What Are Your Favorite Computing Memories?

aussersterne asks: "Every now and then while reading Slashdot comments, I realize that most people have no idea that -the network was the computer- for decades before Amazon.com and Google ever appeared, taking for granted the rather boring state of commodity computing that dominates the marketplace today. Unix and dial-up shell users remember bang-paths, 110 baud BBSing, 'luggable' computers, UUCP, DC600 OS media, VT100s connected to dumb terminals, and 1152x900 8-bit color web browsing before most PC users had even shelled out for their first copy of Windows 3.x and the free 'serial mouse' it included. Middle-aged geeks, what are your favorite recollections from from the '80s and '90s computing, network, and hardware world, as full of platforms and innovation as it was? Which computer system is still 'your baby' all these years later? Anybody still have a running Sun2? A running FHL UniQuad? Anybody still use KA9Q?"

C64

[rmjohnso]

Though I'm not middle aged, I do have tons of fond memories of sitting in front of my Commodore 64 with my dad, learning to load programs and playing games with him. The two I remember the most are Threshold and Falcon Patrol.

Apple //e

[molo]

300 baud pulse dialing modem on my Apple //e.. that only worked with a 40-column text all-caps terminal program.. no ansi, no vt100 emulation, just a dumb terminal. What joy.. and I was so behind the times..everyone had 2400 baud modems. Hah!

-molo

Frustrating lessons

[chh1]

Oddly enough, I found that my favorite memories of computing are from the many times I had to figure out exactly what went wrong with Windows 95/98.

While I realize that this shows me to be far younger than many Slashdotters, as well as much less technically skilled, I think I ended up learning a lot about how to fix many basic computer problems. I may not be a "computer guru" or even a "133t h4x0r", but it did get me up to what would probably be considered a modest level of understanding.

It may have been extremely frustrating, but I look back upon it kindly for allowing me to learn.

Many

[linuxwrangler]

In no particular order...

Saving, borrowing, and going in together with my roommate to put together the $2,000 (that was lots more then than it is now) to buy an IBM PC. The beast came complete with no drives (that's right, NONE - we wrote things via the embedded "cassette-basic" and could save the programs to a cassette tape recorder), 16kB RAM and a monochrome non-graphical display.

The San Francisco computer shows of the early 80s. Those were fun shows. I saw the Osborne I when it was first shown there and went on buying sprees to buy chips (yes, young-ones, individual chips) to plug in and get my RAM up to 64kB, as well as expansion cards (everything was optional back then) to get a clock, printer port, serial port, and finally 640kB of RAM (expansion card and lots and lots of chips to plug in). Everything was outrageously expensive by today's standards so there were lots of cobbled together add-ons. A favorite was a photocell gizmo that clipped onto the print-head of an Epson dot-matrix printer which along with some software made it work as a scanner.

I remember buying DOS 1.0 and a third-party 320k double-sided floppy drive (IBM was only shipping 160 single-sided drives at the time). You had to patch DOS to get it to use both sides of the disk and at $15 for a floppy this was important. The alternative was to buy one of those punches that cut a notch in the opposite side of the disk so you could flip it over and use it as two single-sided floppy disks. When we went to add a second drive we had to figure out how they had wired the drives and found out that all OEM drives were jumpered as "drive b" and the cable between the two was twisted to swap the first and second drive signals. We cut the jumpers and got everything working.

Later, we bought a modem (Cermatek 300/1200: $600) and had to convince the powers that be at UC Berkeley to upgrade the modem bank. The head of the computer-center finally told me that they were now buying 1200 BPS modems because they were the "wave of the future".

I remember having lots of aha's about how computers really work when we learned assembly on DEC computers. The first assignments required us to toggle in the programs at the front-panel of PDP-8 machines. Octal was great for that because the PDP had the switches grouped in threes so you got really fast at using the middle three fingers to toggle in the octal instructions.

Finally, I remember a little cardboard computer we used in one class. I still have it somewhere but can't remember the its name. It had sliders for the registers, a card with small holes for memory registers and little "bugs" to use as a memory and instruction pointers. You filled in the memory cells and registers in pencil and "executed" the "programs" manually by erasing and rewriting memory, sliding the register stack sliders, etc. One day I'll photograph it and put it up on the web.

Punched cards

[spaceyhackerlady]

I'm not sure if "fond" is the right word, but I still remember my very first 1st year Computer Science assignment, essentially "Hello, world" in Algol W. Done on punched cards, no less, in September 1978.

If you did really well you could use IBM 3270 [columbia.edu] terminals.

All this was with the campus mainframe, an IBM 370/168 with one whole megabyte of RAM and a 40 MHz clock. Even programmed that puppy's replacement (Amdahl 470/V8) in assembler in one course.

STM 14,12,12(13)

...laura

Re:Turing

[FLEB]

I had one of those incompetent HS computer programming (VB) teachers, as well. he had little-to-no clue what was going on, so the grading consisted of testing our ability to copy projects EXACTLY, to the letter, space, and typo, out of the book. I, being one of the few people who knew the first thing of programming in the class (I had puzzled my way through beginners' C++), completely stumped in class him with TERRIBLY DIFFICULT questions such as "Can I make an Integer unsigned, so it can range up to 65,535?" Answer: He didn't understand the concept of "unsigned" variables.

I learned later that he was a former science teacher that just still needed a job. I ended up getting a D+ in the class.