Nowadays, kids get to fool around on computers at a very early age. I must've been thirteen or fourteen the first time we had a chance to do that. The first machine we ever used was bought for school by our math teacher. It happened to be a trusty old Apple ][ computer. I remember we tried to sneak in the classroom to get a glimpse of that machine. We had to wait until the next year though to even touch it. It came with some educational software, like how many glasses of Lemonade can you sell and at what price. Our first economics I suppose. Some of us even entered the school software competition to write a substantial program in BASIC. I believe I still have the data tape lying somewhere, because we didn't have cash to buy the first floppy drive, it was all binary 1000100101110100100101 sound and waiting for beeps in between programs.
Later in college, we went for the serious stuff: programming in that wonderful language PASCAL on terminals connected to that ancient Siemens minicomputer, filling a whole air-conditioned building. We were still working with monochrome green displays which weighed like lead and worked with the operating system BS2000 (which is short for a mouthfull of German: "Betriebssystem zweitausend". Ach ja !!). We soon figured out how to multitask..., on some other guy's account..., sending him messages he didn't understand where they were coming from. Boy was that a lot of fun! Pity they all changed their password so fast after that. Anyway, we were just kidding around, not ever doing anything real nasty, like renaming or deleting files. Oh yeah, I should mention this... This adorable machine worked with EBCDIC character-code. We still wonder why there is so much empty space in that code. Meanwhile, a guy in another year got kicked out; he had managed to break in from the userside to the administrator side where he could change to CPU1, where all the administrative data was held about all personnel and students. I guess he now works for some important computer company, dept. of security *grin* .
While some persevered, others drifted into engineering, where we got a first glimpse of that strange, stand alone, single user machine: the IBM PC. Since the word "clone" at that time only had a meaning in different SF stories, we were blessed with the original machine, being already a PS/2 I recall. And.... just one of course, so you had to queue if you wanted to use it,.. or wait for two years when you were listed for the projects. Meanwhile, the whole group started off with programming in FORTRAN and PASCAL on some other obscure system with,...yes... you guessed right... monochrome green display terminals: a PR1ME computer (and that's not a typo I'm afraid). One of the first versions, because we found out soon enough that PR1ME did have really neat mini's at that time even. Let's be honest about this, we missed our BS2000...
Before we even got the chance to work with that IBM, we got some months of programming a most fascinating 1MHz machine in 6502-ASSEMBLER. In the end, we even liked it! Don't ask me too much about it now though.
So finally we encountered that PS/2 machine. Hell, we even got to program it! Although they found out that Larry 2 was there somewhere as well. I did my project at a company and my thesis on such an IBM. The project turned out to be a software programming of a LCA-chip (Logic Cell Array) to make a Video frame buffer. It included a link to a Colour Look Up Table (CLUT). I don't believe I saw that many CLUTS gathered together in my life ever again after that *nasty*grin*
And after that?... Well typing away for a while on a Macintosh in Word (for money that was). And later learning the intricacies of CAD/CAM software on a SUN Sparc station with some guy who used to work at IBM. We worked so fast on the different basic chapters and the ones about B-Splines, they let us fool around to make complex surfaces (like... design some hubcaps and a fender!). Curious little me was also opening a couple of UNIX shells to learn some more besides that horrid CAD environment. It's a pity I didn't get the opportunity to do that some more later on.
Meanwhile,... back at home,.. after years of following magazines in order to have a personal computer myself, I finally made a decision... I bought one! I had been following the whole market: the advent of the first interesting Apple thingie: the Lisa. Way too expensive though...Wel that evolved into our well-known Macintosh, PLUS, SE and so on. In the UK, Clive Sinclair had brought people the ZX-80, 81 and Spectrum machines, but suddenly he came up with a machine also based on the 68000 Motorola chip: The Quantum Leap or QL. Hey, this looked like a powerful machine but much cheaper than that Mac. Turns out there's no floppy drive but something called minidrives (sort of looping mini tapes which looked crappy). Turns out the first versions can't contain all of the memory chips, so you have like this blob which sticks out at the back ?!
Finally I saw the light with the Atari ST. A really great machine! And much more software coming out, no problem there. Boy was that a lot of fun. I was saved, gathered my savings and was lost... my first addiction, The Big One. And of course you needed colour after a while, so you went out and bought a colour display. And a switch box to switch from paperwhite to colour. And a printer,... and a second floppy. And you went from an 1040 to a MEGA4 machine. In the Netherlands there was a guy capable of incorporating a SCSI harddisk. So you just went for it and bought yourself one. I finally became a fervent user of DTP-programs and learned a lot about picture formats. I also became a Typeface addict. I still have over 500 fonts for that machine, and you'll never use all of them. I even started converting MAC Postscript Fonts for the Atari, and deleting the originals (ack!). Oh,... and should I mention games? Oodles of them: puzzlers, platform games, arcade games, adventures; tons of adventures: INFOCOM textadventures, Magnetic Scrolls, ELITE, Dungeon Master, and of course Ultima (also a reason why I finally had to switch - reluctantly - to PC).
Nowadays, because of work and the dead of 8 Mhz Atari (way to go Tramiel!), I also had to follow the current PC rage and am working - why even typing this here text - with an upgradable 100 Mhz Multimedia Monster. It's fun to look at all the cash that went into this hobby. I won't even calculate the time it would take to earn it all back. The thing is, I'm glad I actually did, because I met some really great friends who were also getting into the craze, and we did have an awfull lot of fun.
Recently, I also hooked up on the Internet, and also got addicted there. You can read a bit
about that on my friends' page. The most important thing you (have to) learn
is not to loose yourself there. If you're able to do that, you won't get hurt, or get ill because
of unhealthy eating habits or lack of sleep. Because you start to forget you have a human body and tend to sit
there, staring at a screen until your eyeballs pop and most of your muscles start aching, even
WITH today's ergonomic chairs and computertables.
So watch it, my friends, I know what I'm talking
about.