Ask HN: Who where lived through the beginning of the personal computer era? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Who where lived through the beginning of the personal computer era?

17 pointsendofreach36 comments

Whatever you understand by „the beginning“ of that era (didn‘t know a better way to phrase it).

I‘d love to hear any anecdotes, facts or cool memories. No matter if you were „in“ it or just observing (as a tech interested person)…

I just love hearing and reading stories like that & thought here would be a great place to ask.

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I was 19 and worked for Prime Computer (minicomputers) in the Detroit office in 1980-81 as an OS Specialist. In May 1981 I worked the Prime booth in Chicago at NCC (National Computer Conference), where Xerox first introduced their Star system, running on Ethernet, also a Xerox invention.

https://microship.com/national-computer-conference-ncc-1981-...

We could see the Xerox booth from the Prime booth. It was always packed! Most of the vendors there that I remember were minicomputers and superminicomputers and used 80-character, 24-line terminals, band (line) printers with characters etched on a metal band, etc. The Xerox booth, with a b/w bitmapped display and printer, felt like something from the Jetsons.

As as Soviet kid growing up in the 80s, there was not a whole lot of personal computing going on. Around '91 I entered a new school, which offered informatics classes. My first exposure was with the Soviet "Corvette" computers (not nearly as cool as this sounds). I still remember my first homework - to write, on paper, a set of instructions for a drawing program to draw a house (things like LINE and CIRCLE commands with coordinates). Everyone came back with simple 6-10 line programs of basic 2D-shaped homes. I typed in three pages worth of commands that output a 3D house, complete with door, windows, chimneys, plus a sun, some clouds, etc. I was hooked.

Soon I transitioned into a more advanced computer room with a bunch of 286s with 2MB of RAM and no hard drive (system floppies FTW!), where I picked up Turbo Pascal. My parents eventually got me a ZX Spectrum computer for more coding (though I mostly played games).

We moved to the US just as Internet started taking off. I didn't know anybody else technical, so browsing PC magazines in the library was my main source of tech knowledge. One of them contained a disk with Juno software, a free email provider. Had some brief adventures with various mailing lists, including one that returned HTML given a URL. I didn't know what HTML (or WWW at large) was back then, but somehow managed to open my first response from www.idsoftware.com (via Juno's email) in Internet Explorer 2 that was bundled with Windows 95. The website was mostly images (I believe it was an image map), which obviously didn't load, but the whole thing clicked for me then and it wasn't long until I found an ad-supported free internet provider and the rest is history. Actually had my family set up with free internet till I went off to college, thanks in part to various ad-hiding hacks.

Oh, last ad-related anecdote from the early Internet days. There was a company called AllAdvantage that paid you as long as you had an ad displayed while you were browsing the web. Various ad clickers and hiders proliferated at the time, so I was even able to make a little bit of side cash. Not feeling great about it now, but I was young and this was truly a wild, wild west.

Started Programming in 7th Grade on a Apple IIe in MSBasic. First Macintosh came out when i was in 10th grade and I had to go into the Counselours office after school to use the only one in the entire school. The next year i was programming in Pascal and and Assembly on one of the 7 brand new Macs in the new computer lab. We had an old terminal connected to a printer for output sitting in corner that we would play Tarzan on.

Those were the days!

I graduated high school 1980. Started taking mainframe computer classes in 1981, family got an original IBM PC when they came out. What repeatedly blows my mind is the expansion of storage. A 300 Megabyte removable CDC hard drive was the size of a washing machine. Nothing was a gigabyte anything, the largest drive in the whole place was a 900 Meg beast.

I used to have a keychain with a collection of <8G drives and i'd estimate how much more storage on my keychain compared to my data center. With the large flash drives I'm getting, I estimate that the flash drive collection with higher capacity drives (the smallest they stock in the supply cabinet at work is 32G) has more storage than my entire backup tape vault in 1987 and there is probably as much duplicated data in both.

My (formerly) $55 Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB has more memory, more storage, more compute power, and more network speed than the Cray X/MP I worked with in the early '90s... Don't tell me you need a bigger, faster computer. You need software that's not morbidly obese.

