East Coast Kahuna

Personal computers

I attended a recent seminar about developing ideas - the step beyond the creative process. One of the questions the seminar leader asked to stimulate some discussion was to have each participant identify what his "favorite gadget" is and why.

Without hesitation, I thought about personal computers. I'm old enough to remember using a slide rule to do multiplication and division (then if you got good at it, you used your slide rule for your trig functions, instead of tables). And I remember having to solve equations with exponents in them (we really got good at taking logs and antilogs, and keeping track of decimal places). There were no slide rule calculators. I eventually bought one of the first slide rule calculators, the HP-35, back in 1973 for $300. Even then the idea of having a computer at home was mind-boggling.

The computer was left to mainframes - we had to use keypunches to punch cards which were fed in a large stack to the computer. It was a breakthrough several years later to be able to have a departmental minicomputer which could be accessed with a terminal. You could even call into it over the telephone - there were these printing terminals which had acoustic couplers. At 300 baud you could watch the printing terminal connect and print out line after line (in two directions!).

I got my first job out of college in 1976. I started in a manufacturing plant (all the controllers were analog at that time) - but found that I liked R&D better so I moved on to another company. I still remember my section manager liked to hire Asian-Americans because he had a perception that they were better with computers (and I think they were).

Actually at that time I was not one of the heavy computer users. I did buy one of the early home computers, an Ohio Scientific Challenger. It was programmed in basic - you stored programs on audio tape and had to play the tape to feed it in (or you typed in the program by hand). I used a portable black & white TV as the monitor. There wasn't a printer, so I had to copy down the results onto a pad of paper. I usually used it to play simple games, but I did use it sometimes when I had to do simple linear regressions and statistics.

The breakthrough was when the Macintosh came out. I was about to buy a more substantial home computer and I really didn't want to buy an IBM-PC. We considered the DEC Rainbow and even the Apple II. I am grateful that the salesman at the local computer store who sold Apples suggested that I wait a little bit. Sure enough, several weeks later the first Macintosh was there and I saw one of the first ones demonstrated. In those days the operating system and two applications MacWrite and MacPaint (the basis for GUI word processors and graphic programs) fit on one 400K Sony type floppy disk. I ended up getting a 128K Mac in 1984, the first year it was out. Little did I realize that one of my Iolani classmates, Guy Kawasaki, was evangelizing many third parties to develop software for the Mac.

Anyway to summarize - personal computers were a breakthrough product and the Macintosh was a breakthrough product for personal computers. Even Microsoft eventually copied the Macintosh and went from DOS to Windows. I'm just at the right age to have seen how revolutionary this development was. My kids always had computers around as they were growing up - they really have no concept of life without a computer, or without videos, or without cable TV...

posted by tjh14850 @ 10:49 PM