Love and PCs: Your first computer memories
Its an interesting exercise to think back about our first computers. For those of us of a certain age, it was before the PC revolution. Of course, in those days it wasn't even a PC in any sense. The year: 1978. The place: High school computer science class. The hardware: a beast of an IBM machine, long before the actual PC. Input: a keyboard or a card reader (remember those, kiddies?) The display: single line, red LEDs. Output: a dot matrix printer, or the wonder of the class, a multi-color pen plotter. Software: an early form of Basic, running with 4 KB of RAM. I can't off the top of my head even find anything to compare that to. It is such a tiny, insignificant amount that it's irrelevant to today's world. But we DID things!. The school librarian used to come in once a week and a couple of us geeks would laboriously enter her returns and other data onto cards, which we would then feed into the card reader, and VOILA! a list of people with overdue books. Frankly, it was probably not of any real time saving at all, but it let us work out how to make things happen, plus it got us geek cred in the library, so why not? Or the time that the school had a Career Day. A few of us automated the process a little, preparing a set of cards for each student to fill out their preferred careers, which we then correlated to produce a schedule for each student to visit each of the speakers. But what really got our juices flowing was the plotter. Simple x and y coordinates, so whatever you could specify it would draw. When we discovered that x= sin(y) made a lovely pattern, it became a race to find the best, coolest, and most elaborate designs. I remember hours spent in the computer lab testing various programs, each of which required the laborious filling of punch cards, running, then correcting, re-running, etc etc. All to see what pattern a particular mathematical formula might produce. I sometimes wonder what happened to all those designs, I wish that I still had them, as ancient as they might be. Once we left school, of course, we lost that part of our lives. Nobody (at least in my circle) had the money to buy a real computer, not even the hand made options available in computer magazines. It was a few years before the Radio Shack TRS-80 came out, the one that got the computer onto MY desktop, at least. But I suppose that is another story...
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