I was born in 1968, so that means I was around 10 years old as computers transitioned from being large expensive machines used by big companies and the military to something that people could actually have in their homes. The earliest personal computers were all very different in terms of what they could do - in both hardware and software - as well as the languages and other tools it took to use and program them.
As a curious kid just getting my hands on these strange and wonderful machines for the first time, I know that my future interests and projects were much shaped by the successes and failures with the particular ones I tried.
Timex-Sinclair 1000
A couple miles from my childhood home in Southeast San Diego was (and still is) the Spring Valley swap meet - a sprawling parking lot turned on weekends into stalls for all manner of inexpensive household junk and castoffs. As a kid I would save up and go there to find parts for my various gadgets and projects. I can remember dragging the body of a mid-century vacuum cleaner home behind my ten-speed to try and make a toy hovercraft, or an electric blender I turned into a winch to slide shut a makeshift ‘nuclear blast door’ I’d rigged up outside my bedroom window.
When I was 14, I paid $20 for a TS-1000 I found baking in the sun at the swap meet, with it’s terrible membrane keys, no cassette tape player and no TV included (the latter I had), and took it home to lay on the floor in the living room in front of the TV and try more BASIC programming, which I had started learning in middle school on the several TRS-80 Model 16 machines we had there (picture below). The machines at school were one thing, but this one was all mine. The trouble was that without any permanent storage at all (a good enough cassette recorder to save data onto would have been more expensive than the computer itself), turning off the computer meant losing all your code. I learned to pick short simple goals that I could get running before the device overheated and shut down on its own (which it often did, argh).
Commodore 64
The next logical and cheapest step up from the TS-1000 was the Commodore 64, which I believe my parents bought me as a gift, though I’m not sure how they could have afforded it, since the internet tells me it was $595 when it was new, and they didn’t have much extra money. I think maybe it was used as well. The Commodore was a huge upgrade - it was color, could make sounds, and you could directly access the video memory with poke() and peek(). I remember finding instructions for building a ‘light pen’ by attaching a photodiode to the serial port and timing the light pulses to determine where on the screen you were pointing. Magic! A good friend brought me a vintage C64 for my 50th, and though I’ve not yet been able to get it running, it smells and feels like what I remember.
And to that Commodore, I finally managed to hook up a borrowed friend’s cassette player to give myself some permanent storage, and with it the ability to dream up bigger projects.
Apple II
So my aunt and uncle lived in Santa Barbara in a house on a steep hillside with one of those carports where if you missed the brake pedal (I was just getting comfortable enough driving to ponder horrors like these), you might have driven through the back fence and plummet right through the roof into the family room below. In a room off their kitchen they also had what to me was the very Cadillac of personal computers - an Apple II. The manufacture dates of the Apple II (and the later IIe, which later in high school was my first BIG computer) overlap the Timex and the Commodore, so I’m not exactly sure when I first got to use theirs, but the thing I definitely remember is a 1984 Scientific American with an article about cellular automata and Stephen Wolfram’s inspiring descriptions of how whole new worlds might be found in the evolving worlds created by these simple repeated algorithms. I was entranced and took over the Apple to write a 1-D automata in BASIC (probably Wolfram’s rule 30 or similar) and watch it roll down the screen, excruciatingly slowly.
It was so painfully slow that, having a weekend visit ahead of me, I took on learning assembly language on the Apple, and thereby figured out how to get the automata running fast enough to entertain me. This combined experience of learning a bit of Assembler and the payoff of watching these beautiful patterns scrolling by on the screen opened my mind to the idea that there could be unimaginably complex worlds ‘discovered’ by travelling around inside the mathematical ‘landscape’ of a computer’s memory. I am sure that I excitedly subjected my Aunt and Uncle and cousin and family repeatedly to these musings. 15 years later, when I started the company that would build Second Life, these automata were very much still on my mind.
10Base2, and Lan Parties
Believe it or not, there were computer networks before the internet. And this post isn’t complete without some mention of their influence on me as well. After the Apple II, I graduated to PCs running DOS (and later Windows). More than anything, what the PC meant to me was the ability to plug in a network card with a BNC cable (don’t forget those terminators!) as a way of hooking several computers together. A few years later, this was how kids would have LAN parties.
I learned database programming (FoxPro) in high school, and combined it with this very rudimentary form of networking to create a product for small car dealerships to print the contracts and other forms needed to sell cars from multiple terminals (PCs). The money I earned with this business paid for my college, but also got me thinking about how if a large number of computers could be connected like this, one might be able to create a giant virtual world…
You missed the Vic-20!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_VIC-20