We used to have this joke when I was a kid: a new Russian arrives to a computer store in his S600 Mercedes. He ask for the top specs, with multiple processors, SCSI hard drives, UPS and what not. While the sales rep is packing all the gear, the Russian is still somewhat not satisfied. He looks deep down in to the sales rep's eyes and says: are you absolutely 100% certain I'll be able to play Tetris on this????

I bought a state of the art Timex Sinclair, "fully loaded". My neighbour, an investments dealer for a major bank, saw it and asked, "Could it do financial equations?"

Next day, armed with our strip of silver paper, we met with the head of Domestic Investments...

I first saw an Apple ][ when I was in the 3rd grade at a private school, I got a TRS-80 Color Computer of my own the next year. That was my computer for most of the 1980s until I got a Coco 3 and then a 286 machine maybe a year or two after that.

What I find striking about it was a time from 1979 to 1986 when home computers seemed frozen in midair. Steve Jobs for instance was terrified that the Apple ][ would quickly become obsolete and tried desperate things like the Apple /// (melts down like Three mile island, they wouldn't even demo it at the computer store for that reason), Lisa (order of magnitude too expensive) and the first Mac (only a cool demo because it had too little RAM.) Atari thought the Atari 2600 wouldn't last so they released a large number of successors that failed to get traction.

The basic issue was that, at that point, microcomputers hadn't obtained what IBM had obtained with the 360 mainframes. That is, you couldn't expect to replace your Commodore 64 with a Commodore 65 that was compatible but faster and had more storage. Upgrades were few and far between and each one left you thinking if you want to jump ship to another platform and we all did... The IBM PC. IBM really was the first company to do for micros what they did for mainframes.

(One reason for that was that early microcomputers were built around the video output system so you couldn't increase the CPU clock by 10% without redesigning everything!)

I think it was the summer of 1987 when I got a 286 machine and left it behind. From an operating systems standpoint the 286 was every bit as "brain damaged" as Bill Gates said it was but it was getting into the minicomputer performance range. The rest of the industry saw Motorola's 68k line as being the future but the 68k punched under its weight for realized performance just as the 6502 punched above its weight. Even Motorola gave up on it and all the companies like Atari, Amiga, Apple and Sun either went out of business or switched to some kind of RISC processor. People in the PC universe could just upgrade to 286, 386, 486, ... and benefit from an explosion in performance.

> What I find striking about it was a time from 1979 to 1986 when home computers seemed frozen in midair.

It seems like that era was quite vibrant for home computers though. My impression is that many people learned a lot from their Vic-20's/C-64's. I was a bit left out of that scene because we had chosen a TI-99/4A instead, which was less easy to hack around with (no poke statements, for example).

There was also a huge price difference between the home computers which you could get for a few hundred dollars and an IBM PC which was thousands. There were a lot of people who could afford the former but not the later.

Right, that's why the economic crossover happened around 1987 for me.

I got the Color Computer it cost $149 which was the cheapest computer on the market but I extended the 4K of RAM to 64K, added a disk controller, two disk drives, a disk controller, sound card, speech synthesizer, telephone modem, serial card, multiple printers, tandy-branded tape decks, television sets, etc.

The first IBM PC was crazy expensive but not much better than the home computers, in fact, downright inferior when it came to graphics and sound: my Color Computer, the Apple ][, the Atari 400/800, your TI-99/4A and the C-64 were better platforms for games. The ability of the PC to display 80 columns on the screen compared to the 64, 40, or 32 of lesser computers was what made it "suitable for business".

In terms of processing power and scale the PC wasn't much better at first because you couldn't fit enough memory cards into the computer to upgrade it to the full 640K. The system for using more than 64K of memory was half-baked but not hard to write efficient programs for.

The PC AT was crazy expensive when it came out too, but it was powerful enough to endanger the systems integrators and vendors like Cromeco who advertised in Byte magazine

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine

which I've been reading at the Internet Archive to refresh my memory of 1980s computing. These were people who made powerful computers on the S-100 bus that got installed in merchant ships, supermarkets, electronic labs, etc. They advertised heavily in Byte even though their products were infrequently mentioned compared to home computers and the PC.

