The History of Computers

[Oozlefinch]

Over the last few weeks, I have had several interactions with people who really have no concept of the history of computers, and think that everything that we have today is what we have always had. And they really have no concept how "new" all of what many of us use on a daily basis (including forums like this) simply did not exist a decade or so ago.

To try and put it in perspective, I am using my own life to give an idea how fast things have evolved. I am 54 years old, and really grew up with computers. And in a way that most others my age really did not.

My first exposure to computers actually dates way back to 1970. The year before my mom's hobby shop closed, and she returned to her previous occupation, accounting. She got a job at the Olga lingerie company, at the same time that they were converting to computerized accounting. Realizing this was the wave of the future, she started to take night classes in computer programming, and was one of Olga's first programmers by 1970. I remember that she would take me in to work on weekends where I would fool around with the keypunch machines as she was banging away at code.

I even remember arcades before 1972. Yes, they did exist, but they were generally composed of only 2 types of games. These were either pinball games, or shooting gallery type games which used a gun that had essentially a light inside of it, and the target had a photoreceptor inside to register hits. All scores were analog with a dial or wheel to indicate scores. But all this changes in 1972 with Pong. Then in 1974 with Tank.

But even until the mid-1970s, most arcades only had a few "Video Games". Most were still the old electro-mechanical games of decades past. Other than a few like me that had access to a computer through our parents, they were things of awe. The "IT Department" worked in a separate area of the company, normally behind glass walls in separate rooms with massive air conditioners and raised floors ("Fishbowls"). At most, the few people that used a computer really only used a dumb terminal, with little more power than a pocket calculator. They just accessed the computer remotely, requesting information and the mainframe computer would give them the response.

This was the way of things even into the late 1970's. By this time the first "Microcomputers" like the PET, Apple II, and TRS-80 were finally making their way into some homes. But at roughly 1 month's salary to buy one, only the rich or computer fanatics bought them at that time period. By that time my mom had become a System Analyst for a major construction company, so when she would work weekends I was now playing around on a terminal myself. Using UNIX I would explore around the network, dissecting code to figure out how programs worked.

By 1980 I was taking computer classes myself, learning COBOL and now typing my own programs on keypunch cards. But it did not take me long to realize that although I was good at programming, it did not have the interest that the computer itself had. But at this time, programmers and users did not really have access to the actual computer. It was locked away in that fishbowl, the realm of Electronic Engineers. They were the ones that actually touched the device, we only talked to it remotely. And as I grew more and more frustrated with programming I finally made the decision to leave computers and join the military in 1982. And even though my test scores were high I made the choice to pick a career as far from computers as I could, the Infantry.

 

[Oozlefinch]

Now at this time, the "Computer Revolution" was just getting started.

The home computer market exploded, with a huge surge of new machines. The Timex-Sinclair Z80, Atari 400-800, Commodore Vic-20 and C-64, TRS CoCo, the Texas Instruments TI-99, and a slew of others were all entering the market, and competing with each other. Even game consoles like the Magnavox Odyssey and Atari 2600 had "BASIC Programming" modules. But the downside is that these were really their own little universes. Almost no hardware or software made for one system would work on another.

So you had companies that generally wrote software for one system, but not another. And many times hardware made for one would not work on another. And until the first real "killer app" (the VisiCalc spreadsheet), most computers were largely used for playing games, or as glorified typewriters. And even the games were pretty crude. Text based parser adventure games ("Go North", "Get Key") and "ROGUE like" games (with text characters for walls and monsters) were pretty much the extent of what computers could do.

Oh, and the earliest examples of "On-line". Yes, we hade MODEMs back then. But not much we could call. Some banks by 1983 were offering "online banking". But at most all you could do was connect to them with your 300 baud modem and check your balance. Even the 1983 movie "War Games" was ahead of things then, showing things that were not yet possible. But if you were really rich, you could subscribe to an "online service" like The Source or CompuServe. Those let you do things like read newspapers or send "electronic mail" to other users of that system. Generally for a sign-up fee of $50, and a connection charge of $10 per hour.

But in 1983, things started to change. The Apple II was still chugging along, with it's small but loyal user base. The Atari and TI computers were dying, and the Tandy TRS series was in trouble with several competing models that were not compatible. But Commodore had released what would become the largest selling computer model of all time, the Commodore 64. With over 2 million units sold, it is still the largest selling computer of all time. And within 4 years they were everywhere.

