I was once super cool
GordonMcComb
Posts: 3,366
OMG:
http://money.cnn.com/gallery/technology/2016/03/25/80s-tech/index.html
At one time or other in the 1980s, I had EVERY ONE of the 20 righteous technology products shown. These days, I'll be lucky to upgrade my 10-key flip phone.
http://money.cnn.com/gallery/technology/2016/03/25/80s-tech/index.html
At one time or other in the 1980s, I had EVERY ONE of the 20 righteous technology products shown. These days, I'll be lucky to upgrade my 10-key flip phone.
Comments
The C64 came out in 1982. I was already done with programming in BASIC in 1974. We were building and programming Motorola 6809 in assembler at that time. The C64 had no attraction for us.
Floppy disks: I pass,
We used 8 inch floppies on the first Intel development systems for the 8080/8086.
VHS and Betamax: I fail.
Never owned a VHS never mind a Betamax in my life. Just did not see any reason to record hours of stuff I had no time to watch later. Besides those mechanisms were so complex, horrible, unreliable I never had the urge to own one.
IBM Selectric typewriter: I fail.
Too expensive. We had old teletypes and line printers, later personal dot matrix.
VisiCalc: I fail.
Never had a use for such a thing.
Apple II: I fail.
Too expensive.
Macintosh: I fail.
Too expensive.
Dot matrix printers: I pass.
See above.
Sony Walkman: I fail.
Never needed music whilst on the move. Much loved my home built stereo system and speakers.
Nintendo: I fail.
Not into games. Not since Star Glider on the Atari ST520 accused me of cheating when I finally got a score over 100,000.
Word Perfect: I pass.
The best most user friendly word processor ever made.
Pagers: I fail.
Nobody ever needed me that urgently.
Motorola DynaTAC 8000X: I fail.
Too expensive.
Answering machines: I fail.
Too expensive.
My friend noticed that his new answering machine had doubled his phone bill because he was always calling people back if they left their name and number. Eventually he put a greeting on the machine like so "...please leave your name and number, then YOU can call me back later"
Cordless phones: I fail.
What possible use is that?
Boomboxes: I fail.
See walkman above.
Fax machines: I fail.
Had a bit of an argument with a bank one time that was prepared to transfer thousands of pounds of my money on the basis of a letter with my signature sent by FAX. They did not seem to get the idea that anyone could spoof my signature digitally.
Dial-up: I pass.
Downloading all the sources to build a Linux system over a 14.4 modem took all night.
Tandy TRS-80 Model 100: I fail.
But my father was cool with that. After he retired he started to learn how to program on a TRS-80. Not bad for a guy born in 1914!
Camcorder: I fail.
See VHS, Betamax above.
Man that was hard work. 4 out of 20 is not very cool is it.
I guess I didn't make the grade. Had only 7 of the actual items listed and the equivalent of 9 others on the list.
No cordless phone, boombox, TRS 80 Mod 100, or camcorder. :-(
Some things I had some things I didn't.
I did pay $3000 for an overpriced Macintosh and printer....today, I can still pay $3000 for an overpriced Mac...I guess times haven't changed that much.
I don't miss pagers and pay phones.
I had a boss that once told me he didn't care what bar I went to in the afternoons as long as I had my pager and they had a pay phone.
If someone called and you were home and awake probably you answered.
If you were not home, at work or out and about with better things to do, the caller gave up and tried again later. No problem. Obviously you are not home.
Today, if someone calls you on your mobile and you choose not to answer they get really upset and agree. As if you are supposed to be available for them on demand 24 hours per day.
I wrote some of the first books about the Macintosh, and had a very early prototype in '83. I had to buy my own (full price) when it came out in January '84.
Radio Shack sent me the Model 100 as a review product, and never wanted it back. I was a contributing editor for magazines like Video, so you'd expect I'd have VHS, Beta, and camcorders. Oddly enough, I still have (and use!) a VHS deck. Some time around '87 my Beta deck was sold to Harlan Ellison.
The gompy Motorola phone and pager were relics of needing to stay in touch with family members that had issues with "calling home when they got there." Actually, they still never called home, but at least I tried.
WordPerfect (it wasn't published by Corel then) was the subject of numerous books, so obviously, I had to at least own a copy.
I kept my IBM Correcting Selectric until just recently, when it finally told me it had enough. There is an advantage to using a typewriter in that it helps you from editing while you write -- not always good for some kinds of prose. These days I have my eye on a good manual portable.
By 1989 I think I was still using 1200 (maybe 2400) bps modems. I think I probably had a 56kbs modem at some point, but don't remember when that was.
