Minutiae 1: My First Computer(s)
December 17th, 2006
AllWords.com defines “minutiae” as: small and often unimportant details. Yet, it is often the small, so-called “unimportant” details that prove themselves exceedingly meaningful with time, or even downright revolutionary. Sometimes, those trifling, easily-overlooked particulars are merely interesting in that they illuminate the dusty and overlooked corners of our lives where tiny–but meaningful–truths come to rest among the cobwebs and lost earrings and dropped thumbtacks. Revealing the great, grandiose Truths-with-a-Capital-T that upend civilizations and decode the universe’s operating system is the province of Science. But it is the duty of writers like myself to take a featherduster to those dust-bunnied corners and reveal what lies forgotten there for the benefit of everyday people, for whom the simple ritual of taking a hot shower on a cold day is a million times more meaningful than the twanging of a cosmic string.
So, I’d like to inaugurate another PEGRITZ(.com)! featurette today by calling one’s attention to those all-important Minutiae that so many barely pay attention to. Yet, those little details are often the features that reveal how vast, and seemingly impersonal, forces of technology, society, history, physics, chemistry, and so forth reach down to touch our lives in very real and very personal ways. And what better subject to launch this vehicle than personal computers–the one technology that has upgraded the existence of virtually every human being in the First World countries over the past twentysome years?
Everyone today remembers his or her first computer just as everyone remembers his or her first car, first love, first BJ, first…well, anything. Once, only bonafide geeks, nerds, and technophiles like myself had such cherished memories of that virgin system that introduced us to the ever-expanding universe of computing…but today, almost everybody can think back and recall that first device that brought the Information Age home to them, however limited that first experience may be. How did computers become so ubiquitous that even stereotypical “jocks”, who, in the 1980s, wouldn’t be caught dead in a computer lab for fear of catching some kind of female-scaring nerd disease, now cannot live without their laptops?
My experiences with my first computers illustrate this principle perfectly, I think. Notice that I said “my first computers“–plural. I actually had two: a Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer that I got in 1982, and a Packard Bell 386 PC exactly ten years later in 1992. Even though the TRS-80 was technically my first computer (i.e., a device that computed things and showed the results on a video screen), the Packard Bell was my first real computer, as the differences between the two machines were so gargantuan that it’s hard to believe they were both, fundamentally, the same type of device.
Check it out:
The TRS-80 Color Computer was, even by 1982 standards, a pretty useless machine. First of all, even though it could display colors (by being hooked up to a television through an oldskool RF modulator), it could only display nine colors (you basic red, green, and blue…and a handful of other tones that may or may not have been derived from them)–and it didn’t even come with a floppy drive, let alone a hard-drive. The TRS-80 was designed to save and load programs from audio cassette decks. It also sported a meager 4 kilobytes of memory and was so poorly-ventilated/cooled, that the damn thing inevitably overheated and locked up after about 20 minutes of use. The only thing I could really do with it was write my own short BASIC programs to perform simple math equations (making the computer little more than a hot, heavy calculator) and print the words “FUCK YOU” over and over and over again. But, because the cassette-deck “drive” was so useless, I couldn’t save any of my programs: I had to input them over and over again everytime I wanted to do something with them. Oh, and I had one game for the damn thing–something involving fighting dinosaurs that looked like stacks of pixelated Lego blocks–but I never played it because: 1) it took nearly ten minutes to load from the audio cassette that it came on, and by the time it loaded the computer was just about ready to die from heatstroke; and 2) it was about as much fun as doing long division in hexadecimal. But my mom paid $300 for the thing…so, really, how much could you expect to get?
I only got the TRS-80 because my grade school, German Central Elementary, had bought one for my classroom and I spent a lot of time on it writing goofy little programs. Still, I had to share the classroom computer with other larval computer nerds, and so I wanted one of my own. I distinctly remember my teacher applauding me for my interest in learning to program in BASIC because, as she noted, “in the future, computers will be everywhere, and everyone will have to know how to program them to make them work.” By the time I’d graduated from third grade, I was a veritable expert in BASIC, sure, but I’d grown completely bored with the TRS-80…simply because it was too much of a pain in the ass to work with. Oh, sure, writing programs was mad fun–but the most I could develop were simple matching games, mathematical functions, and anagram generators that could figure out how many cuss-words could be spelled using the letters in someone’s name. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do with the TRS-80 that I couldn’t do with, say, a piece of paper and a pencil. I had incredible ideas in my mind for programs that would…say, make music, or write stories–but I couldn’t implement any of them using BASIC on a friggin’ computer that choked on its own waste heat and had less memory than an Alzheimer’s patient.
