Happy Birthday IBM PC

Introduced this day, August 12, in 1981.

I still remember how excited I was when I got my Leading Edge smoking 4.7Mhz machine with TWO floppys, take that you punks. Those were the days.

Which led inexorably to... .

Celebrate in India next year. Bye Bye IBM.

I was a Commodore rebel back then. No IBMs for me back then.

Dan

In 1984, my company dropped a Leading Edge 4.77 mHz with a 10 MB hard drive on my desk. I'd been waiting a long time for that.

Yeh, I went out (with my solid couple weeks of experience) and talked a few local companies into letting me be their computer consultant and made some bucks and got a 10MB hard drive as well. It self destructed about a week later, and I had to go get another one.

Back then it was an open book. I bought the Turbo Pascal and Turbo Assembler packages and the IBM BIOS technical manual, and went to town. For a semi-austistic, mega-geek like me, that was the good life. I just disappeared into it. 25 years later, I'm still doing it hard core every day.

After about a year (during which time I had an exciting career in the food services industries and got to wear various sexy polyester outfits), I finagled a job at a GE Govt Systems place in Raleigh. I'd been working for Davey Tree by then (the polyester suits weren't flattering me) and was really not liking it. Basically I was just a gopher and changing tapes at night. But they had plenty of much better machines (286s) around and lots of software, and I immediately started earning more than my boss' boss at Davey Tree earned, so I just took advantage of that in a big way and learned a lot since I only had to flip a tape once in a while.

When they told me that we need to get a new PC for one of the groups, I took advantage of that to get in one of those new fangled 386 machines. They were pretty PO'd about that because they felt that was gross overkill for a PC, but they didn't send it back and I used that one a lot at night for development.

I was getting really good, but they had a stupid rule that, no matter how good you were, you couldn't be a developer there unless you had a degree. So once I'd sucked them dry of anything I could learn, I got a job a a software developer at an automation company in Charlotte. And never looked back. I guess that was in 88 or so. Hard to even believe it was that long ago. Where did I leave my teeth?

I was pretty much part of the ][ crew back then

a ][ and a luggable DEC dumb terminal (print/ not VRT based) for afterhours access to a VAX

Anybody seen The Pirates of Silicon Valley recently? It's cool if you haven't.

I envy you, Dean. You have a temperament I don't really have.

I've always been fascinated by computers and technology. When I was a little kid my Dad was in charge of data processing at a bank. He started off as a salesman for IBM and later went to work for one of his customers. On weekends he would sometimes let me come with him to the computer room which was like mission control as far as I was concerned.

They had an IBM 1401, giant tape drives, what I'm sure were giant hard disks that looked like dishes in dark plastic containers. They had a huge reader/sorter that he would let me run punch cards through.

The room looked a lot like this.(see attachment)

Everything was big and impressive, especially to a little kid.

Later on in the later 70's he got a subscription to Byte, which had all kinds of great pictures of microcomputers which I lusted over and tried to figure out how I could afford.

My first computer came in '81. TRS-80 CoCo, 4k RAM. I used to do some simple programs in Basic code, but I was never a very patient person to really try and learn to program, and my father wasn't really the type of guy who would sit down and try and foster my interest, so I never really got very far with it. I was always too slow to learn, and too easily distracted by other things.

My Dad died in 1991. One of my last memories of him was visiting him at work one day, and him showing me pictures of the PC's he had just ordered from some company called Dell who's CEO was this kid who looked like he was about my age at the time. I still have a little IBM promo of an IBM PCAT which sat on his desk and held rubberbands and paperclips. It's probably a collectors item.

To this day my father casts a shadow over me. I always wished I had a career in computers as my father did. Maybe designing databases and networks, but unfortunately I've never had the patience to really sit down and learn it. The concepts seem so abstract.

Anyway, it's weird how something like the anniversary of the IBM PC can trigger off such strong memories and feelings. My Dad never spent much time with me, but the times that he did were usually connected with his work. Some of my best memories of him were in the computer room of that bank.

I was still an infant in the early 80"s, but by the late 80's I was plugging away on my Apple II E. At my privous job, we were still using AS400 computers, wich were actualy really good at what they are designed to do, and can handle a very large number of connections.

I don't know why, but I was made for the software engineering life, though I didn't find that out until I was like twenty-something. My mom also worked in a big IBM shop when I was little (an insurance company.) And it was a pretty amazing place for a young boy to go. I'd play the (very, very primitive) Adventure game and whatnot. But I got into music and never really went that direction and only came back to it after hitting bottom. Believe me, there's nothing hotter than a 25 year old guy in a Burger King fry station outfit. I couldn't keep the chicks off of me.

