Ask HN: Computer nostalgia

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7808379

by tonteldoos • 12 years ago

6 14 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

After spotting numerous 'Learn To Code (tm)' articles today, I'm in a nostalgic and reminiscent mood.

What fond memories do HNers share of their early computer days (especially if you're over 30).

Mine include learning to power up our first IBM PC XT and start FriendlyWare (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendlyware), before I could read (involved detailed handwritten instructions from my dad, and matching up keyboard keys).

Oh, and only being 'allowed' on the computer for an hour a day :P

goshx• 12 years ago

installing Age Of Empires from 24 floppy disks and it failing in the last one.

tonteldoos4• 12 years ago

Hah! Or sitting up all night to download the 7 stiffy shareware Quake (I) on a 28.8kbps modem, and having it disconnect on the last file.

khnd• 12 years ago

multiplayer AoE over dial up- this was great.

greenyoda• 12 years ago

Writing an assembler in PL/1 that used up a whole box of punched cards (I think there were 2000 cards to a box). This was for a class project in my first year of college.

Using Unix for the first time on a PDP-11 and seeing how much nicer it was than the IBM mainframe operating systems of that era. Later being trusted with root on that machine.

Learning C and Pascal simultaneously to write a Pascal compiler in C using Lex and Yacc (another college class).

Writing code for a 6800 microprocessor with only 512 bytes of RAM (with the instructions entered on a hex keyboard).

Hacking an IBM operating system to be able to read files that I wasn't supposed to be able to read. This involved disassembling (by hand) one of the system programs and changing one of the machine instructions to make it an unconditional branch.

Writing code for one of the first IBM PCs.

Getting my first e-mail address with an "@" in it - on the Arpanet (precursor to the internet) in 1982.

(Yeah, I'm well over 30.)

NameNickHN• 12 years ago

Around 1990 I wrote Basic programs on an Amiga 500 that moved sprites, draw lines etc.

tonteldoos4• 12 years ago

One word: BBSs

mparrett2• 12 years ago

That sweet sound.

waterfowl• 12 years ago

Microsoft Golf on 3.1(I was probably 3 or 4)

tonteldoos4• 12 years ago

Microsoft Flight Simulator on same wasn't half bad either...

danelectro• 12 years ago

I always wanted to get to be over 30 so I could gain enough respect to do advanced things that were always discouraged for youngsters back home where most people have always been over 65.

Well, in 1982 when the IBM PC was not very popular yet (under 50,000 sold) and non-businesses were still using their Commodores and Ataris, I decided to improve my programming abilities and build a small game for my Atari 400.

Earlier with arcade games I never thought Pac-Man was very interesting, but when Centipede appeared I liked it because of its trackball interface. I guess I'm just what they would nowadays call a natural UI/UX guy.

When the 400 came out it was attractive since it was not just a game console like the earlier 2600, but a full computer that also played some of the same games from its own series of cartridges which were more advanced than the 2600 anyway. BASIC programming was also available in cartridge form.

I wanted my own home computer mainly to continue the machine-learning I had pioneered a year earlier during the Houston oil boom where I had procured expensive Hewlett-Packard benchtop oil & gas analyzers at my employer, but was having more breakthroughs developing "software" than I was on the hardware. It was a petroleum engineering laboratory startup where I was operating the instruments in the lab during the day, then writing code at night by hand on paper, to be typed into the terminals at work once the module was complete.

After the crude oil & gas (exploration & production) boom went bust, I was luckily able to move to a traditional employer, who was in the refined products (fuel & petrochemicals) measurement & testing field. This was a 100-year-old service corporation, not a research place.

Anyway, even Apples and the new IBM PC's were not powerful enough for my former pursuit, but after they came out with a Centipede cartridge for the 400, I decided to get one, plus since I was employed I figured I could afford a trackball in addition to the joysticks that came with the Atari.