Affordable, easy to purchase almost everywhere, and with one of the best user manuals in the industry this computer dominated the industry. And by 1986 there was even a graphical interface available known as GEOS. For millions of people, this was their first exposure to a GUI. Now users of the C-64 (and later Apple II) could use a fancy point and click interface, without the need for an expensive MacIntosh.

Oh, and GEOS shipped with this nifty add-on. A service you could connect to with a modem and access many of the same features that CompuServe offered, but instead of paying an hourly fee you paid a flat monthly fee. This was a relatively obscure service known as Quantum Link. It offered such innovative features as "Habitat", a game created by Lucas Arts where you could create a virtual avatar and wander around and interact with other users.

However, in 1989 Quantum Link changed their name to America On-Line.

 

[Oozlefinch]

Throughout the 1980's and early 1990's, there were really no standards in computers. It really was a Wild West landscape, where systems would live or die entirely on their own.

And this is not even between companies. Yes, you had Apple, Commodore, Atari, Tandy Radio Shack (what TRS stood for), IBM, and a slew of other companies all competing. But it was worse than that, even inside of a company you had competition.

And by the late 1980's, things were a mess. For Apple you had the Apple II, Apple III, and Macintosh lines, and none of them were really compatible with the other. You had the TRS-80 Model I and II, which came out at roughly the same time but were not compatible with each other. For Atari you had the 400 and 800 (which were mostly compatible), and the ST.

Then you had Commodore. By this time you had the PET, VIC-20, C-64, +4, MAX, C-128, and finally Amiga. Of all of these only the C-64 and C-128 were compatible with each other, the rest were incompatible.

And users were almost religiously loyal to their brands. They were almost warring camps, with Apple and Commodore users being the most loyal to their brands, being the last remainders as TI, Atari, Sinclair, and all the other brands fell one by one to the wayside. But even inside of these groups you had warring camps, as the older 8 bit (Apple II - C-64/128) users fought against the newer Macintosh and Amiga users.

Ultimately, much of this caused the computer crash of the mid-late 1980's, and led to the rise of the system that would eclipse all of the others.

And that is the IBM Compatible.

 

[Xelor]

Over the last few weeks, I have had several interactions with people who really have no concept of the history of computers, and think that everything that we have today is what we have always had. And they really have no concept how "new" all of what many of us use on a daily basis (including forums like this) simply did not exist a decade or so ago.....

Red:
Insofar as this forum was created a decade or more ago, it strains credulity for you to assert such a thing.

 

[Oozlefinch]

Now first of all, let me define what we considered as an "IBM Compatible" in that era.

It basically was a computer that used an Intel 8086/8088 CPU (or compatible), and used the Microsoft MS-DOS (or compatible) operating system. Originally these were all made by IBM, but as the years went on Compaq and a slew of other companies started to make clones. And by the late 1980's, the term for compatibility became generally the "LIM Standard".

That stands for "Lotus-Intel-Microsoft". In short, it used an Intel processor, ran Microsoft DOS, and could use Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet software (the most popular program of the era). However, even among "IBM Users", there was competition when it came to operating systems.

Yes, until the late 1980's, Microsoft was not the dominant player that most seem to think it was. Until the mid-1990's there were a slew of non-compatible operating systems even on the IBM platform. And that is not including the "Non-IBM compatible IBM compatibles", like the Tandy 2000, IBM PC Jr and NEC 9800 series.

You had CP/M by Digital Research. You had OS/2 by IBM. You had XENIX by Microsoft (yes, MS had one of the most popular Unix clones at one time). GEOS (the OS made for C-64 and Apple II) made an appearance to the PC. VisiOn, DeskMate, GEM, DR-DOS, TurboDOS, Windows, and many other operating systems were all competing for users. Even WIndows NT had appeared by 1993. And few if any of them were compatible with each other.

By the early 1990's, it was not unusual for a PC user to use MS-DOS for most of their work, such as Word Perfect for writing letters. Then load up GEM so they could use Ventura Publisher for some desktop publishing, before swapping over to VisiOn for doing some work on spreadsheets. Yes, at that time having multiple operating systems was all to common. Even Windows (before 95) was not really an operating system as we know it now, it was just a shell that ran on top of DOS.