I was still convinced that computers were The Next Big Thing, though–I read a lot of sci-fi, and all the stories and novels I devoured involved computers, so I naturally assumed that the Future was going to be full of ‘em–so years later I ended up taking a number of computer-science classes in high school. Again, we were programming in BASIC–though later we moved up to Pascal–and we were working on Apple IIe and IIc Plus computers…which were a great deal faster and much more reliable than the TRS-80s (they also had 3.5″ floppy drives, so we could save our work), but still very limited. I spent my entire senior year in computer science working on a database-management program in BASIC that, ahem, basically proved to be completely unworkable. We had one Apple Macintosh sitting in the lab, but no one touched it because it was virtually useless as a learning tool–you could only write little documents on it and use it as a calculator, and play solitaire.
By the time I hit college in 1991, I had lost almost all of my interest in computers as devices that I would actually use in the here-and-now. It was neat to write about sentient computers in the Year 2600, sure, but computers in the Year 1991 were–in my admittedly-limited experience–good for little more than random entertainment (I had a lot of friends with Commodore 64s and Amigas, but they only used them to play games not much better than what you’d find on an old Atari or Nintendo) or business applications, like spreadsheets.
When I started working for Penn State Fayette Campus’ local newspaper, The Roaring Lion, during my second semester, I began to use a Macintosh for writing and printing stories to be added to the paper. Now I truly began to discover the usefulness of computers! The Mac’s word processor program let me write papers, spellcheck them, edit them, and print them with an ease and versatility my little “stand-alone” word processor (a Magnavox, I believe) at home couldn’t touch. Plus…there were other programs on the Mac, too: a calculator, games, and a terminal program that let the Mac call other computers! (And do precisely what, I didn’t know–but it was still a cool concept that I instinctively knew was Cool As Hell.) The greatest thing I learned from working on the Mac was that you didn’t have to write your own programs to make a computer do all manner of things, not just business applications.
I looked into buying a Mac, but even then Macs were horrifically overpriced. It seemed I would be stuck with my Magnavox word-processor…until my philosophy professor suggested, “Why don’t you get a Windows machine like mine?” He showed me his PC–or IBM as we all still called them–and it just amazed me. Windows seemed to do all the same stuff as the Mac, but was at least a hundred times cheaper! Dr. Pluhar had gotten his computer at the Uniontown Mall’s Sears outlet, and he suggested I go there and look at what they had to offer as well. He gave me some specs to look for in a computer–so I’d get as much computing power as I could afford–and I zipped up to the Sears, all giddy and excited, but still half-expecting to find the machines out of my price-range.
But they weren’t. Two days later, I had my first real computer–a Packard Bell 386 PC with a 16 megahertz processor with two megabytes of RAM (that’s what they called memory these days), a 100 megabyte “hard-drive” (which was like a big stack of floppies you kept inside your computer and never had to remove!), and–AND!–a monitor that could display sixteen whole colors! That was twice what the TRS-80 used to handle! Hell, the Packard Bell’s specs were easily twice what that old Mac at the Roaring Lion office had, and it had a color monitor…all for $1100.
Now, that Packard Hell computer did nothing but give me trouble. In fact, it died–irrevocably–two days after I bought it, and Sears replaced it with a slightly better model that had a whoppin’ four megs of RAM but was, otherwise, the exact same machine. That one wasn’t much better: Packard Bell computers were, after all, the Edsel of the PC market. But it introduced me to the world of DOS and Windows 3.1. Much like MacWrite, the little word-processing program I’d used, Microsoft Word for Windows made writing research papers and silly sci-fi tales very easy, and as a glorified graphical front-end for DOS, Win 3.1 made file and program management easy as well. The key word here is easy, folks. Macintosh computers were touted in the 1980s as being computers that average, everyday folks could plug in and just use: programming experience was completely unnecessary. You didn’t need to know how the Mac worked in order to use it. IBM-format PCs soon followed, and MS Windows was the obvious champ at implementing the basic idea of the Graphical User Interface on a PC. Now, PCs of all sorts were still not plug-in-and-go machines like Macs, but by the early 1990s your Average Joe could buy one, set it up, and start using it productively within just a few minutes with only a modicum of technical knowledge.
