Tag: computerhistory

I’ve been writing recently about my Gen X computer experiences from the days when they required more patience and commitment than the convenient appliances of today.

I wrote about how the TI-99/4A was my gateway to computing, and how I learned persistence from the TRS-80 Model III, and how the Commodore 64 inspired my ingenuity, and how the Apple II+ made me an amateur scientist, and how the Apple //c kicked off my writing. I wrote about the weird outliers of the Commodore SX-64 and Amiga 500 that may have been too clever for their own good. And I wrote about how the PS/2 and Macintosh labs in college set up my vacillating loyalties that persist even today.

I’m lucky that I’ve seen both worlds, enjoying the hobbyist tinkering of BASIC and also the vast interconnectivity of the devices we have today. I feel a little like someone who witnessed the Wright Brothers taking flight and then the Moon landing six decades later, with each magical in its time and context.

It was a lot easier to be accidentally dumb back then, with only nearby resources to learn from. If you lived somewhere with a lousy library or culture of idiocy, you could have huge gaps in your knowledge that were hard to even know about, much less fix. I learned to shave from a high school friend who described it over the phone, but it took my stepfather to tell me to use warm water instead of cold. Now I could learn that on YouTube.

You felt weirder then, too, with only the sample size of your town or neighborhood to go by. There weren’t many alternative models for how to be, and most of them came down to stark divisions instead of gradations: male or female, white or not, American or not, rich or poor, able or “handicapped,” straight or queer, dreamer or worker, city or country, north or south, bookish or mechanical. When a deaf boy joined my second-grade class, I thought his hearing aid was a Walkman and he was a bad ass rebel who refused to take it off.

It’s harder to be that dumb today, but some people are making their best go of it.

Now with access to all the knowledge on the planet, you have to work hard not to know things – to choose only a few sources of information that reinforce your perspective and filter out others. But humans are humans and our brains take a lot of energy, so it’s natural that we fall into the shortcuts of prejudice if we don’t fight against it.

Those old computers taught me that ideas are malleable, refined through a process of active experimentation until they “work.” That hacking mentality has been the cornerstone of my writing practice as well as my perception of the world as a giant experiment ever in refinement.

What I learned from years of SYNTAX ERRORS is that life can be debugged and improved, though perhaps never perfected. There’s only “works” and “works better” for more people.  

It’s useful to know that even if “answers” are far easier to search for these days, we still have to do the experimenting ourselves.

Who’s ready for some programming?

[I’ve been on a nostalgia trip lately thinking about the computers that influenced me growing up. They were a perfect metaphor for our latch-key generation: “Here’s a device with limited instructions. Good luck!” I know they changed the way I think, and this week, I’ll be blogging about the early computers that influenced me.]

Astute readers may have noticed that I haven’t yet mentioned any of the video game consoles that influenced me in my Gen X childhood, and there’s a very good reason for that.

If you were to engineer a torture device for people with untreated anxiety disorder, you’d invent “games” that hint at the possibility of winning by skill but endlessly rob it from you with no save states, no endings, terrible controls, and buggy programming.

I mean, this is what we were working with:

And this:

Did I have fun with my Atari 2600 as a kid? I did. But starting there, I probably lost years of mileage on my heart and lungs yelling at shitty console games with only a few shining stars to keep my hope alive that the next one would be better.

I can list the few video games that, through a combination of design and story, may actually have contributed something to my life. Note how many of them were on consoles.