Into the mid-1990's, the computer industry was often chaotic and hard to keep up with. However, by 1995 pretty much all of them had fallen by the wayside and there were only 2 companies remaining. IBM with OS/2, and Microsoft with their 4 different operating systems. MS-DOS, Xenix, Windows 3.X, and NT. But even though they were not compatible, the MS operating systems did not really compete. Xenix fulfilled the role that Linux generally fulfills now, generally running servers. NT was dedicated mostly for business. And Windows 3.X relied upon DOS to work.

One of the things I sighed in relief over as 1994 arrived is that the OS and Platform wars had pretty much ended. Commodore, Atari, GEM, VisiOn, TRS, Apple II, and all the others had died. And when you went to the store to get a new program, all you had to worry about was if it was for Macintosh, MS-DOS, or Windows. And if you were an "IBM Compatible" users, it no longer mattered who made your actual computer, they were all compatible with each other. So long as you met the CPU and RAM requirements of the program.

 

[Oozlefinch]

Red:
Insofar as this forum was created a decade or more ago, it strains credulity for you to assert such a thing.

Yes. And other forums existed in similar ways even before that.

But how many users were in here a decade ago? A decade ago, you would still have had more people using services like AOL Instant Messenger than forums like this.

You are making the very mistake that inspired me to start this thread. You see things how they are now, and just assume things were always this way. 10 years ago these kinds of multi-thread forums were still radically new. Most of them are almost unrecognizable today, and what we have now would amaze us back then.

 

[Xelor]

Over the last few weeks, I have had several interactions with people who really have no concept of the history of computers, and think that everything that we have today is what we have always had. And they really have no concept how "new" all of what many of us use on a daily basis (including forums like this) simply did not exist a decade or so ago.

To try and put it in perspective, I am using my own life to give an idea how fast things have evolved. I am 54 years old, and really grew up with computers. And in a way that most others my age really did not.

My first exposure to computers actually dates way back to 1970. The year before my mom's hobby shop closed, and she returned to her previous occupation, accounting. She got a job at the Olga lingerie company, at the same time that they were converting to computerized accounting. Realizing this was the wave of the future, she started to take night classes in computer programming, and was one of Olga's first programmers by 1970. I remember that she would take me in to work on weekends where I would fool around with the keypunch machines as she was banging away at code.

I even remember arcades before 1972. Yes, they did exist, but they were generally composed of only 2 types of games. ...

[...]

This was the way of things even into the late 1970's. By this time the first "Microcomputers" like the PET, Apple II, and TRS-80 were finally making their way into some homes. But at roughly 1 month's salary to buy one, only the rich or computer fanatics bought them at that time period. By that time my mom had become a System Analyst for a major construction company, so when she would work weekends I was now playing around on a terminal myself. Using UNIX I would explore around the network, dissecting code to figure out how programs worked.

By 1980 I was taking computer classes myself, learning COBOL and now typing my own programs on keypunch cards. But it did not take me long to realize that although I was good at programming, it did not have the interest that the computer itself had. But at this time, programmers and users did not really have access to the actual computer. It was locked away in that fishbowl, the realm of Electronic Engineers. They were the ones that actually touched the device, we only talked to it remotely. And as I grew more and more frustrated with programming I finally made the decision to leave computers and join the military in 1982. And even though my test scores were high I made the choice to pick a career as far from computers as I could, the Infantry.

It's so that computers have evolved over the past ~70 years, but the thesis that, prior to recent years, computers were tools abetting little but games is pure poppycock.


Black Bold:
I think your comprehension of the history and use of computers is amiss.

• From "Computers, Electronic Data, and the Vietnam War"
  • Historians will highlight discussion of computer use by the American military establishment during this period. The Vietnam War was the first war in military history to be run with the full-scale assistance of electronic data. Computers were in place in the White House and the Pentagon in time for large-scale application for war in 1965. By 1968 the American high command had installed computers in Saigon and military data originated thereafter from South Vietnam.
    