To code my first game I did not expect to be able to achieve very fast action, which was dependent on machine language, since I was just using Atari BASIC. So I settled on "MasterMind" which I selected for its pure logic base and its particular two-user operation where only one participant at a time is the actual player, and the "opponent" merely qualifies the player's progress among successive determinations against a hidden pattern. To emulate the "opponent", the computer would select the hidden pattern at random and provide feedback to the player, reducing it to a one-player puzzle.

All I had was the 400, the BASIC & Centipede carts, the trackball & joysticks, plus a fairly good Atari reference book. I had to leave the 400 powered on all the time since I had no data storage, but eventually got the Atari cassette after it became affordable.

Trying to make the most of the hardware I had, I ended up with an intuitive point & click, drag & drop, player scenario using the trackball in a way that years later would be very common once the computer mouse appeared for Apples & PC's, and especially after Windows came out and became popular because of pointing & clicking.

Meanwhile, like most employers, mine was more interested in status quo rather than maximum utilization of resources, but I became informed that they were going to embrace computers first in the tank calibration department. I was in chemical analysis but I knew the ASTM calibration manual fairly well and thought this was an excellent choice, there were geometric calculations based on physical properties & measurements, with a resulting report tabulated into an 11x17 inch chart having entries in fine print for each depth of fluid that was to be inventoried in that tank each time for the following decade. It was text output, looking like a spreadsheet, but these were traditionally reduced from a blueprint master which the cells had been typed in with a manual (non-electric) typewriter having a special wide-carriage.

I was naturally disappointed when I found out the project had already been underway since before I was hired, an established Northern consulting group was doing the work, they were being paid over $100,000 and already delayed well beyond the target date.

You can only imagine my feelings after the project was finally delivered and I found out from the calibration guys how they thought it was quite a time-saver.

They loved the way it printed the final charts in fine print using the new-fangled 17inch wide PC printers without having to go through the typewriting/blueprinting process.

But the raw data entry, calculations, output, and manual typing of final data into each cell was still done by hand.

The consultant had merely provided a replacement for half of what the typewriter was doing, the mechanical printing function of the typewriter, but not even the hand keying :-\

there's more but that's enough for now . . .

tonteldoos4• 12 years ago

Speaking of printing...who remembers those early tractor fed dot matrix printers released about the same time as the PC XT?

notduncansmith• 12 years ago

I'm not over 30 (turned 21 this year) but I do have some rather fond memories of breaking, and subsequently fixing, my family Dell running Windows 95. I used the internet, but not for anything major. I mostly just explored the computer, learned how it worked, and practiced my creative writing in early MS Word.

I did write some batch files really early on, thanks to my dad's answer when I asked how the computer worked: "It's just a bunch of text files". After that, I didn't do much other than explore networking stuff at school (and use the school's LAN to distribute games, but I was 12 at this point and well into the 2000's).

vtd• 12 years ago

In 2003 our school still had a class with old machines what should boot from a ROM into some BASIC environment. I was actively reading books on computers at that moment, however, without any access to the hardware, so I was using any available option to walk into that room and to fix errors in someone's code. Then we started learning graphics, and I actually tried to draw something on a sheet of paper with 1x1 mm cells and then code it by putting points in these places. Other folks did strange things too --- the pixels in the displays were not exactly square, so someone tried to make a circle out of points, adjusting them so that it looked more round than the standard one.

A year after the school bought about a dozen Windows machines and the fun was over (just until we figured out some ways of obtaining admin rights there and doing strange things like renaming all computers to what look like "COMP-12" (all these letters are present in the Russian locale, so unique same-looking names are possible)).

mparrett2• 12 years ago

There are so many good memories to choose from. The other day I played some random 4k video on YouTube. I then remembered the library computer at my elementary school. It had Encyclopedia Britannica on CD which included mindblowing minutes of video clips the size of postage stamps. MULTIMEDIA!

Ask HN: Computer nostalgia

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