Computers I have Known

Computers I have known

Not quite computers

Dad always liked gadgets. I remember a pong-type game, where the ball was an LED moving around behind a dark screen.

Another big hit was a Sears videogame system, which had several versions of electronic pinball and breakout-type games. Strangely, Mom and the kids seemed to use this one more than Dad did.

The Beginning

Mom brought home the first real computer from the local school. She was working with my elementary school teachers, and had an Apple II home on loan, We set it up on a card table in the living room. I don't remember much about it. We probably had LOGO running on it, though. That computer didn't stay at home too long.

Soon after the first introduction of a computer into the house, we made the decision to purchase an Atari 800. The decision was made on the strength of its graphics, which were much superior to the Apple II. You could even view 256 colors at once, while the Apple was limited to four. It's a little disconcerting to see an Atari Historical Society... this wasn't all that long ago.

I have many fond memories of that Atari, which was the only household computer for longer than I've had any computer since. Some examples:

  • Atari 2600I remember going to a friend's house, and being astonished that they only had an Atari 2600 game system, while we had a real computer. Her father was a doctor, after all, and they could get a really nice computer if they wanted to.
  • Getting a sore thumb loading Frogger or Apple Panic from tape, because the tape drive used an inexpensive plastic part to latch the play button. That didn't take too long to break, and you had to mash the key down for five minutes or more to load the games.
  • Mom showing me how spreadsheets worked with Visicalc.
  • Ready promptCountless hours typing in BASIC programs (the Atari had a built-in BASIC interpreter) from ANTIC magazine.
  • Building a cover to go over the reset button, because everything you'd done would be erased if you pressed it accidentally, especially when using the LOGO cartridge.
  • Playing Star Raiders when the television broke (the Atari didn't have a dedicated monitor, instead it used the television), and having to switch to the old black and white TV.
  • Writing papers for high school english classes and college admissions essays.
  • Jury-rigging a pair of wires to use for a space bar after the key broke.
  • More countless hours on local BBS systems, where the sysops were always very friendly to me. Of course I was one of about three women active on local bulliten boards -- no wonder I was popular. Eventually I met my future husband on one of the boards.

A friend of mine, Disa, always had an Apple II, and later an early Macintosh. We used to spend hours playing adventure games together.

I also played Dungeon (or was it Zork?) on the mainframe at Dad's office. For a long time I still had a piece of paper with the arcane commands:

cd /usr/_games
dungeon

scrawled on it. (Yes, the underscore was part of the command!)

I used part of a transcript from that game as a prop when I acted as one of the eee-vil Glitches in the play The GIGO Effect. I'm sure that the Glitches would be awfully fond of the whole Y2K problem. Just thinking about it recalls some of the music to mind: "We're the Glitches, and we're here to say, / We're going to cause distortion every day..." (I'll spare you from a real-audio rendition.)

Another friend was one of the first people I knew to get a Macintosh. I followed my usual method of discovering a new computer -- poking around -- and managed to turn the volume up to maximum and change the background from its usual sedate checks to a fanciful swirl, but couldn't put it back. Not long after that, a house rule that all use of the computer must be supervised was instituted.

Formal Training

I took a few Apple BASIC classes through the local science museum.

Later, I took AP Computer Science in high school, where I learned Pascal on an HP3000. My final project was a paper about artificial intelligence. As a demonstration, I entered an Eliza program from a book, and was disappointed to see how fascinated people were with that program, when they should have been paying attention to the implementation of the Animal program I'd spent hours working hard on.

I attended Bucknell University, where I got a BS degree in Computer Science. The department chair seemed to think there was little future in software engineering "it's just a fad", and looked down on working with PCs. While there, I used the VAX 11/780, and various Sun workstations. Sophomore year, my roomate thought I spent too much time using the computer (I was corresponding with Rich using talk a good deal of the time) and made my keyboard the object of a scavenger hunt. I was a bit upset.

For on-the-job training, I attended the Software Development conference twice, and also Microsoft's TechEd (*) conference. (I have pictures from TechEd, too.)

At home and at work

I've used IBM PC-compatibles at all of my jobs since college. My first was with Utilicom (later Dakota Software), where I worked on maintaining and extending the DOS version of the AuditMaster software, written in Pascal. We began a port to Windows 3.1 with a  prototype written in VB3.0, and moved on to development using Borland C++. Shortly after that, I left to join Ormec Systems, where we developed MotionDesk software, a project we began in Delphi for Windows 3.11. We currently do development in Visual C++.

While learning the ins and outs of MFC and Visual C++, I became active on the Microsoft newsgroups, and was asked to join the MVP program. You can see some of the things I've done with Visual C++ here.

You can see some information about the computers we currently have at home here. We also had a 3B1 terminal for a while, but are very happy to each have our own computer. I can't imagine our home without more computers than people.

I also have a Palm Pilot, which does its job in keeping me organized, for the most part.