By 1987 there was relentless competition between clones of the PC AT so I got one for about $1200 including a monochrome monitor. Soon people are publishing benchmarks in Dr. Dobb's Journal showing that a $2000 desktop computer beats the VAX-780 minicomputer that we were all in awe of long long ago.

IBM and the clone makers did all that and they kept compatibility. EGA graphics was good enough to make games like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander_Keen

by 1992 or 1993 sound and video cards are getting good enough that graphics oriented computers like the Commodore Amiga could not keep up. In 1994 I get my first 32-bit computer, install Linux on it, and it is equal to the Sun workstations I had just been using at college.

The CoCo was great. It had me writing assembly language when I was 10, Often I was frustrated that other computers had more software and that the tape storage was unreliable, but once I got the disk I installed an operating system called OS/9 that was multitasking like Unix and even plugged in two serial terminals that I could log into.

The 286 couldn't manage that trick because of the "brain damage" that Bill Gates complained of.

> I installed an operating system called OS/9 that was multitasking like Unix

Was that Microware OS 9 ?

I replaced a control system that was running that with Linux around 2003. I wasn't aware it was ever used on PC's. Or was there yet another OS 9 (in addition to Microware's and Apple's) ?

Yep.

The most important anecdote that I can tell from the early 1980s is how optimistic we all were. My dad was an engineer and helped take the lead on fundraising to buy Apple ][+ computers for the school classrooms in our town. He used to earnestly tell everyone that he met that my generation would be the last one to go through a curriculum where programming was not a core skill. He imagined a world where everyone would understand how to code.

He passed away before the realization set in that "computer skills" were going to be defined as word processing and spreadsheets rather than programming, and I think he would be very disappointed in our current trajectory.

That optimism still largely existed in the 90s, too, when grade school math textbooks had BASIC listings in them. Pretty sure that all disappeared by the time I graduated at the end of that decade, except in districts that couldn't afford new textbooks.

I don’t think it will ever happen unfortunately. Programming requires the ability to think abstractly. Something that most people are not very good at. It’s the same reason why most people will never become good at math. IQ tests basically tests your ability to think abstractly. And the more a job requires abstract thinking, the higher the average IQ is for people working those jobs. No amount of money or intensive focused training will change that.

First computer was a Radio Shack Tandy 2000. On it is where I learned QBASIC, and that same summer I wrote a choose your own adventure short story game, as a kid who loved those cheesy Choose Your Own Adventure books (and Encyclopedia Brown).

First "game" I ever made :)

Dad got laid off, family went into poverty, a lot of stuff got sold including our computer, and I didn't see a personal computer again in the house hold until Windows 98.

I got started fixing Commodore 64s for a friend who had a repair contract with a local school system. My first computer was a 286 machine, 8MHz, no wait states (as fast as a normal 10 Mhz machine!) with 40 megabytes of hard drive, and a super hi resolution monitor (640x480!)

I reprogrammed the CRT controller chip to add an extra display line. On that line I displayed caps/scroll lock status, and the time, etc.

Borland Sidekick was a Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) program that did a ton of cool things, including a text editing. That came in quite handy in the days of MS-DOS.

I was introduced to Turbo Pascal (3.0) as a means of controlling an EPROM burner. I didn't like it first, but grew to love it in short order. Pascal is still my favorite programming language.

Multilink allowed you to use a single machine for multiple users. We'd have a Wyse terminal hooked up to a serial port supporting a second user. (Back when computers were $2000+, it made sense)

The best part was shareware... you could get a disk full of programs to try out for $3. There were quite a few good ones in the mix. Now we're so terrified of malware we don't even want to visit the wrong web site.

Certainly more interesting nerd circles back then - I ran a Commodore Users Group, a BBS, and enjoyed programming a bit. Tried to submit some articles to magazines in the day... no luck though.