• Eamon (1980, Apple II), which was a fantasy text-adventure you could customize.
• Raiders of the Lost Ark (1982, Atari 2600), which had a story and an ending.
• Taipan (1982, Apple II), which was great for trading commodities and becoming a drug dealer before Grand Theft Auto made it cool.
• Lords of Conquest (1982, Commodore 64), which was a Risk-like game that I enjoyed playing with Norman.
• The Legend of Zelda (1986, NES), which had a save game and a storyline plus lots of secrets to discover.
• Wasteland (1988, Apple II/Commodore 64), which had an engrossing storyline and witty writing.
• Wing Commander (1990, PC), which had a great storyline and fun flight sim physics.
• X-Wing (1993)/TIE Fighter (1994, PC), both of which were deeply story-driven with great flight-sim features.
• Tomb Raider (1996, PlayStation), which barely makes it onto this list because the archaeological visuals only SLIGHTLY outweigh the frustrating gameplay.
• Jedi Knight/Mysteries of the Sith (1997, PC), again with good stories.
• Outlaws (1997, PC), again with a great story and wit.
• Metal Gear Solid (1998, PlayStation), frustrating as fuck but a great story.
• Half-Life (1998, PC)/Half-Life 2 (2004, PC), both featuring amazing game play and storytelling as well as multiplayer fun.
• Neverwinter Nights (2002, PC), with a great storyline and game mechanics (though the graphics were odd).
• Knights of the Old Republic (2003, PC), with one of the best storylines in a game ever.
• Jedi Outcast (2002, PC)/Jedi Academy (2003, PC), also with great storytelling, level design, and lightsaber physics.
• Lord of the Rings Online (2007, PC), which may be one of my favorites of all time because of the gorgeous accuracy and absorption of the world building, as well as the enjoyment of playing with friends.
• Portal (2007, PC) /Portal 2 (2011, PC), which are both arch and witty games with mind-bending physics puzzles.
• Red Dead Redemption (2010, XBOX 360), which had an engaging story and a lot of fun territory to explore.
• Borderlands 2 (2012, PC), which tells an amazing story with some of the best characters I’ve seen in a game, including THE best villain.
• Pillars of Eternity (2015, PC), a beautiful distillation of everything that SHOULD have been good about Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale.

Also, a few runners-up:

• Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 5, which are both gorgeous games with interesting but very problematic stories. I feel pretty icky through much of Far Cry 3, and the ending of Far Cry 5 pisses me off.
• River Raid and Frogger on the Atari 2600 are sentimental favorites because my mother loved them so much, sitting down after dinner on the floor with a cigarette and playing them for hours.
• Various generations of shooters (Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, Rainbow Six) were fun to play with friends until the Adderall-twitchy ten-year-olds took over.

I freely confess that my exposure to video games has been spotty and my needs are unusual: I like tinkering and exploring and fighting if it’s relatively easy. I’m not looking for a tooth-and-nail struggle in my leisure hours because that’s what real life is for.

If you’re remembering the consoles of the 80s with an abiding fondness, here’s my challenge: pick up one of the new remakes of those consoles or an emulator, and time how long you enjoy playing it.

On the whole, I’m a little like a high-functioning alcoholic. I know that I’ve lost countless hours to video games that I didn’t really enjoy while I was avoiding other things. But the good ones…they were pretty good.

[I’ve been on a nostalgia trip lately thinking about the computers that influenced me growing up. They were a perfect metaphor for our latch-key generation: “Here’s a device with limited instructions. Good luck!” I know they changed the way I think, and this week, I’ll be blogging about the early computers that influenced me.]

In this entry, I’ll cover two computers that had some influence on me, though it was brief.

Commodore SX-64

Released: 1984 –1986

Specs: 64KB RAM, 6510 1.02 MHz CPU

My friend Norman introduced me to a lot of geeky and fannish things, but he was especially an early adopter of computers. It was like he’d been waiting his whole life to enjoy something so logical and structured and safe. He owned a Commodore SX-64.  

The SX-64 was the “luggable” version of the Commodore 64, sporting a 23-pound weight to challenge your back and a five-inch screen to challenge your eyesight. That must have been fun for spreadsheet users; it was bad enough for gamers like Norman and me.

In the afternoons following school, I’d walk over to his house and we’d play either Autoduel or Lords of Conquest on the machine, setting it on its back with the screen facing upward so we could squint at it from above. Norman’s mother would offer us off-brand soda and oranges, and those visits were a great respite in the early days after my parents’ divorce.

Norman and his family were Japanese-American, and his folks had been interned in the camps out west during World War II. His mother Mary wrote a speech about her experiences for Toastmasters that she shared with me when she found out I wanted to be a writer, and it was very well-written.

I sometimes got the sense that they thought I was more likely to share that story than Norman was, though I never have because I feel only like it was loaned to me. Still, I was honored she thought of me in that way.

It was important to me at that time, too, to see other kinds of people leading other kinds of lives because my notion of “normal” was so skewed.

Not long before I went off to college, Norman sold the SX-64 to me because, small screen or not, it had a disk drive and my regular Commodore didn’t. I somehow had it in my head that I could write college papers on the thing, but I learned quickly it was too obsolete even with an external monitor.

I did play one of my favorite video games of all time on it, though: Wasteland. For a (relatively) primitive computer game, it had a great story with interesting characters. One time I was playing it during a difficult high school tumult of some kind, and when I rescued a character from the brink of death, he said, “Let’s go kick some ass!” I was taken aback by that, but it filled me with a strange sense of hope.