The PC I got, however, soon proved to be at least a thousand times more powerful than the Mac–because there was just sooooooooooooo much more software for it. I could made music with my computer (if you added a sound card to it, which I obviously did). I could draw with my computer (once I bought a better video card for it that actually displayed an incredibly 256 colors). I could even call other computers (once I added a 2400baud modem to it). As you can see, I had to jam a lot of new hardware in that damned computer to make it do everything I wanted it to, but the key factor that everyone should note here is that I could upgrade my machine as easily as jamming a new card into it, and once I did so, there was software out there that let me use it immediately! I had absolutely no reason to write my own.
My first computers taught me a great deal about how electronics and software engineering works–but, more importantly, those two devices taught me something about myself, and, by extension, something about humanity which explains just why the Information Age exists as a pervasive entity today. First and foremost, I learned that programming simple things was fun…but that I had neither the patience nor the intellect to code large pieces of software. Few people do, in fact. I just wanted a flexible, easy-to-use device controlled by programs that let me write, compose, communicate with folks, and so forth. Luckily, I’m a little more technically-inclined than most people, so I jumped on the PC wagon train just as it was beginning to roll out in 1992. I was a bit ahead of the game, but as computers became easier to use, via standardization of hardware components and better software design, more and more people followed. Most humans do not care to know how anything works as long as it does work, and lets them accomplish stuff that is meaningful to them–like writing term papers, talking to your friends, creating music and art, and so forth.
The TRS-80 was an evolutionary dead end: a personal computer that one could only use if one was “computer literate”–literate meaning you were able to read code. I had several books of programs for the TRS-80, for instance. Books. Of programs. In order to use the programs, I had to type them in to the computer and then execute a RUN command. How incredibly inefficient is that? By the 1990s, all I needed to do to run a program was, most of the time, insert a 3.5″ floppy disk into a drive. Sure, even as early as the 1970s, there were companies developing software to be installed on computers for users to access…but few personal users would even have any idea how to install them, let alone configure them. With a Mac or Microsoft Windows, all you needed to do was double-click on the file clearly named INSTALL and you were usually good to go.
When the Internet first began to come into daily use (my first experience with it was in 1994 at California University of Pennsylvania, when I sent my very first email to a professor asking to take a final early), it wasn’t exactly a no-brainer to use. I had to access my shell account on the campus mainframe and use all manner of complicated command-line instructions to get to my ASCII porno. If I wanted to call up any of the local Bulletin Board Systems where fellow computer nerds hung out, I needed to initialize my modem with all manner of complex settings so it could connect to them. But then, one day, programs like Netscape and Eudora came along and made surfing the web and reading email a thousand times easier and more rewarding. Why? Because they were easy to use. By 1995, the web was blossoming because it was simple for simple people to work with.
Every year now, the ability of computers to Do More Stuff (for less money) is doubling–mainly because they have now become indispensable tools for living our daily lives. Very few users actually know how to program them, but that doesn’t matter anymore: there is such demand for computers, and their usage has become so ubiquitous, that there are programmers aplenty designing software for others to use on their machines. Computers are now everywhere thanks to a paradigm shift so obvious–but so damned simple–that most folks take it completely for granted. Hell, anyone born after, say, 1988 probably doesn’t even vaguely remember a time when only nerds played with computers and spoke to their devices in bizarre languages full of line numbers and weird symbols.
And, best of all, exactly ten years after I bought my first PC for $1100, I bought a back-up computer (that I kept sitting around just in case my primary machine died on me for some reason) with a 1.2 gigahertz processor, 512 megabytes of memory, a 100 gigabyte hard-drive, a video card that can display upwards of 32 million colors, and all other manner of amazing hardware that my 1992 Packard Hell never would’ve even been able to dream about. I paid $300 for this machine…exactly as much my 1982 TRS-80 cost.
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My first "real" computer was a used PS/2. By this point I'd decided I wanted to work with computers, so I installed Windows 3.1 on it... maaaannnnn was it slow! It was only when I had access to college computer labs that the world opened up for me...
After that was a Gateway (because that was Pitt, my employer's standard) and my first time putzing with hardware... an HP Pavilion from the Las Vegas Best Buy... an HP laptop... now this Alienware. For an I.T. professional, I end up keeping my home compuetrs a long time, and have never really gotten a high-powered desktop. But I'm really surprised I can remember these all...
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