    "The effect of these data on the propagation of the war touched the highest levels of the Office of the President. It affected infantry brigades on the battlefield. The effect was felt by the South Vietnamese government and its citizens from scores of data systems dedicated to their well-being. It was noticed in the press media who reported stories of 'body count.'"
  • "The decision to use computers in the Vietnam War was new, but by no means novel. Their use in the armed forces of the United States, and in many other agencies of the American federal government, began much earlier in the nineteenth century. By 1965 there was a substantial government involvement in computing."

You may want to review the references found at ARL Computing History to obtain an accurate understanding of the use of computers by the various branches of the army.

 

[Xelor]

Yes. And other forums existed in similar ways even before that.

But how many users were in here a decade ago? A decade ago, you would still have had more people using services like AOL Instant Messenger than forums like this.

You are making the very mistake that inspired me to start this thread. You see things how they are now, and just assume things were always this way. 10 years ago these kinds of multi-thread forums were still radically new. Most of them are almost unrecognizable today, and what we have now would amaze us back then.

Red:
The quantity of users has no bearing on the central element of your thesis, which is that of the existence of a given technology. The number of uses reflects the adoption -- status and rate -- of that technology, not whether and when the tech in question came into existence.

I do believe the thread title is the "history of computers," not the "history of the general public's adoption of computing software." As go "laymen's" adoption of computing technology (hardware and software), I think one can make a strong case that the development of GUIs effected and hastened that progression/outcome. That said, your thesis has to do with the history of computers, not the history of GUIs.

 

[Infinite Chaos]

~ I am 54 years old, and really grew up with computers. And in a way that most others my age really did not ~

I'm a year older. I remember being offered the chance to study a new subject at school called "computer science" but my father banned me from doing this qualification.

"waste of time" he said, "nobody will ever earn a living working with computers" he said....

He was never very good with financial predictions and suchlike.

 

[Mycroft]

Over the last few weeks, I have had several interactions with people who really have no concept of the history of computers, and think that everything that we have today is what we have always had. And they really have no concept how "new" all of what many of us use on a daily basis (including forums like this) simply did not exist a decade or so ago.

I'm just over a decade older that you and I watched this evolution of computers, that you describe, occur. I started with the VIC-20 and quickly switched to the C-64. There are a couple things you didn't mention that, while not part of your history...which I take to be focused on "consumer" use of computers...are highly related:

1. The "minicomputer".

These computers existed in that space between the "mainframe" computers that were used by large corporations, universities and the government (IBM 360, for example) and "micro-computers" that were used by consumers (C-64, etc). The "PC" eventually killed off the minicomputer.

2. Computer magazines.

Lordy!! If I had the money I spent on magazines back, I could be rich today. LOL!! And I'll never forget the hours I spent typing pages of code from those magazines into my C-64...just to play a game. Mis-type one character...and spend hours trying to find the error. But that was how I learned what made my machine tick, new things it could do and where the future was going. The internet killed off the magazines.

 

[Oozlefinch]

It's so that computers have evolved over the past ~70 years, but the thesis that, prior to recent years, computers were tools abetting little but games is pure poppycock.

And you are completely missing that I have been discussing computers in how they related to everybody. Not just the few individuals like myself who actually used them at the time.

Once again, all you do is come in and blast away, not understanding what is actually being discussed, and trying to take things into a completely different direction.

Do not like it or the title, then make your own thread and call it whatever you like.

 

[Oozlefinch]

I'm a year older. I remember being offered the chance to study a new subject at school called "computer science" but my father banned me from doing this qualification.

"waste of time" he said, "nobody will ever earn a living working with computers" he said....

He was never very good with financial predictions and suchlike.

At that time, it was pretty much true.

You really had 4 tiers when it came to working on computers professionally.

Lowest was the Keypunch Operator. Generally a glorified typist, who had to transcribe the hand written 80 column programs or data onto keypunch cards. This was damned near minimum wage work.

Above that was the Computer Operator. Once again, basically just entering data and getting the results. About the same pay as a keypunch operator.

Then you finally had the Programmer. Now by the late 1970's this normally meant a degree in Programming, and the user knew multiple languages. COBOL was the king of the hill, but PASCAL, BASIC, C, and ADA were also common languages. This was roughly a mid-level White Collar pay scale.

Then you had the Computer Engineers. Generally guys with advanced Electrical Engineering degrees, these were the ones that actually worked "hands on" with the computer.

