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Dave's Computer Musings.

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

The Early Seventies

I was let loose on a computer (defined as a machine that allows arithmetic errors to be reproduced with great reliability and precision) as a schoolboy way back in 1972. That computer was located at the local college of further education about a mile (or a kilometre and a half) down the road from my school. What I saw, in the small room beneath the stairs of the Library Block, was a teletype and a modem to linked that teletype to the computer itself.

Things were a little different then. For a start, there was none of this plugging a modem into your computer and into a telephone line, then automatically dialling the mainframe. No, you dialled (and I really do mean dialled, as in using a dial) the mainframe, listened for the carrier signal, and then put the telephone handset into the moden - which sent data down the 'phone line using a cunningly placed arrangement of a loudspeaker and a microphone. Goodness only knows what the baud rate was... very likely about one bit per minute!

While we're on the subject of "life were 'ard when I were a lad," a teletype looked like a typewriter, except that as well as typing on a piece of paper, it sent signals down a wire. In this case, to a telephone. It also received signals from the same wire and typed the resulting text (for text it was) either on paper or on punched tape. Punched tape was actually the only way we had of backing up data locally. It wasn't until much later that I saw my first floppy disk, and that was eight inches in diameter.

Seventies Games

Of course, even then people knew what they wanted a computer to do. Yes, that's right - play games. The most popular game at my school was "Lunar Lander" - well, that's what we called it, what it's official name was I never did know.

This game was very, very simple. The computer printed out a message like:

Height 30000 Speed -200 Fuel 1000 Burn (8 to 100, or 0)?

To translate:

You are 30000 metres above the lunar surface.
Your rate of descent is 20 metres per second.
You have 1000kg of fuel left
How much fuel do you want to burn? You can enter zero, or a number between 8 and 100.

You typed in a number (say, 50) and the computer would work out your new height and rate of descent:

Height 28850 Speed -14.5 Fuel 950 Burn (8 to 100, or 0)?

And so it went on, until the game ended.

There were three possible outcomes:

You burnt up all your fuel while still eight kilometres up, and crashed.
You reached the lunar surface with plenty of fuel on board, but still with a high rate of descent, and crashed.
You burnt fuel so fast that you came to a stop at an altitude of eight kilometres, started going back up, then ran out of fuel, and crashed.

There were rumours of a fourth outcome, which is that you made a good landing. Someone did claim to have achieved this once, but we didn't believe him!

Despite the painful slowness of this system - which we didn't notice at the time, because we didn't know any better - it captured my interest, and I produced a few programs in very basic BASIC. One of these days - if I can remember all the parameters - I may start a nostalgia corner with a JavaScript version of Lunar Lander.

The Shape of Things to Come (I)

(with apologies to H.G. Wells)

About that time, two things happened that, had I known it, were prophetic.

A couple of years before "The Computer" arrived at my school, the local university held an open day. In amongst demonstrations of electron-positron annihilation and models of the movement of silt in rivers were some new, small computers. In this case, "small" meaning that they filled a room, not a building. "Oh," said one of the assembled computer science experts, "in a few years they'll all be down to that size...", waving a hand in the direction of a large filing cabinet. We smiled politely, not really believing a word of it (we were a sceptical bunch back then).

Second, a film called Moon Zero Two showed up one Saturday morning. A character boarded a salvage spaceship with a briefcase, and announced that he had a computer inside. Well, never mind smiling politely, that scene provoked complete hilarity - because this computer was really small - about the size of... well, a laptop computer, I suppose.

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