I guess it just hit me the right way at the right time.

Commodore Amiga 500

Released: 1987 –1991

Specs: 512KB RAM, 68000 7.16 MHz CPU

The reason Norman could sell me his SX-64 was that he upgraded to an Amiga 500. I used it only a few times, but it was an astounding machine with the first real GUI I’d ever seen, as well as the first 3.5” disk drive and mouse.

I remember looking at the mouse and thinking how counter-intuitive it was compared to a joystick, and I thought it would never catch on. Sixteen-year-old Will thought we’d be working in Photoshop with a joystick in 2021. Also, he thought he’d be the President of the United States, so he wasn’t a keen predictor of the future.

It was on Norman’s Amiga that I first played Lemmings (meh) and Marble Madness, which I loved.

What was significant to me about the Amiga was that it was a computer that I could tell was already doomed. IBM clones were invading schools and companies, and the Amiga seemed like the last real hobbyist machine that was just odd enough to be enjoyed by a limited group of people. It would live a little longer as the source of many animated TV titles you remember from the late 80s and early 90s, helped by a device called the Video Toaster.

I guess the Amiga was my first introduction to the principle that being amazing isn’t always enough.

[I’ve been on a nostalgia trip lately thinking about the computers that influenced me growing up. They were a perfect metaphor for our latch-key generation: “Here’s a device with limited instructions. Good luck!” I know they changed the way I think, and this week, I’ll be blogging about the early computers that influenced me.]

Commodore 64

Released: August 1982 – April 1994(!)

Specs: 64KB RAM, 1.023MHz CPU

“Gee, Will, with access to so many computers and parents who owned a bookstore, you must have been rich!”

No, we weren’t rich. My father ran the bookstore into the ground with his sketchy accounting and customer service (“It can’t be cheaper back in Michigan. They print the price on the fucking cover!”) by 1984 or so, but even at its height, there were only so many Judith Krantz novels and books about snakes we could sell. Soon, my father was working as a furniture mover and security guard, and my mother was working at a doctor’s office and as an EMT.

I was lucky in a few important ways, though:

1. My parents had very strange financial priorities, often involved with keeping up appearances of our social class. So we’d eat Dinty Moore beef stew with my father’s restored Porsche parked out in the driveway.
   
2. My grandparents, much better money managers, must have asked my parents at key birthdays and Christmas what my sister and I wanted.
   
3. My family as a whole likes to give dramatic, wish-fulfilling gifts. (Which sucks as adults because we all have most of what we want.)

So it came to be for my twelfth birthday in 1985 that I got a Commodore 64 home computer. I remember my father did a lot of research and asked around to discover that it was a superior product for the price, which was essentially true. It came out of the box with a lot of features that required upgrades to an Apple II.

My father also imposed a rule for the Commodore: no games except ones I wrote myself. That felt draconian at the time, but in retrospect, it sparked me to learn programming in a way that I wouldn’t otherwise.

He eventually got a professional job again (at a mental institution, ironically), and my first black-and-white monitor for the Commodore was almost certainly pilfered from there, because that’s how he rolled.

Before I could work on games, my father was obsessed first and foremost with having me write a program that he could use as an address book.

What he craved was the convenience of:

1. Sitting down at the computer.
   
2. Inserting a tape into the cassette drive and fast-forwarding to a spot we’d written down for the counter.
   
3. Typing LOAD “ADDRESSBOOK”,1.
   
4. Pressing Play on the tape deck and waiting patiently for the program to load at 55 bytes per second.
   
5. Typing RUN.
   
6. Entering a person’s name precisely spelled in answer to a prompt.
   
7. Waiting briefly for the program to churn through some READ and DATA statements.
   
8. Receiving the requested phone number, assuming the person was in the data.

Even as a kid, I thought this was insane, so I suppose this marks my first encounter with unreasonable client demands for software.

It was also my first encounter with development delays and bad project management because he left my mother for another woman before I finished writing the program.

(And thank God, because as funny as I make him sound, he was a dangerous and violent sociopath and he exits the story here.)

In his absence, I got cracking on those games, including a Star Trek ship simulator.

My friends and I would position the coffee table and TV in the living room to be the bridge of the ship, and I’d write a program that could accept commands for navigation and combat. You could enter a heading and a warp factor, and the computer would show you scrolling stars as the ship was underway. At random intervals, Klingons would attack, and it was possible to fight them off with phasers and photon torpedoes after declaring Red Alert.