Yea, "Computer Science" in the public schools was rather hit or miss in that time period. I was lucky enough to attend a school district with 3 High Schools, and was in what was probably the High Tech center of that area of the country. We not only had a major HP factory in town, we were also the world headquarters for 5 major corporations (Albertson's, Boise-Cascade, Micron, Morrison-Knudsen, Idaho Power). So instead of simply punching in BASIC programs into an Apple II like at most schools, we actually went to Boise State University and punched COBOL onto keypunch cards, which was then run through an IBM 360 mainframe.

It was finally in the mid-1980s when that started to change. Prior to around 1985, unless you were a programmer you really were at a "barely above minimum wage" type career field. However the Keypunch Operators became extinct, and Operators started to become pretty much everybody who used a computer. And it was the explosion of home computers that allowed the type of programs and the places they could be used to explode.

It must be remembered that what is recognized as the first "Commercial Computer Program" aimed at regular people is generally considered to be a chess program in 1976. And it was distributed literally as photocopies of the source code. You would send a few dollars to the programmer, and he sent you a copy of the code which you entered yourself. Then in 1978 you had another chess program called Sargon, which went a step further and for an extra fee would send you a paper tape of the code (later on cassette tape).

That was pretty much the standard, until 1979 when companies like Sierra Online and Richard Garriott started to sell ziplock bags with their programs directly to computer stores.

 

[OldFatGuy]

Obviously no true power users here. UNIX was King throughout it all, with its variants from AIX to SGI and the MacOSX, all with some levels of compatibility. My Solaris workstation is still faster than any of the new machines, not as powerful as the latest chipsets, but faster, and for those not in the know, a cheat since I use now use custom SGI chipsets which are more powerful in the same fiber ware box as a lock down family server. LINUX is not UNIX. More than half the servers on the net have LINUX backbones.

 

[Oozlefinch]

I'm just over a decade older that you and I watched this evolution of computers, that you describe, occur. I started with the VIC-20 and quickly switched to the C-64. There are a couple things you didn't mention that, while not part of your history...which I take to be focused on "consumer" use of computers...are highly related:

1. The "minicomputer".

These computers existed in that space between the "mainframe" computers that were used by large corporations, universities and the government (IBM 360, for example) and "micro-computers" that were used by consumers (C-64, etc). The "PC" eventually killed off the minicomputer.

2. Computer magazines.

Lordy!! If I had the money I spent on magazines back, I could be rich today. LOL!! And I'll never forget the hours I spent typing pages of code from those magazines into my C-64...just to play a game. Mis-type one character...and spend hours trying to find the error. But that was how I learned what made my machine tick, new things it could do and where the future was going. The internet killed off the magazines.

Yes, I admit I am concentrating on the "consumer" level, because that is what most people would have had exposure to. And although most people were aware of the minicomputers and early microcomputers, few people actually used them or ever actually saw one. Prior to the VIC or C-64 line, very few considered ever actually owning a computer. And even fewer ever actually saw or worked with one.

The Altair, the Osborne, the PDP line, and others. But these were still incredibly expensive, typically costing the annual salary of most people just to buy one. And many did not even have a keyboard or screen, you programmed them by flipping switches and read the results in blinking lights.

For example, the original Altair 8800 came out in 1974. And it was released as a kit for $500 (over $2,000 today). And it was basically just a big blue and black box with LED lights and small switches. But for an additional $100 ($400 today) and the cost of a dumb terminal ($400, $1500 today) you could add a serial interface and telex terminal and finally "use it" like a computer more people were familiar with, with a keyboard and monitor.

And yes, Computer Magazines were huge back then. Byte, Computerworld, Creative Computing, Compute!, and of course Computer Shopper. I used to devour these and more every month. And most of them had programs you could type in yourself, which is what taught a lot of people how to actually program in BASIC.

One of the landmark publications of the C-64 era was "Compute! Gazette". And yes, I had almost all of the issues from 1983 until around 1987. What was unique of that publication was that for a few dollars extra it would come with a floppy disk, with all of the programs included already entered and working. I imagine if I still had all those old magazines they might actually be worth something today.

Whenever I go to an old book store, I always keep my eye out for old issues of Computer Shopper. I have yet to find any, but I would love to find one from the late 1980s or early 1990s. When it was a phone book sized monthly publication, 600 pages or so of a few articles, listings of BBS sites, and pages and pages of advertisements.

