« Translation 101 F | Main | Unmeasurable IQ »

June 04, 2003

Newly Digital

A couple of recent posts got me thinking. One was a reference to the Newly Digital project which is trying to catalog some early computing experiences. The other post was at Cogito, ergo doleo and mentioned the unreality of Hollywood portrayal of people like Hackers.

My earliest computing experiences were on an Apple IIc (later a IIe) that had been donated to my high school. No one had any idea what to do with it but there were prizes (sponsored by various external organizations) for educational programs. Like most teenagers, I was always short of pocket money and the offer of $AU5 and $AU10 prizes were irresistible. AppleBasic was easy to learn and a few PRINT and CLS statements later, I was a "real" programmer with programs (i.e. science knowledge quizzes and maths testing routines) under my belt. About year 12 (last year of high school) I discovered graphics and bit-blipping. Wow, games! People paid like $AU10 for each copy of a game - not just once off like the prize money.

When I left school, I walked the streets looking for a job in a shop. I lived in the sticks (boondocks for Americans) and the nearest "city" was Penrith (on the outskirts of Sydney). Over a period of maybe three weeks, I visited every retailer in the High Street (which was actually called High Street) and the main shopping centers. Then I started again (to followup the previous visits). One of the possible prospects was the local Tandy (RadioShack) store which had a computer classroom upstairs. After the third or fourth visit, the manager said to me "Can you read?". I was indignant, "Of course I can read, I have a HSC". "That's no guarantee!", he retorted, "Can you read fast?". The deal was that the computer instructor had just quit and he needed someone to read the notes fast enough that they would then be able to teach it. I read the entire course over the weekend (without a computer to practice on) and turned up on Monday morning ready to go - completely (and very naively) confident. The boss had in fact hired an instructor after he spoke to me on the Friday so I spent the rest of the time assembling computers and cabling instead. He then offered me a job in the store selling electronics but specializing in the computer section.

So what happened to the Hollywood link? Well the main reason for wanting to do anything with computers (and the reason that the Tandy job was so attractive) was the movie "War Games" (which I now have on DVD). This movie was so cool. The best part was that the main character (an unbelievably young Matthew Broderick) had this computer. It might have looked like a toy computer but it had an acoustic coupler and an autodialer and it could play cinematic high-quality three-dimensional war games right on his little TV set. I was hooked. I wanted a computer like that. I wanted to be able to break into the Pentagon's WOPR and play war games.....

I did get an acoustic coupler. The only thing you do with it was connect to Viatel (the computer bulletin board equivalent to TeleText). It wasn't very reliable and the speed was usually under 100 baud. I used it with a Tandy Model 100 (one of the first laptops). Even though I was extremely disappointed initially, somehow I was sure that eventually computing would be like War Games (and it is like that now, 20 years later).

In the meantime, I turned into a gadget geek. I tried all kinds of computers, all kinds of equipment. I was forever fiddling with my computer systems. My Model 100 ended up with a floppy drive (it used 180Kb SS/SD and weighed more than the computer) which was unheard of for that time. I tried everything. I went to university and earned a degree in computer science, and then more degrees in related areas but there was always this itch in the middle of my back - I had not found the real thing yet. That itch was finally satisfied when I first used a Newton 2100. This was a computer that "functioned". It worked right. It fitted the internal concept of how a computer should work....

Some of you out there will be laughing at this point because I missed something. Yes, in all those years of fiddling around, I had never used a system that was designed for users - i.e. a Macintosh. I had avoided them like the plague. Really I believed that computers were supposed to be hard to use. That was the challenge. You mastered a computer the way you mastered a wild horse. You put up with the temper tantrums, the bucking, the blue screen of death. Along the way you learned, you tamed, you manipulated and you fiddled until eventually you could control it. Then you went out and bought another one. The Mac never fitted that model, it came with the perception that it was "always right" and never to be fiddled with. After the Newton, I became a "switcher" and joined the Mac camp.

The second coming of Steve Jobs was both good and bad - he combined the Mac with Unix (my home used macs, my work involves Unix) but he axed the Newton.....

Posted by Ozguru at June 4, 2003 12:06 PM

Comments

Couldn't really understand the bit about the "acoustic coupler"...but it sure sounds cool nonetheless! Unfortunately most of my experience has been centered around, shucks, Microsoft :-(

Posted by: jivha at June 4, 2003 12:06 PM

An acoustic coupler is a modem. Instead of hooking a phone line to it, you strap a speaker and microphone to your handset. The modem sounds travel through the phone as if you were speaking them. They fell out of favor once modems were built that could accept a phone line.

Posted by: Adam Kalsey at June 4, 2003 12:06 PM

Thanks Adam, I was going to try and describe it as a pair of headphone for a phone but that wasn't quite right. Then I figured I would try and find a picture but I am still searching. The one I had was really awkward to use and included two hugh rubber suction caps that had to be fitted over the phone itself. In the movie (WarGames) he was able to sit the handset on the coupler without so much drama.

Posted by: Ozguru at June 4, 2003 12:06 PM

Couplers are making something of a comeback for business travelers. With a strap-on coupler, you can connect to the net from a payphone, hotel lobby phone, or anywhere else that you don't have access to a phone jack.

Posted by: Adam Kalsey at June 4, 2003 12:06 PM

Here is a coupler: Cool eh? Old Skool.

Posted by: andy diller at June 4, 2003 12:06 PM