There are no pictures of this bridge setup, alas, but this was the computer at the time:

It was really a prop for role-playing more than an actual game, and that source code had to be an ungodly mess as I added feature after feature to make it better. A few friends remember my frustration at debugging that resulted in some loosened keys, but then, shit was blowing up on the Enterprise all the time like that.

What I learned most from that Commodore 64 was the power of tinkering and incremental changes based on making something user friendly. It wasn’t necessary to get the exact product you wanted on the first try, though my anxiety disorder didn’t let that part sink in for many more years.

The programs I wrote on the Commodore were all about entertaining people, and that’s a practice I maintain today not only with my fiction but also with my design and technical work. I’m less interested in what I can help people DO than in how I can make them FEEL. The Commodore’s emphasis on audio and graphics made that easy.

And yeah, I still own one (not the original).

[I’ve been on a nostalgia trip lately thinking about the computers that influenced me growing up. They were a perfect metaphor for our latch-key generation: “Here’s a device with limited instructions. Good luck!” I know they changed the way I think, and this week, I’ll be blogging about the early computers that influenced me.]

Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III

Released: July 1980 – September 1983

Specs: 16KB RAM, 2MHz CPU

Oh, Radio Shack, my favorite store as a kid: home of the 160-in-One Electronic Projects Kit, the Archer Space Patrol walkie-talkies, the PRO-46 radio scanner, the nigh-useless Armatron robot limb, and a whole bunch of adequate computers. I loved those catalogs when they came in the mail.

A couple of my childhood friends had the TRS-80 Color Computer, but the alpha nerds on the block – usually adult men for whom ham radio was too sexy – owned one of the massive Model I, Model II, Model III, or Model 4 computers. (Yes, oddly, they didn’t truck with the Roman numeral IV at Radio Shack.)

The Model III I first encountered was in the home of Eric Jones, the grown man who’d volunteered with foolhardy optimism to be the Computers merit badge counselor for our Boy Scout troop.

He’d told my father that he’d once taught at the American University of Beirut, which my old man told me was code for being a CIA agent. Maybe that was true. Mr. Jones (hell, maybe Dr. Jones, I don’t know) had the quiet patient badassery of someone who knew what democracy (or at least American hegemony) really cost.

By small town coincidence, Mr. Jones’s wife Margaret had been my third-grade teacher, the first of many educators who’d wonder what the hell was wrong with me. Her diagnosis in 1981 pretty much nailed it:

And luckily that problem has not persisted to this very day. Ahem.  

Three years after Mrs. Jones coped with what could be politely called my “quicksilver” (slippery and toxic) mind, it was her husband’s turn as he explained the workings of TRS-80 Level 2 BASIC in their den.

I did not take to it well.

One of the few values that both my parents agreed upon was that our family was eerily and perhaps tragically smarter than 99.9% of the human population, one generation or so removed from evolving into hyper-brilliant orbs of effervescent light. Work was something people like us invented robots or conned others into doing, and a single cursory read-through of a book would be enough to supervise a heart transplant or the construction of a nuclear reactor.

We were skimmers, not studiers. All we needed was the gist and we’d take it from there…if we felt like it.  

The trouble is that programming is not an intuitive inborn gift, at least not back then in BASIC. So I was bewildered to be bewildered by something, and I had no practice in listening carefully to parse out someone’s complex instructions. You can’t extrapolate the syntax of an arbitrary command from the first couple of letters.

You can’t just “get the gist.”

It turns out that ignorant genius is still pretty much indistinguishable from stupidity, and I wince even to this day imagining the Jones family discussing my progress at the dinner table: “You’d think a kid so maladjusted would be smarter.”

I may not be remembering it clearly, but that merit badge seemed to take agonizing weeks to earn, for Mr. Jones at least as much as for me. If he’d really been a CIA assassin, he must have been sorely tempted to garotte me.

The breakthrough finally came when I really listened and did my half of the work integrating what I heard. It was when I realized that the statement:

READ A$, B$, C$

could iterate through a series of DATA statements like this:

DATA Ludwigsen, Will, 555-111-1212, Amemiya, Norman, 555-222-1313,

to produce names and phone numbers.

It came to me like turning on a light. Or, more accurately, like a slowly warming filament over the course of days until it flickers into a dull red glow.

I learned from the Model III (and, more accurately, from Eric Jones), that smarts without input is useless…though it took me many more years to put it into practice.

(And yeah, I got the badge.)