Curiously, they left off the IBM PC. While it may not have been "righteous" technology, it did speed the adoption of personal computers in business, if for no other reason they used off-the-shelf parts, allowing quick entry of lower-cost alternatives.
Example useless junk I helped to sell (see cover stories):
https://books.google.com/books?id=XARMtUUMxm8C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://books.google.com/books?id=f0Hw30gTTckC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
Having been shown the way IBM all of a sudden felt the need to be in their as well. So they rushed out that pile of junk which was the original PC, basically the Intel reference schematic for using an 8088, together with the cobbled together operating system from Seattle Computer Products, via Microsoft.
IBM, being the industry giants at the time, set the standard.
When we pulled an IBM PC apart in 1981 a young colleague of mine shook his head and remarked "IBM always holds up the progress of computing by ten years".
Turned out he was right.
The PC was never "cool".
Modems, my first was 300 baud and you set the phone handset on it. At one point I had 4 * 56K modems all ganged up on 4 phone lines, no DSL available at the time.
The volunteer fire dept I was in still uses pagers and radios. Way better than cell phones out here.
Jonathan
The IBM PC was about as capable as any CP/M machine, yet within just a few years, CP/M was dead. You're revising history: it was the initials I, B, and M that caused the great sea change. The fact that they used off-the-shelf parts simply made it easier for others to offer the same thing, for less. This only fanned the flames caused by the most iconic computer maker in history finally placing its bets. CP/M didn't excite, and certainly wouldn't have fostered the creation of major events like Comdex. (And, some people would say, the rise of people like Sheldon Adelson, thanks to his purchase of the Sands, and the development of its convention center, in order to handle the once-monstrous attendance Comdex produced.)
All of which was lost on IBM at the time. Except for the small group that created the PC, they had no idea of its influence at the time.
The one factor that made all the difference was the clones. Binary compatible hardware for running freely distributed executables was the ticket. M$ knew very well that the way to grab the biggest market was to give it away - The ultimate cheat for a market driven economy - hence their aggressive and well financed bullying of Linux. And also why I'd still not trust M$ in their current actions with Linux.
Do they not really embrace Linux now? First Visual Studio Community Edition, some serious IDE now running on Linux also and now the announcement that a port of SQL-Server will be available this year.
No, embrace is the wrong word. MS is hugging Linux really hard. Right around the neck.
Enjoy!
Mike
Have to agree with Heater and evanh on this point. S100 bus systems running CPM were what got the ball rolling. At one point I was installing 3-4 systems a week in small business offices. Doctors, Dentists, Lawyers, Accountants, researchers, etc. were buying them as fast as they could be made. Biggest reason the IBM PC took over was that buying IBM was a CMA decision.
Isn't that what I said? Initials I, B, and M, and all that?
Not talking about what started the ball rolling, but what knocked it out of the ball park. I'm always amazed at the revisionist history that goes on with IBM. The resentment must run deep. The facts remain: IBM's entry changed attitudes for the mainstream public. Plus, their use of off-the-shelf parts -- something they later regretted -- fostered the entry of hundreds upon hundreds of small and large players that leveraged off the IBM brand (some, like Dell, exist today), and is what gave the industry its tremendous growth.
Just as an aside, after a TRS-80, my next three machines were all CP/M: Osborne 1, Morrow, and CompuPro (I knew George Morrow and Bill Godbout personally, which is how I got my Morrow and CompuPro machines). However, I eventually had to switch to a PC and PC-DOS if I wanted to keep getting assignments.
Bottom line: the impact of the IBM PC was utterly unmistakable. Really, it should have been mentioned in the CNN article. More typical revisionist history, I suppose.
I have at least three of your books, so you can't be all that bad ...
"Robot Builders Bonanza - 99 inexpensive robotics projects"
"Gordon McComb's Gadgeteers Goldmine"
"Fantastic Lost Inventions You Can Build"
The key point being 100% binary compatibility, ie: the clones, since the official "Compatible" PC spec never went anywhere. Just like CP/M was also a compatibility spec doomed against free beer.
An example of this evolving would be something like VGA graphics chips had all the old modes of CGA and EGA. Faster CPU clock speeds were a problem for a bit but developers soon started adding bloat to deal with that at the application level.
Of course, that all changed with Win95 (Potentially OS2/WinNT) but conquest was already absolute, there was now only the PC+Windoze left, so no competition.
Speaking of excitement there was bucket loads of it surrounding the microprocessor and the personal computer industry years before IBM jumped in.
To my memory 1976 was the magic year. That was the year the masses of geeks could first get hold of a microprocessor at a reasonable price and do something with it easily. You know, the Intel 8085, Motorola 6800, MOS Technology 6502, Zilog Z80. There was a buzz in the air, everyone knew where this was leading and they all wanted to jump in. That spawned a lot of personal computers, NASCOM, Sinclair, Apple, a ton of others.
