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Dave's Computer Musings.

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

The Eighties

It was during the early 1980s that home computing really began to take off. Up to that point, the small self-contained computers that were available tended to be used more in the either academic or business sectors, or by the more dedicated electronics enthusiast. Then, a number of competing systems became available from High Street electrical shops, with price tags that put them within the reach of the average home user. Naturally, the various systems were mutually incompatible, but before long it seemed that every 14 year old boy had a computer in his bedroom.

(By the way, it was usually a boy. No doubt, readers will have their own opinions as to why that was the case. "Because we have more sense" was what a very good friend of mine said before she, too, became hooked.)

The Commodore 64 was a popular machine, but in the British market, the two systems that held sway were the Sinclair Spectrum and the BBC Micro. Both offered huge amounts of memory - up to 48k - and both were reasonably affordable. The Spectrum was based on the Z80 processor - a sort of fifth cousin of today's Pentiums (or should that be Pentia?) while the BBC micro was based on the 6502, which bore the same sort of relationship to the kind of chip you'll find in one of today's Apple machines. Both used an ordinary TV as the monitor.

The BBC was the more expensive, and the more conventional, of the two. It had a "real" keyboard (what I mean by this will become obvious when I talk about the Spectrum) and built in BASIC - you typed in your program word by word, letter by letter. The Spectrum was cheaper, and had the notorious "rubber keyboard". The keyboard proper was a single membrane - rather like the pressure sensitive pads you'd find on the front of a microwave oven, for example. This was places beneath the top of the case, in which were a number of keys, laid out almost like a typewriter keyboard. These keys were made of rubber. In fact, the overall effect was very like a TV remote control keypad writ large. Commentators of the time were not greatly impressed by this keyboard - one, in fact, described the experience of using it as "like handling a piece of putrifying liver". An appealing image, no?

The other oddity about the Spectrum keyboard was that, when you pressed a key for the first time on a line (or following the colon that seperated statements on the same line) you didn't get a letter! No, that would be too simple! What you got was a keyword, such as "PRINT" or "LET". Once you'd got that out of the way, pressing a key typed a letter (or a symbol, function or operator such as ABS, NOT, +). To get the full range of operators, functions and symbolsrequired the pressing of "Symbol Shift" and "Extended Mode" keys. All in all, it was an involved business.

Small wonder, then, that when Sinclair upgraded the Spectrum (to the Spectrum 128+), it acquired a more conventional keyboard layout. It also acquired additional RAM, to bring the total amount of memory up to 128kb. As the Spectrum was based around the Z80 processor, it could address a maximum of 64kb of memory, which on the face of it left 80kb of RAM inaccessible (since the lowest 16kb was occupied by the operating system, on ROM). The solution adopted to solve this problem was to arrange the 128kb as eight "banks" of 16k each. Two of these (banks 2 and 5, if memory serves) were permanently assigned to the 4000h - 7FFFh and 8000h - BFFFh memory ranges. The C000h - FFFFh memory range was switchable between any of the eight banks, including those permanently allocated to lower memory ranges. Overall, the system was very like the LIM expanded memory system introduced to overcome a similar memory limitation on IBM compatibles (although in that case, it was to overcome a one megabyte limit, not a 64 kilobyte limit)

The Spectrum 128+, in common with earlier models and the BBC, continued to use tape for long term storage. You bought a cheap cassette player, and connected it to your Spectrum using a pair of leads via the earphone and microphone sockets. Amazingly, this lash-up actually worked... most of the time, at least.

The Spectrum +2 was very nearly the same machine as the 128+, but had a new case with a proper keyboard. Also, no longer did the user have to store data using a cheap tape recorder connected via the earphone and microphone sockets - the +2 had a cheap tape recorder built in.

The unsuitability of domestic tape recorders for data storage was obvious to anybody who had taken 15 minutes to save 95% of a file only to have the entire system crash and lose the lot. Various add-on gadgets to allow the use of disk drives became quite popular, so much so that Amstrad (who, by now, had taken over the Spectrum range) brought out the Spectrum +3 with a built in 3" disc drive. That's not a misprint - it really was a 3" drive, incompatible with near enough every other computer format then available. Which explains why it never really caught on.

For may years, my computer set-up was a Sinclair Spectrum 128+ using a gadget called the "DISCiPLE" to save data to 5.25" floppies, and printing to a 9 pin dot matrix printer for everyday use and an electric daisy-wheel typewriter for best. It was a set-up that worked well enough for someone to whom computers were a hobby, and I never felt the need to change to one of the other "home" systems that emerged toward the end of the 1980s, such as the Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, or the MSX from various manufacturers.

Meanwhile, businesses were using Apple Mackintosh and IBM PCs. These used purpose-built monitors - no plugging in to your TV involved here. As "serious" machines, at first they were black and white only, and certainly weren't intended to have sound capabilities beyond going "beep" (although some enterprising programmers did manage to create music and speech using the built in loudspeaker). From the point of view of usability, the Mackintosh had the edge. With an IBM machine, you typed the name of the program you wanted to run, followed by some additional instructions, such as (for example) "WS MYFILE.DOC" to run a word processing program called WS and start editing a file called MYFILE.DOC. In contrast, the Mackintosh screen looked pretty much like current versions of Windows - which is really to say that Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows NT now look pretty much how a Mackintosh screen looked then, and still does to this day. The familiar methods moving a mouse in order to steer a pointer to an icon representing a document, and clicking to open it using an appropriate program first reached a mass market with the Apple Mackintosh. For some reason, though, business users stayed with the IBM PC (except for media industries, such as publishing, design, and advertising, who embraced the Mac whole-heartedly)

At the end of the eighties, most of my professional computer usage was still with mainframe computers, using VSPC and CMS operating systems. There was one personal computer, used for a small collection of ad-hoc programs written in BASIC, and also to read data from paper tape, convert it to a form that could be read by the mainframe, and transmit it.

That was about to change in a dramatic way as the 1980s gave way to the 1990s, as I will discuss in a section to follow shortly.

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