ECN Forum Forums Technical Discussion Re: Computers and the Internet Remember Your First Computer?

Some early brain damage... Me and these two other guys worked at a place where we could get hand-me-down PC stuff for almost nothing. We were titled “electricians” but we did our share of geekey stuff to support our division.

It was all obsolete but completely “True Blue” IBM. We’d get 5150 PCs, 5151 expansion chassis with their goofy ¾-inch umbilical cords, 5160 XTs and 5170 ATs. Many had 3270 emulation cards that seemed to be sort of an early form of blazing pre-ethernet, giving coveted access to the almighty Oracle base through pricey 4-wire data circuits. Early PC serial/parallel ports were termed “aux” and “prn” before comx and lptx. ATs had an idiotic 1.2MB bios configuration disk.

Most common add-on board had a hardware clock and 384KB of that mysterious “above 640” memory. There were lots of 20-40MB hdds and hideous failure-plagued 10MB removable media; riding in notched frames of the ATs in an "optional" hatcheted ½-height drive bay.

This was all pre-mouse…with those beautiful 100?-key “Selectric Touch” keyboards jealously guarded… IMO they still have not been even closely copied—much less outpaced—in feel and reliability.

Used Qmodem and Telix terminal emulation software along with WordStar and Lotus v2.x. Remember LIST, Xtree and Phil Katz?

One of us was this crazy guy who would write dos executables in assembly language so we could do remote equipment polling and control on water-distribution pumping and 115/12kV substations at a 5000-acre site. The place had its assortment of asphalt and dirt roads. The electrical-system polling had a ~5-mile daisy-chained RS-423 leased 4-wire data line.

The crazy guy’s code was very compact and permitted power-failure restart to save us a few trips from after-hours phone calls. It all ran 24/7/365; 3 shifts with few complaints.

Those PCs have since made chock blocks. Original prices on the stuff must have been stellar.


[This message has been edited by Bjarney (edited 06-30-2002).]

My first computer was a stock IBM XT with two floppies and a whopping 256K of RAM. Over the next year I added a 20 Meg Seagate MFM hard disk ($440.00, or $22,000.00 a Gig(as opposed to today's $1.47 a Gig)) and an EGA Graphics Adapter that came with an offer for a new fangled program called Windows for $15.00. Windows 1.01. Still have the disks and docs. I'd cut my teeth back in school on text based control of the output and immediately fell in love with with the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) set up in windows and promptly put together my Elec. Cont. proposal contract using the bundled word processor, Write. No more hand written contracts for me, No Sir.

The first computer experience, though, was gained through the indirect access to an IBM System 360 Model 60 mainframe at Iowa State U back in the late '60s. When we were first introduced to it, we were shown the new ferrite toroid memory cores, card about three foot square with a wire mesh, much like a window screen, that threaded through the tiny ferrite doughnuts. This core memory was a great improvement over the spinning drum, three foot wide and four foot high, that was read by a row of brush contacts that would sweep along the outside of the drum. Highest speed Random Access Memory. We'd submit our program exercises to the high priests that served the machine, and get back out printed output a day later. The printers were kept under acoustic shields to protect the priest's ears from the noise created by the chain of printable characters, that was longer than the width of the output paper, that was struck by a hammer as each impression was left on the paper. We'd put the programs together one line of code per punch card at a time. We'd try to do things like solve an "Instant Insanity" puzzle, the Rubick's Cube.

I thought that even though the Commodore products (Vic 20, c-64, c-128) were sold in Toy stores that they fairly sophisticated. They had some self-learning programs that taught basic programming and I found them quite interesting. Through 'peeks' and 'pokes' we could create new characters (and control individual pixels) and sounds. Even though the 'serious' people had machines like the Pet, XT, or AT they seemed quit envious of what the C-64 could do with Color and Sound. It was a lot of fun.

Bill

It's amazing how one forgets details that were once indelibly etched into the brain. Did the bus go to 16-bit on the XT? I thought that happened on the AT?

I'd always been led to believe that the Winchester handle came about from the famous rifle and IBM's code for the hard drive, but I'm not sure whether that code had any relationship to sectors/capacity.

The 6800 is Motorola. 6502 was Rockwell, if I recall correctly.

Bill,
Most BASICs of the time had PEEK and POKE, but the Acorn BASIC implemented in the Atom and the BBC Micro I mentioned used really neat ? and ! operators to address a byte or a 16-bit word. It took a bit of getting used to at first, because many other BASICs used "?" as an abbreviation for PRINT.

One piece of hardware I really wish I'd kept was a big Triumph-Adler daisywheel printer. It weighed a ton (well, probably about 40 lb.) and was slow, but the print quality was fantastic.