 

[Oozlefinch]

Obviously no true power users here. UNIX was King throughout it all, with its variants from AIX to SGI and the MacOSX, all with some levels of compatibility. My Solaris workstation is still faster than any of the new machines, not as powerful as the latest chipsets, but faster, and for those not in the know, a cheat since I use now use custom SGI chipsets which are more powerful in the same fiber ware box as a lock down family server. LINUX is not UNIX. More than half the servers on the net have LINUX backbones.

Yes, it was. I was already using UNIX back then, but I also admit I was one of the few that actually used computers before they jumped into the home.

And I also mentioned XENIX (now known as SCO UNIX), what was one of the most commonly used versions of UNIX for over a decade.

Here, a quick diversion for the UNIX heads.

Back in the early days, there was really no way to use UNIX if you were an individual. Instead you had clones like CP/M and others, which tried to capture the "look and feel" of UNIX. This is because Bell Labs (the owner of UNIX) refused to license the operating system to individual users. They only wanted to sell site licenses to bog corporations and organizations. They made a lot of money on those licenses, and it was thought that if they were sold individually both piracy and companies only buying a handful of individual copies would erode their cash cow.

So Bill Gates set out to create his own operating system, as close to UNIX as he could get away with without breaking copyright laws. And when it was ready for release in 1980 they tweaked the name to XENIX. And to say it was huge is an understatement. It was truly cross-platform, running on Zilog, Intel, and Motorola processors. However, it was not available to sale to end users, only to OEM manufacturers. IBM, Altos, Siemens, and other companies were soon shipping XENIX computers. But the landmark shift came when Tandy selected it as the default operating system for the TRS-80 Model 16 (the last and most powerful computer of the TRS-80 line).

It was even a popular operating system choice for the Apple Lisa computer.

Literally this was the "LINUX before LINUX". And in the early days of the "Public Internet", quite a few web servers were actually running XENIX. One thing that is rarely remembered is that Microsoft itself used XENIX for it's web hosting and e-mail system until 1996. And Apple was also using XENIX until around the same time. Most of the remaining XENIX servers died fairly quickly however after APACHE came out.

And yes, I am fully aware that LINUX is not UNIX. Nor is CP/M, TinyDos, QDOS, MS-DOS, or most of the other variants developed over the decades. But they all descend from UNIX, with the earliest ones trying to duplicate it's look and feel as closely as they could.

And UNIX is unique when compared to those older operating systems, because it was both a DOS and a NOS (Network Operating System). Until after Windows 95, very few people ever even though of connecting 2 computers together in their home. To do so was often problematic, as well as expensive. Hubs and switches were still expensive, so those of us that did generally used 10base2 (coax cable). Then shelled out money for an additional program like LANtastic, WEB, and finally Novell DOS so you could actually have one computer talk to another.

But if you used one of the UNIX clones (like XENIX), that capability was built in. Most home computer users did not start to try and network their computers until after Windows 95 came with that capability built in. And even then, only when high speed Internet finally started to make it's way into the home in the early 2000's as a way to share their new DSL connection.

Myself, I still use variants of UNIX to this day. My main server is Mint, and my other one (which I constantly change) is currently running Xinuos OpenServer (essentially the "Great Grandson" of XENIX). Heck, 15 years ago I even sold some Pentium Pro systems with LINDOWS on them. And most people today use some variant on their phones, be it Apple or one of the various Android systems. Myself, I generally use UNIX when referring to one of the systems directly connected to the original Bell Labs UNIX, and LINUX when referring to any one of the thousands of other systems that are as close to the "look and feel" of UNIX, but not connected directly to Bell Labs or one of the variants that followed directly afterwards.

 

[Oozlefinch]

And as for the speed and power of a system like the Solaris, then that is a very different kettle of fish. Because now you are getting into the difference between RISC and CISC CPU architecture more than operating system.

For the laymen that do not understand what this means, CPUs generally fall into 2 categories. In basic terms, Complex Instruction Set Computing (X86) is where the CPU has a very large and bloated instruction set, but this set is very comprehensive so it is easier to program for. Reduced Instruction Set Computing (Motorola, Alpha, PowerPC) is much smaller and more efficient, but is more complex to program for because more aspects have to be entered into the software which in CISC were simply handed off for the CPU to do itself.