I don't know about Comdex but over in Blighty we had the Personal Computer World magazine from 1978 and they ran the Personal Computer World Show in London every year. For Blighty that was a huge show with massive attendances.
IBM arrived to the party late. Their miserable PC (Wonder where they got the name from?) was the meteorite that caused the mass extinction of all those threads of evolution in personal computing that had been developing rapidly.
The excitement was gone.
CPM86 ran on the IBM PC but corporate clients decided that PC DOS (IBM DOS written by MS - ok bought in and rebranded with/without some development thrown in) was the WTG.
BTW MS made lots of $ selling Z80 boards with CPM for Apple //e & /// computers, well before IBM came on the scene. IIRC Apple //e's were rolling out the door at about 70,000 per month when IB came on the scene.
The moto "no one got fired for buying IBM" gave IBM a leg in to the corporate sales for the PC.
And one last point.
56Kbps modems did not appear until at least 1996+. 33k6 modems were the top of the range dialup in at least 1995.
Used to go to Comdex for a few years. IIRC last time was 1995. My wife used to troll the isles and report backwhich stands I needed to visit. Last year we were there, on leaving Comdex we (my business partner, our sales manager, and our wives) commented on the lack of mobile phones at Comdex. Between us all, we only saw one guy on a mobile phone - between the 6 of us we had 8 mobile phones! My business partner and Sales Manager had both analog and digital phones. In the same year back home in Oz, our paultry Computer Shows in Sydney and Melbourne could only muster 30,000 visitors for the 5 days (you only needed to go for a day here). Yet Telstra had to install a new mobile tower to handle our mobile traffic in the convention halls! Everyone at the show would be sporting mobile phones here back then. My how things have changed.
That's not how I see it. IBM didn't stop anyone from coming up with something better. Arguably, a few times someone did -- the Mac is still around. You can't blame IBM for other people lacking ideas.
I fully recognize the contribution of CP/M, but it wasn't CP/M and the machines that ran it that transformed computing in the 80s and 90s into a powerhouse. It was a possibly flawed architecture made popular by a very well-known brand, quickly followed by a multitude of clones, whose business model was made possible because of an unintentional open source hardware design. Remember that by 1985 a large number of people were building their own clones using parts they could easily buy mail order, using unitized plug-and-play components. My 816 may have been S100 based, but everything about it was custom. Even its power supply was hand made. You can't create a ubiquitous product that way.
Oh, by off-the-shelf, you are actually meaning the cloned hardware that I've been harking on about. That, of course, requires not just 100% binary compatibility but identical mechanical cloning as well. And, yep, that was also another hallmark of the clones.
Personally, I think Itunes was a dog and never deserved any value but that gaping hole had to filled by something.
I had an 8 MHz clone, but I never needed to switch it back to 4.77. The only software that needed that was copy-protected stuff that used asm timing for accessing the floppy (which is one reason why absolute hardware cloning was essential).
As a not-well-to-do college student, the only software I ever paid for was MS Quick C, which was not copy-protected; it cost $70 and was worth it for its easy-to-use inline assembler that I used extensively. Many of my functions were all assembly with a C wrapper, so I had to learn how to write a real .S file for the prop (and other microcontrollers) during my triumphant second wave of programming life (thanks Parallax !).
My proclivities and resources seem to be similar to Heater's, so I also sampled only a few items on that list.
Meanwhile the PC's were drab beige boxes that weren't particularly interesting. It wouldn't be until 1992 and Windows 3.1 that PC machines would have mutli-tasking GUI and large memory model. At that point they started getting interesting.
Unfortunately a series of poor business and engineering decisions doomed both the Adam and Coleco itself, but during the final downward spiral you could get Adams really cheap and they were super functional for the price. At one time I owned three of them. And the keyboard cables were easily extended with cheap standard RJ11 hardware, so you could lounge on the sofa with the keyboard on your lap using the TV as a monitor. It would be decades before that became practical again.
https://archive.org/stream/creativecomputing-1984-03/Creative_Computing_v10_n03_1984_Mar#page/n66/mode/1up
A sad tale about JJ: He was one of the unfortunate souls who died in the Loma Prieta earthquake in '89. He was precisely at the wrong place at the wrong time when the brick facade of a downtown San Fransisco office building collapsed on his car, instantly killing him and a co-worker.
(While on the archive.org site, be sure to poke around at other back issues of Creative Computing. It was a fantastic magazine, and serves as a terrific time capsule of the heydey of personal computing. I have a few articles in there somewhere.)