Besides the computer nerds like me, you would find the other groups that used computers for their interests, like Ham Radio operators, Educators, Small Business Operators, Writers, and Parents which provided interesting perspectives. Some of them got hooked and explored more like trying out BBSes, or trying to get the most out of word processing, those that didn't get it either stayed just with what they needed or went back to pre-digital methods.

Given that group; reading early home computing magazines magazines like Creative Computing you got to see a lot of articles exploring people trying to implement computer solutions for their varied interests (i.e. cataloging a stamp collection, tracking the farm's vet schedules, etc.) Programs and methodology were not as developed so even the most basic thing could be a struggle to build it up from scratch (you need what sort of storage??)

As far as the nerds there were various nerd clicks from home hobbyists, college educated, old time professional, entrepreneur, know-it-alls, and of course the religions: Apple ][, Atari, Commodore, TRS-80, CP/M. etc. Lot of division with many truly beliving "you can't possibly do X on machine Y!" etc.

Even though there are still seperate platforms, a lot of it is just the same software/development tools, just different computing hardware (which also isn't all that different as it was then).

My suggestion for a good feel is go to the Internet Archive's Computer Magazine rack ( https://archive.org/details/computermagazines ) and start reading through stuff from the mid 70s - mid 80s especially magazines like BYTE, Interface Age, Kilobaud Microcomputing, Creative Computing, Compute!,

Couple of Other documents - https://archive.org/details/ted-nelson-computer-lib-dream-ma... - https://archive.org/details/TheCompleatComputer/mode/1up?vie...

Absolutely EVERYONE who ever wants to do anything with computers should read Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines. It is one of the most important computer books ever written. (The Mythical Man-Month being the other.) Although it obviously shows its age in places, it's really amazing how well it's held up over half a century of the most rapid technological progress the world has ever seen.

Nelson is a true visionary, and not being an engineer or scientist (he considers himself a filmmaker first), he has a very different, but very valid perspective on the way we should interact and relate to our machines.

BTW, Puppy Linux community and parts of the Raspberry Pi community still have the spirit of those early days of computing/hacking/learning/pushing the envelope...

My high school had a "data processing" class which had some FORTRAN programming. We had a key punch, and we'd give the decks to the teacher, who would take them to the university twice a week. This was the 1978-79 school year.

In the fall of 79, the computer science lab (which was not related to the FORTRAN class) got 5 TRS-80 Model 1 computers. I wasn't in the computer science class, but I borrowed the Basic manual and read it one day when I was supposed to be paying attention in calculus class. (Financially, that may be the single most valuable thing that happened to me in high school.) And it was magic. I could make a change in a minute instead of a week. In terms of how I interacted with computers, that changed the whole world.

But program storage was on cassette tapes. I found out that the top of the microwave at home was not a good place to leave the tapes I brought home from school.

To me, the next big step up was a PC with a 30 Meg hard drive. It was a clone (Leading Edge, if anyone remembers them). It came with Hercules graphics (or a clone).

And then, after the PC had been out for a while, suddenly there came the explosion. I'd look at this month's computer magazine, and there would be an ad or three where I'd think "huh, I didn't know you could make a computer do that". And that went on for... maybe three to five years? And then I started seeing ads where I'd seen that before, but this one was clearly better. And then I started seeing ads where I'd seen that before, and this wasn't any better, but it was maybe a bit cheaper, or had a slicker ad. And at that point, the revolution kind of ran out of steam. Things were still changing, still improving, but it wasn't a revolution any more. I'm not sure of the date, but it was probably somewhere around 1990-1992.

And then came the Internet, and it was a revolution again.

A friend had an Apple ][+ and an acoustically coupled modem in the early 80s. He had to dial the phone and put the receiver into the cups of the modem. One evening of calling a list of modem numbers for Bulletin Boards and companies (there was no specific law against hacking in 1980), I was hooked.

I saved $2,500 for an Apple //e, printer, and Zoom modem the next summer and it changed my life. Though I had an MA in clinical psychology and was an intern psychologist, through some some roundabout choices I ended up a few years later as one of the first Forensic Computer Examiners at a small federal law enforcement agency. It was the wild west in the late 1990s as I was working as a Special Agent and they offered the job to me as a sworn agent with no official credentials other than the ones I earned within the agency.