This is why in the 1990's, a Macintosh PowerPC could perform the work of an IBM clone that was 50%-100% faster. But that also came with the trade-off of requiring more RAM to handle the larger code.

Now today in most ways these are kinda pointless for the most part. With multi-core 64 bit processors the bottlenecks are more likely outside the CPU, so RISC and CISC is largely meaningless in most cases. However, both actually continue to live on in the AMD series of processors. Those are actually hybrids, which use a RISC core, with a translation layer built in so it seamlessly exists in a CISC system.

And although most of us used CISC processors in our computers at work and home, RISC was still very common. Most of the classic game consoles used RISC (Sega, Nintendo, Sony, Xbox, NEC), because of the raw power of the processors being an advantage in games. This is why a PlayStation or Xbox with a CPU half the speed of a desktop could perform just as well. But as with other computers this died out in the latest generation of consoles. As both Microsoft and Sony have migrated to CISC processors based on the X86 architecture because the CPU power is now more than enough to offset the overhead of the more bloated instructions.

And yes, I am aware that I have "dumbed down" much of this description. And while I am sure you know exactly what I am talking about, most computer users would have no idea what the difference is between RISC and CISC, differences between Token Ring and Ethernet, or even RAM and ROM or memory and storage.

 

[Helix]

in my lifetime, i've gone from learning Basic on a TRS80 to carrying a device the size of my high school calculator which can access an archive of human knowledge which is the modern day equivalent of the Library of Alexandria. this is definitely a fascinating time to be alive.

 

[Oozlefinch]

Before The Internet

One thing that most people today either never learned or have forgotten, is that there was an "online" presence for decades prior to The Internet reaching the home.

For most with the money or need to do research (lawyers, authors, doctors, stock brokers, etc), this generally came from companies like CompuServe. You would hook up a MODEM (generally 300 baud) and access archives of data. Newspapers, magazines, tech papers, stock and earnings statements, and the like. They also had crude forms of e-mail and essentially an "Electronic CB Radio" for real time chatting with other users. But at $10 an hour (in the early 1980's), very few could afford to use this.

But by the mid 1980's, a growing hobby of Bulletin Boards was starting to spread. Essentially somebody ran some software on their computer, and would then hook it up to a phone line so others could call and access it. By 1990 there were thousands of BBS and users across the country. Most were free or requested a donation, and offered things like shareware software, fonts, clip art and even digital pictures, and multi-user games. Then you had the "Elite" ones, that dealt in pirated software.

And ironically, this was the segment of the industry that really pushed the need for faster and faster modems. Until the mid-1980s, you were pretty much stuck with a modem of 300, 600, or 1200 bits per second. This was the norm until around 1985, when the V 22 bis 2400 modem hit the market. Now you could download a small program in only 10 minutes, instead of 40 minutes. A year or so later there was a 4800 bps modem standard, but before it had time to really catch on the 9600 bps modem hit the market.

By this time, more and more computers were being shipped with modems built in. These were generally 2400 fax-modems, which could be used to connect to an online service (like AOL or Prodigy), but could also be used to send and receive fax messages. And by 1993 a growing number were realizing that they could call a local BBS and both get software as well as communicate with other users.

And it was not only home hobbyists like myself that set up a BBS. Companies like McAffee Antivirus, Sierra Online games, and pretty much any other company that worked with computers had one. I was the "Official McAffee Distribution site" for my BBS, so had to call them every week to get the newest version of their programs so that others could connect to my system to get them. Game companies like Sierra would offer not only patches for newer hardware, but cheat texts to help you through their games.

But by and large, when you called a BBS that is all you got. What that System Operator ("SYSOP") had and made available and nothing else. So most who got into this hobby soon amassed a list of multiple BBS in their area, and would call one after another. This is especially true when the "Door Games" became huge. Essentially these were multi-player turn based games. Trade Wars, Legend of the Red Dragon, Operation Overkill, essentially early MUD games. And there were a lot of addicts to these, with many people participating in 10 games a day, bouncing from BBS to BBS to do their daily updates.