I started taking some electronics courses the community college where my mom went. I didn't have a car and would have to catch a ride with her. She was taking computer classes and so I'd often have to sit there in the computer lab and wait, so I started messing around. The bug immediately bit me really bad. I got it, or at least I felt that I got it. I've continue to keep getting it more and more ever since. But I it felt very natual to me, and is not unlike music in many ways. There are LOTS of people in software engineering who are musicians to one degree or another.

It's all about logical decomposition of problems into their constituent parts. No matter what they may teach at schools, that's really the art of software development. It's a very interesting challenge to have a big problem and to have to look at it and figure out you would break it down, how data flows through the process, how to make it effecient and flexible and robust and all that.

I have anxiety problems, and one of the side effects of that is often compulsive thoughts. My brain runs around in circles like crazy. A large software project can eat up as many cycles as I have and then plenty. So it's basically like letting a hyper-active kid run himself to sleep.

They stick to the polyester.

I used to lust after the various computer kits in the Heathkit catalog -- or at least puzzle over them. But I didn't really get fired up on computing until I read Stewart Brand's slim book, Cybernetic Frontiers. (I liked the title. Seemed to fit with some of the, er, um, headwork I was doing at the time.)

I took class in Fortran, which was all my uni offered in '73. In '79 or '80 I took a similar class (but they'd added two weeks of Cobol and a week of Basic -- guess they figured a whole semester of one language was something of a waste of time. Even in '86 when I thought about going back to school -- never took that sheepskin -- they still weren't offering anything of any value to me.

The uni president that Reagan had pushed in while he was gov had made it his personal goal to turn Long Beach State University back into the vocational school it started out as after the war. Honest.

Now, this was the uni with the first comparative literature program in the US. It had a groundbreaking interdisciplinary studies program (which I was fortunate enough to be accepted into). A great art department at the time. Some respected writers in the English department. But this guy, Stephen Horne, was determined to turn it back into a place where his fellow Republicans could feel comfortable and unchallenged taking auto repair and coaching classes.

He did such a good job, that the Business school actually lost its accreditation for a period. (Some of his more upscale fellow Republicans were not too happy about that, though.)

Horne later became a Republican politician, himself, after he was forced out of the university in disgrace, with 3 million dollars just missing... which no one ever found, far as I know. But Horne also stole from me -- personally.

I had been given the assignment of writing the narration script he was to deliver over a 27 minute film documentary on the university. But after I handed in the rough draft, I got word back through my adviser that "Steve thought he should write the script, since he's going to be delivering it. I'm really sorry. You'll still get credit as a researcher though." And I did, way down at the bottom of the credits, below the actual researcher. Funny thing, though, good ol' Steve actually plagiarized between 80 and 90 percent of what I wrote. I wasn't able to see the film for years but I went through the roof when I finally did. Stephen Horne, former president of California State University, Long Beach -- if you're googling yourself -- I think you're filthy, thieving scum.

At my work were still celebrating. Ours are still running some of are test equipment. Weve lost a few over the years but the rest keep on going. Believe it or not the IBM PC's are better constructed than most of the business PC's made today and probably for the last 20 years knock on wood. I read an article a while back that said NASA even has some PC's running their equipment.

I remember learning word processing, desktop publishing and BASIC on an Apple IIe as a kid, and spending the summer with cousins who had various other Apples, but my first home computer was a used IBM PCjr that a friend's dad gave me after upgrading his home office. Now, the PCjr was *mostly* PC compatible, but due to proprietary sound, graphics and expansion slots, some PC-based apps absolutely would not run on it. My friend's dad had installed (at great expense) a "PC compatibility module" that was supposed to improve the odds of programs working properly, at the expense of the whopping 16 colors available to the PCjr's native graphics chipset. Interestingly enough, one of the major game releases - Ghostbusters - would only run on the PCjr and Tandy 1000 due to the audio and video requirements. Three-voice sound from the factory, folks!

The PCjr and the Epson 8086 that followed were both floppy-only systems, and my first experience with hard drives wouldn't come until my old grade school asked me to help set up a PC/XT that was donated to them. It was the first and last time that I accidentally formatted a hard drive! Meanwhile, I gave away the PCjr, only to have the Epson die the week after the warranty expired. I got my hands on another Epson (which I would eventually run a dialup BBS on) and eventually a smoking-fast IBM PS/1 286.

Ah, the good old days . . .