Dreaming of the Simple (Computing) Life

I'm never going to recover from 1977.

Wasn't that the first year of my real life? I can't remember. It's so hard to remember those "good old days", when life was so simple (except, of course, from my point of view, when life was so full of complications like dealing with parents and siblings and chores and school and homework and acne and all that). 1977. Last year of Junior High, first year of High School. It was somewhere around that time. I'd had my first exposure to programming in 7th or 8th grade (can't quite remember ... whenever the first year of TAG was). Loved it. Addicted. Writing programs that did exactly what you told them to do. So unlike things at home.

No control. Over anything. No job, no car, no girlfriend. Sisters, but no brothers (yet). My only consolation was electronics, because I could build circuits that would actually do what I expected them to do (mostly). And computers, with the little bit of programming I'd learned in TAG. BASIC. On a teletype machine, hooked up to a remote mainframe.

If it is true that we spend the majority of our lives trying to return to the days where we felt most in control, that would probably be my year. That was the year I found a little integrated circuit in the parts bin at the local Radio Shack, the little chip that set my world on fire. A microprocessor. The 8080A, one of the first 8-bit microprocessors, the one that started the PC revolution (long before the IBM PC showed up, there was the MITS Altair and the IMSAI 8080). I had to have it. And they were selling it for only $5!! Naturally, I picked it up.

But it took me over a year of poring over the specs to create a board with something that would run anything. That's because it didn't function very well without the 8224 Clock Generator chip (which was not in the parts bin at Radio Shack), unless you know how to create a two-phase clock from scratch (which I didn't). Took a year before I found an 8224 over at Jameco, and then I finally got the silly thing to run a simple program, entered through switches which had been plugged into a proto-board.

Back then, it was way cool to have a computer with 4K of RAM. I had a 1K chip, so I was only kinda cool. Then it was 'vogue' to have 16K. I dreamed of having 16K! What programs I could run then! But I was happy (kind of) to have my little 1K RAM program. Which I had to enter by hand.

A few years later, I got my first Z80A chip, and upgraded my old 2 megahertz 8080A to a screaming 4 Mhz model. With a new 4K memory chip. Wowsers! Life was good. Not quite the IBM 5100 that was sitting in the Science department over at the high school (and which I diligently programmed from 1979 - 1981). Or the Apple II which they had over in the Mathematics department (which I considered a cute little toy). But it was mine, all mine! Ha ha!

Eventually, my friend, Mark, and I purchased a TRS-80 to "share" at college (it bounced between my college and his), and we used it as a terminal to access the mainframes so that we could get our homework done.

The first IBM PCs showed up at college. Then the PC XTs. Then the portable PCs. The pace of change was increasing. The punch cards disappeared. The old remote terminals were replaced by newer, more capable ones. The old PDP-11/780 in the lab was starting to look a mite shabby and underpowered, especially in the graphics department (but our mainframes could still do some amazing things on the RGB screens).

That pace has never ceased, and each year brings a new change, a new advance, a faster CPU or more memory or more buttons or widgets or gimmicks. Indeed, my now-ancient, 3-year-old Dell laptop is a geezer, with its dual 2 gigahertz processors, 8 gigabytes of RAM, 500 gigabytes of hard disk storage, and HDMI video. It's practically a dinosaur!

But it isn't the newest gadgets which thrill my soul; it's the old hardware, the old chips with their simplistic structures, the ones which captured my imagination back when life was so much easier to handle, when it felt like things were more within my grasp, my control. When I would sit in my stuffy little room with the television propped on the old wooden trunk, its back cover missing so that I could see the glow of the tubes against the back wall, watching Saturday Night Live while I played with my little 8080A computer, toggling switches to enter the trivial programs which sent the electrons flowing through the counters and adders and registers and output ports to the little flashing LEDs, telling me that it was doing exactly what I told it to do.

1977. Oh, how I wish sometimes that I could return to those days; or, rather, that those days would return, bringing back that feeling that I actually had some control over something in my life.