Wouldn't have changed a thing. I retired at 51 and am living as an expat.

I remember my dad used to work at the Tandy Center in Fort Worth and for Christmas one day we got a TRS80 color computer. That was basically the kind that was built into a keyboard, and you hooked it up to a television. We didn't have any disk drives or tapes or anything so we had to turn it on, manually type one of the programs from the manual (kaleidescope usually) then turn the computer off when we were done or someone wanted to use the tv.

This being Hacker News I should say I wrote my own BASIC interpreter on it or something equally nerdy but the truth is it was all sorcery to me. I did manage to make a basic text animation, though.

I have happy memories of learning how to program machine code on a ZX-Spectrum. I was 11 years old, I had no access to the internet, and I didn’t know anybody who could help me figure it out. All I had was a small book “Programming Machine Code on the ZX-Spectrum” that my parents got me for Christmas. But it was enough to figure it out. I didn’t have an assembler so I manually translated hand written assembler code to binary. Drawing black horizontal lines on the display, without crashing, was a major breakthrough for me :) I still have the book.

What strikes me looking back at the PC era is how siloed it was and how little information people had in general. DOS, Apple //, Mac, Amiga, Atari, Unix, DEC, mainframes were completely separate worlds and people from one rarely knew much or anything about the others. Every platform had completely different and incompatible file formats, different software, completely different (and very expensive) developer tools, separate magazines, separate user groups, separate BBSes, etc.

As most geeks here, got an Apple //c and learned basic from the manual. Tried to create a 3D vector game of a robot that explored a house, dreamed about someday building an AI assistant in my computer. Later on got an IBM PC and a copy of a page from some Polish magazine with the Pascal code of a simple virus, didn't understand the Polish text but the self replicating Pascal code was eye-opening.

I think the first time I became aware that there was something called a "personal computer" was when I saw an add for the IMSAI 8080 in Scientific American when I was in about the first or second grade. I immediately wanted one, because of all the pretty buttons, but it was still several years before my parents got me a computer, a TI-99/4A. It wasn't as pretty though.

for me that Altair or IMSAI would have taken a lot time of to earn with a paper route.

Yeah, especially once you bought a terminal so you could actually do something with it other than blinking LED's.

While I was not personally there you may enjoy the book Hackers by Steven Levy. It has a lot of anecdotes from that time.

Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine is also a great book taking a great look at this era, but from the larger minicomputer perspective...

Ha! I'm currently in the middle of this very book! (great so far)

90s kid here - while I've missed Atari computers & early Mac era I've gone through all kind of available hardware in Poland - from Atari 2600 & Famicom consoles, through Commodore 64 and into first available PCs with and without a gfx accelerators.

Funny times.

My Dad brought home an Osborne portable from work. Twin disc drives, a tiny monochrome screen and built-in BASIC.

I spent the next 3 days building a football game simulator, only to have my baby sister trash the floppy disc by spilling a drink on it. I wasn't a happy camper.

didn't live through this, but the show "Halt and Catch Fire" is an interesting look at that era. I only ever watched season one, but it was great.

8088 and BBSs were the start for me. I rode the initial prodigy and AOL wave into the internet

Good times! Capsule history of the computer world:

Before I ever had a computer, I devoured Popular Electronics and the early computer magazines (I still have a copy of "Interface Age" that includes a "Floppy ROM" - one of those vinyl record disks that used to be bound in magazines that you play on a record player - it contained a minimal BASIC ROM encoded in the "Kansas City format" that was the most common way to save data on cassette tapes, since floppy disks (8" at the time for the small ones!) were still heinously expensive - and what hacker needed to store hundreds of KB when 64K RAM was HUGE? (Only big companies had exotic stuff like megabyte hard disks.)

