A brief history of my time
A couple of days ago, I was struck with memories of my early computing days. It started me thinking about where it all began. Then I came across Adam Kalsey's Newly Digital: A distributed anthology of early computing experience, so here's my story.
I do not remember when my first exposure to computing technology was. It was with a game console, where one could play pong, tennis, and similar games... well, if it worked that is. I found it in a trunk somewhere in the early 80's, it had joysticks, but no cartridges.
In 1985, my dad bought a ZX Spectrum+, with 48KB of RAM, and audio cassette input and output interfaces. It had the Spectrum dialect of BASIC burnt onto its ROM, and booted in about a second. It connected to the TV - on the same channel that the video ran, and also had a connector for plugging external devices to it. I'd seen pictures of these devices, but was never to own one.
I inaugurated this machine by playing Hungry Horace. Loaded from tape using the command LOAD "". The screen flashed Cyan, Red till it found the start of data, then Cyan and Red stripes till it found something it could load, then Blue and Yellow stripes while it loaded, and then the program started.
A couple of days later I'd started writing my own programs, and about a week later, I figured out how to use the Break key to get into the source of a running program - thus was born my interest in figuring out how programs ran, and how I could change them... something that remains with me today.
Most of my programs were small, because I could never save them to tape reliably. Once I got a printer I started printing out my source. I figured out how to get the printer to change to a graphics mode by sending some funny codes to it - quite by accident, and then learnt how to print screen shots. I don't remember what it was I did, or if it is such a big deal, but it definitely felt like it back then. I also learnt about two strange BASIC commands called RANDOM and RANDOMIZE.
I think this was also my first introduction to Polymorphism. The ZX Spectrum BASIC used the keyword TO to mean two things. You'd use it to extract a substring from one position TO another, and also to draw the arc of a circle from a starting angle TO an ending angle.
In 1991, I my parents got me a PC XT. It had a 20MB Hard disk, and 640KB of RAM, and one 5¼ floppy disk drive - Single Side/Double Density, but of course, we could turn the floppy over to use the other side. The processor speed was 4.77MHz, and it was fast! I learnt GWBasic, C, FoxBase, Lotus-123, Wordstar (macros), and then I wrote a large program in GWBasic that would teach me Chemistry. Then, I made a bootable floppy, put the program on it, and made it run through autoexec.bat - I could boot the computer into my program. How cool was that!
This XT also had Windows 3.0, but no mouse. I did have the Win 3.0 user's manual (original, yeah, I still have it), and figured out how to use the keyboard to get around. Played solitaire, played minesweeper, got fed up, and never used it again. Then, contracted Dark Avenger, and lost everything. After that, I learnt to use PCTools, Norton Utilities and Sidekick... hmm, TSRs!
I had a lot of problems with the XT - the RAM chips kept popping out!. One day one of the banks exploded, and I was down to 256KB RAM. A little later the entire system gave way, and I remained PC less for the next 5 years, getting whatever PC time I could from friends, college and Aptech.
I had an amazing time learning, I only wish I'd known what books to pick up, or had someone to point me in the right direction.
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
bluesmoon) wrote,
nostalgic
