modem, WordStar, and some sort brain damaged version of BASIC. Maybe 1981/82? Not as much fun as the PDP-11 in the lab, but an amazing thing to have in one’s apartment.

My true love was the SE/30. I love the Macbook Pro, but much of that is nostalgia for the earlier machine, the first adequately powered Macintosh.

By: Russell Arben Fox

Russell Arben Fox — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 15:35:04 +0000

I agree Tom—remember the Kaypro! I’d have to Google to see who made it and when and for what bizarre purposes, and I’m too lazy to do so now, but I trucked that Kaypro around (in it’s own handy, compact, click-shut, stainless-steel case!) for a few years back in the mid-80s. We also had a Commodore 64 at home, but that was the family’s, so I took the Kaypro to college in 1987. The word processing program I ran on it was called WordStar, I think. There were a couple of computer geeks down the hall in my dorm (they introduced me to an new innovation called the “compact disc”), and they were ecstatic when they saw that blinking, green-on-black screen. Only five or so years old, and already a priceless fossil. They took it apart for me, rebuilt it, and kindly fed the well-oiled squirrels on their treadmill inside who kept it running.

By: Chuchundra

Chuchundra — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 15:15:10 +0000

The first machine I did any programming on was a Timex-Sinclair 1000. 2K of RAM expanded to a whopping 18K with a 18K extender sticking out the back. My friend’s parents bought it for him and I was over his house quite a bit that summer to play with it.

The first machine I had for myownself was a C64 that I bought in 1983 with money I had saved from my newspaper route.

By: duaneg

duaneg — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 14:46:21 +0000

You’re not sure?! There goes your geek cred, man!

Mine was the C64. Finest piece of electronic engineering for the mass-market, ever.

By: Tom

Tom — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 13:58:45 +0000

Don’t forget the Kaypro!