These magazines featured articles about early computers from long-gone companies like IMSAI (8080), SWTPC (6800), Compucolor, Kaypro, and RCA. (Yes, they had a moderately popular early hobbyist computer board that used their own microprocessor...) It took a while for the market momentum to sort-of settle (maybe 40%) on the S-100 bus, Digital Research's CP/M operating system, and the Z-80, but early on, there were literally hundreds of different kinds of PCs, OSes, and early apps, from spreadsheets (VisiCalc and MultiPlan were the two biggest) and word Processors (WordStar was most popular) to, of course, games! CP/M was the common glue that let apps be consistent across such widely varying hardware.

I learned BASIC programming as a kid on TRS-80 model I in the first computer lab at my school in 1978. The first computer I owned was an early Timex/Sinclair ZX-81, but the first "real" computer I had wasn't until I was a senior in college, when I bought a liquidation special Commodore SX-64 - the "portable" version with a cute as buttons 5" color CRT screen and a 1541 floppy disk built in! I wrote all my senior papers and reports with it, as well as my first several resumes, using one of the most amazing hacks ever written: The amazing GEOS from Berkeley Softworks. This incredible program replicated almost all of the capabilities of the MUCH more expensive state-of-the-art Macintosh (with its far more powerful 68000 CPU) on the C-64's 64KB RAM and already pretty long in the tooth 6502 CPU. It wasn't speedy, but was fast enough to be usable, and included a word processor, calculator, spreadsheet, bitmap drawing/painting program, and more. GEOS was later ported to the PC and was used by a few companies I know of that wanted a GUI on PCs prior to Microsoft coming out with Windows in the late 80s. (I also worked at a sizeable aerospace company in those days that standardized on Digital Research's GEM OS and app suite. We did a fair amount of the automated factory design (except CAD, of course), planning, and documentation for the B-2 airframe in the GEM apps. GEM wasn't for most home users: it required an exotic VGA (640x480) graphics adapter! Interestingly, we though HDTV monitors were right around the corner then, but they wouldn't arrive for another 15 years. Our displays and interfaces still suck, compared to what they should be - think desk-sized touch/pen Surface Studio.)

By the late 80s, the PC was dominant, driven first by the 8086 (with 8087 math coprocessor if you were doing badass stuff) and later by the new and powerful Intel '286, '386, and '486 CPUs. IBM PC compatibility was becoming required, largely driven by a new upstart called Compaq making 30 lb.(!) suitcase computers - They sold like hotcakes. Very early PCs, even IBM's, gave you the choice of PC-DOS (IBM's version of what would later be MS-DOS) or CP/M-86 (the preference of us "serious and knowledgeable" computer guys - when spending someone else's money: it cost several times more than DOS!) CP/M-86 felt like a cross between CP/M and early DEC OSes - much more powerful than the clunky DOS. To do more than one thing, you had to load programs called TSRs (Terminate and Stay Resident), the most popular of which was Borland's Sidekick, which was probably the most pirated software on the planet for a while. Running multiple TSRs was possible, but they often got along like strange bulldogs in a bag... The PC software world changed forever when Lotus introduced 1-2-3, its lightning fast spreadsheet written in C, the language of serious Unix computers, which allowed nearly the speed of assembly (which was behind most commercial apps), but could be written by mere mortals who happened to be geniuses.

Macs were cool, but really expensive (like literally, the price of a new car) and more like toys than tools, unless you were doing desktop publishing, where the LaserWriter changed everything - I honestly don't think Apple would have succeeded with the Mac at all without the LaserWriter - it was that important.

Things started to get standard by the early 90s, when Windows 3 finally brought GUIs to the masses at a reasonable cost, and allowed Microsoft to extend its OS dominance into apps, where they had been a player, but not dominant. Things stayed that way until I saw a VERY interesting demo at Interop '93 (IIRC) of O'Reilly's GNN - Global Network Navigator - the first news and info website anyone had ever seen designed to work with the stunning new NCSA Mosaic browser that blew everyone away with its support for inline graphics (early web browsers required you to click on links and download the image to see it in a separate window.) It took a few more years, but that idea was the one that created the modern world, though we had to go through a few awkward years of Trumpet Winsock to add TCP/IP to Windows before Windows 97 showed up with integrated IP support.

I've skipped tons, of course, but the rest has pretty much just evolved from there into what you see today...

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