As the subject of keyboards has been mentioned, does anyone else find that the PC keyboard has developed more than a few quirks over its development?

Look at the original PC keyboard, and the CTRL key is in the correct place, to the left of "A". It was still there on the first AT keyboards, so why did somebody decide to move it? (I have a neat TSR which hooks the keyboard interrupt and swaps CTRL and Caps Lock.) Similarly, who decided to move ESCAPE up away from the main key area? I grew up always expecting it to be immediately to the left of "1." (The first AT keyboard even had Esc on the right with the numeric pad!)

The original PC keyboard also adopted the annoying layout of having "\" between left Shift and "Z". For some strange reason, it is still there on modern British PC keyboards even though it was moved back to a more sensible place on American versions. I use a U.S. keyboard normally, but if I have to use somebody else's (British) keyboard here, I'm forever hitting \ or | by mistake.



[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 07-01-2002).]

Paul,

As I recall, the XT was an 8 bit bus with a 16 bit processor. It'd run 16 bit code, two samples per processor execution. Before I migrated up to a 386, I was running "Windows 286" on that lowly machine. I thought I was patient, but when I installed my first copy of Excel for Windows, I learned about 30 second refreshes. When I then output the table in graphic format, the wait turned into minutes.

Al,

Thanks -- That what I had in mind, because the XT retained the 8088 CPU of the original PC, and while the 8088 is 16-bits internally, it has only an 8-bit external bus.

Some of the PC/XT clones used the 8086 processor, which is equivalent to the 8088 but with a true 16-bit bus.

What a clown I am!!!

Just dusted off the old books plus IBM stuff and just like you guys said, the XT had only 8 bit ISA bus! [my short term memory is bad enough, now the long term is crashing too?!!]

For some darn reason I was thinking the XT's 8088 ran the 16 bit ISA with twice as many clock ticks - pushing the complete word through the internal 16 bit registers by breaking the word into two Bytes, which ran serial thru the 8 bit external registers.

Don't know where I came up with this one, or even why!!! Man, talk about latency! there would be about 4 times as many wait states from that one, even with instruction prefetch queue [pipeline]!!!

As everyone mentioned, the 80286 was a 16/16 CPU [16 bit inside, 16 bit outside], which allowed for 16 bit bus usage.

What a dope! Need to go back to "Old School" or go over the Triassic Period Books more often!

Sorry about the "Flinging O' Poo-Poo Info"

Bjarney, I remember that Word Processor - Wordstar! We had Wordstar Gold for DOS [like version 1.xx or something]. Now that was as far from WYSIWYG or "User Friendly" that an App' could ever be!
Yes, it does look like HTML tagging big time!

Had this, along with a variety of old DOS App's, which ran absolutely flawlessly on my 386 machine [80386 sx 16 mhz - the classic "Affordable 386" CPU; 32 bit inside, 16 bit outside, or simply 32/16].

My all time favorite Utilities were X Tree [mentioned earlier], Norton Utility for DOS [got that around 1994], Copy QM for copying floppy disks, Autosketch for DOS, and a DOS based shell type "Menu" App' for running different programs with a mouse click, instead of typing stuff at the Command Prompt. Got it for free and it was really cool.

Old Windows [3.0 and 3.1] ran really slow on that machine! Too much disk cache going on! [only 4 MB of 100 ns DRAM!]. Never tried old Windows on the 286 [standard mode sucks!].
Windows 3.1 and 3.11 for workgroups ran with very few GPFs / IPFs on the 386 in "386 enhanced mode". Large App's took days to execute, Print Jobs took even longer! [one reason was my legacy HP laser printer had only a serial interface, the other was my Epson MX-80 printed only in one direction and retraced each line when Windows drove it].

Scott S.E.T.

Just look at how many later word processors and text editors adopted the Wordstar control-key commands, or a slight modification of them (Ctrl-S/D/E/X for cursor movement, ctrl-R/C for Pgup/PgDn etc.).

Wordstar really was a great word processor right from its early CP/M days.

Many Winders ‘shortcut’ keys are the same as were Wordstar’s in 1986 or before…like <ctrl><left-cursor>, <ctrl><right-cursor>, <ctrl><home> and <ctrl><end>. The “inverted-T” keys—much less a mouse—weren’t there early on.

Many folk nowadays also forget that not all terminals in the "old" days had cursor keys, page up/down, and so on, so Wordstar and many other packages were designed so that they could be used on even the most basic terminal.

And for those units which did have extra cursor/function keys, there was no standardization as to the codes produced by these keys. Remember having to install each code manually if your terminal type wasn't listed?