July 1982: Living with a Computer | Hacker News Reader

July 1982: Living with a Computer

theatlantic.com

38 pointscwan9 comments

Reminds me of my car... it's a 1979 Toyota Land Cruiser. I found the owner's manual online and it's surprising what was expected of an automobile owner 30 years ago: lubricating the chassis, servicing the oil filter (not changing, but dismantling and cleaning the parts), lubricating the distributer, differentials, changing electrolytes, etc.. It's like back in the day... men were men... even if they were dorky men with computers.

Minis had to have 'minor service' every 5000 km, and I think it's good practice to have a good look at your car every few thousand anyway. One day I spotted a cracked front disc like that, in an emergency situation that might have been a real problem.

I'm not sure what you mean with 'changing electrolytes', I think you refer to filling up the battery with distilled water, electrolyte is not normally replaced afaik.

Similarly, we're not really making chip diagrams any more so much as designing them with the aid of computers. Unless there's some giant EE-geek slave trade which uses thousands of people to draw the billions of transistors out, and double check them.

The company that put his computer together is still around: http://optek-inc.com/

Posted a few months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1291580

Things I learned from this article include:

There was once a word processing machine named Wangwriter.

The 'wang' was a pretty solid setup, a small computer with several terminals and a near as you could tell 'what-you-see-is-what-you-get' layout program, as well as templates and output to daisy wheel printers.

The bank where I worked used these for almost every department, Wang made a killing selling them.

Very high quality hardware too, the monitor arms could be used to bludgeon stray dinosaurs with.

The Wang writer inspired me to write a proper editor for a mainframe (and later ported it to the Atari ST and from there to a bunch of other computers) that I worked with, which still had a line oriented editor instead of a full-screen one. I'm no longer using it, but it was a really good exercise to put that together.

"When I need new programs, I try to write them myself"

Good times...

"Disk-operating system" makes much more sense with the hyphen.

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