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Dave's Computer Musings.

Being a Set of Reminiscences Concerning the Author's Personal Experience of Computing

Late Seventies / Early Eighties

It was when school gave way to university that I learnt that the sort of programming I'd been doing in Basic (GOTO somewhere, GOSUB somewhere else, RETURN to somewhere other than where you started) was frowned upon by Real Computer Experts. What they then taught me was FORTRAN... including the construction of programs to be sent to the computer in the form of punched cards. The idea was sound... since computers read binary data the individual bits might as well be holes... or places there weren't holes... as areas of oppositely oriented magnetic material. The disadvantages were:

One line of code per card
Maximum 80 characters per line (although you could continue on another line - in other words, another card.)
If you dropped a stack on the floor you had hours of fun putting them back in order (rubber bands were essential equipment).
On the positive side, you could safely put them on top of the loudspeaker of your record player (sic) without worrying about loss of data!

There were still some teletypes about, but mostly we used VDU terminals... not unlike a present-day monitor, but they were in black and white only, or sometimes dark green and bright green. Some manufacturers dabbled briefly with dark orange and bright orange, but the idea never really caught on. The computer itself was still what we would now call a mainframe, kept in a large room, air conditioned to keep it to very carefully controlled conditions of temperature, humidity and dust.

The computer was used primarily by the science departments. All the physics, computer science, mathematics, chemistry, and biology students knew exactly what they wanted a computer to do. Yes, that's right - play games!

Games of the Late Seventies / Early Eighties

Two in particular stick in the mind:

First, the game generally known as Colossal Cave (although we actually knew it as Adventure). This was a text based fantasy game, where the computer gave you a brief description of your surroundings. Example:

You are in a large cave. Water drips from the ceiling. There are exits North and South. On the ground is an axe.

In return, you typed in instructions such as or "Get Axe" or "Go North" ("N" would have done just as well). Whereupon, the computer gave you a description of where you were now. No pictures, no sound, just lines of type on a screen (or sheet of paper, which at least helped you prove your boasts of success were true!) The programmer(s) had a wierd sense of humour. "The little bird attacks the dragon and, in a flurry of feathers, drives it off. (Unbelievable, isn't it?)" And, if you continued beyond a notice telling you that the caves beyond that point were under construction by the "Witt Construction Company", you found yourself at "Witt's End". People were easily amused then.

The second was known as Trek. It put you in the role of A Well Known Starship Captain, as you travelled the galaxy in an equally well known starship to defeat an invasion by the combined forces of two Famous Alien Adversaries]. This was again text-based, but printed out a map of the "quadrant" you were in as a ten by ten array of full stops (or "dots" to use the technical term). Stars were represented by asterisks, star bases by the letter "B", torpedos by the letter T, and different types of ship by the letters E, K, and R. Gameplay was simple - the computer asked for a command, and you typed a number from 1 to 10 for movement, communications, firing Torpedos or Other Weapons", and so on

The funny thing is, while these games sound simplistic in the extreme, and had none of the fancy graphics or sounds that everyone expects these days, they were quite addictive at the time. So much so that so many students (and, let it be said, staff as well!) were playing games that computer response times suffered a drastic deterioration, and the hours when games were available were restricted further and further. Eventually, games were available only from midnight onward, and still these games attracted players in great numbers.

In early lectures the following day, quite a few people looked very, very tired.

Dotted around the campus were one or two "minicomputers" - the computers about the size of a large filing cabinet (oh, all right - a very large filing cabinet - more like a wardrobe, really) that had provoked quiet amusement only a few years before. Eventually, in one or two rooms appeared some machines that looked like computer terminals, except that the keyboard was laid out on a square pattern rather than the usual arrangement. These were Real Computers in their own right - Commodore PETs. The ones I remember had 8k of memory - or, put another way - one four thousandth of what is rapidly becoming the entry level in early 1997.

These PETs also let save your programs, and load them back in again by means of a tape drive. These saved data on to ordinary audio cassettes.

Well, of course programmers soon started to work up to... and beyond... the limits of the system. Before long, memory had expanded to (gasp!) 32k. The makers of the PET, CBM, brought out a disk drive that used those new fangled small (five and a quarter inch) disks. Looking back, I can't remember what capacity they were - probably 160k. One thing I do remember, though, is that the drive unit itself was gigantic - certainly larger than a present day PC system unit. (I'm referring to its physical size, not memory capacity, just in case of confusion.)

The Shape of Things to Come (II)

In the early 'eighties, I was given to visiting computer exhibitions, which were intended to convince the business community that they really needed one of these new-fangled "microcomputers", as they were then known. At one of these exhibitions, IBM had a stand on which they were showing off their latest model, known as the Personal Computer or PC. For a four figure sum you got a machine with, if memory serves, 256k of memory and the capability to save programs and data to tape. It could also make sounds. If you used the right command, it went "Beep."

Like so many computers of those days, it had the BASIC computer language built in. Nearby, another company, called Apple, were showing off their machine. No mice yet, but it did have a colour display of similar resolution to the old CGA standard, and it used floppy disks instead of tape.

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