And some ran these as a business. Rusty & Eddies was a large BBS that charged $90 a year, had 124 phone lines, and over 14,000 paying members at it's height. In Los Angeles you had a 32 line one called Stepping Stone Hotel. This was a 32 line BBS based in Santa Clarita, but was a local call to most of LA because of call forward hopping. They were located in an area that a call to the San Fernando Valley was "local", and set up a phony phone exchange number that forwarded calls from the 213 and 310 area codes to their number. They did the same trick to the Antelope Valley, allowing them to reach most of LA County via local numbers.

In 1994, they then expanded to become the first ISP in the Santa Clarita area. The owner made a fair chunk of money when she sold that to Earthlink in 1997 for a big chunk of money, but continued to run the BBS as a hobby until it finally died off in 2001.

This is the industry that drove modem speeds to 9600, 14.4, 28.8, then finally 56k speeds. The last jump basically happened within 5 years. And with perfect timing, as in 1995 The Internet finally arrived for most users

 

[Oozlefinch]

At that point, there was not much to "The WWW" yet. A few web pages, which you found with GOPHER, ARCHIE, JUGHEAD, and VERONICA. You also had real time chatting via Internet Relay Chat (IRC). But there was very little other than pages of text, a few pictures, and poor quality WAV audio. No, there was no full motion video yet. RealVideo did not appear until 1997. Flash came out in 1996. The early years were amazingly quiet and static.

I bet most would be surprised that at that time Yahoo! was not really a "search engine". Quite literally, it was originally a directory of a bunch of sites by 2 college students. But not even trying to be all-inclusive, it was what they thought were the "Coolest" sites. Things were broken down in categories, and you would go though the tabs to find what you wanted. For those of us who were making web pages back then, it was a big deal if you were considered "cool enough" to be on Yahoo (all entries were inspected, graded, then approved and added to the directory manually).

And oh, was connecting to The Internet a challenge back in those days! Today, most are spoiled in they just click and go. Always on high speed connections are all that a lot of people know, they have no idea how it used to be.

Before August 1995, this is how you would have connected to the Internet.

First, you contact an ISP and set up an account. They would then instruct you to either access their BBS and download the needed software, or they would send it to you on a disk. This was generally a suite of 3 programs. First a dialer, so your computer could connect to their phone number. Then you needed Trumpet Winsock, which allowed your computer to work on a multi-computer network via modem. Then finally an Internet Browser, like Netscape.

This all changed with Windows 95. Because if you were one of the early adopters of Windows 95 ($109), you could shell out an additional $49 for Windows Plus!, which included the dialer, Winsock, and Internet Explorer built in.

It was not until Windows 95 OSR2 (1997) that such features like IE and the rest was finally built into Win95 at no additional cost.

 

[Oozlefinch]

in my lifetime, i've gone from learning Basic on a TRS80 to carrying a device the size of my high school calculator which can access an archive of human knowledge which is the modern day equivalent of the Library of Alexandria. this is definitely a fascinating time to be alive.

Exactly. And it is something that I have noticed a large number of people simply do not comprehend anymore. Kind of like trying to explain to somebody in an era of 300+ channel cable TV what it was like when you only had ABC-NBC-CBS-PBS (maybe). And if you were lucky enough to live in a larger city, maybe 1 or 2 "Independent" stations. That was how TV was until I was 22 (1986) when Fox finally added a "Fourth Network". I remember in Boise it was a huge deal when we finally got our first independent station in 1981. Suddenly we went from 4 to 5 choices of what to watch. Most of their lineup was old sitcom reruns in the day, and movies at night.

As a web designer in the early days, it boggles my mind that today most have no idea how crude the Internet was in the early days. It was largely static and quiet.

That is why one of the first real "Internet Memes" that burst everywhere in 1998 was such a big deal. It was just a bunch of crudely made animated GIF drawings of various dancing rodents. And a WAV file of a sped up segment of the Roger Miller song "Whistle Stop" (from the Disney movie "Robin Hood") that lasted for 9 seconds. But Hampster Dance became a worldwide hit. For most users, it was really the first time they could visit a site, and both see motion and hear music.

Other than the MIDI files that were everywhere at that time. But the quality of MIDI files could vary greatly, depending on who made the file, and the quality of your sound card.

 

[Oozlefinch]

Sound and Music

Now for this, you really have to separate the IBM series of machines (and early Apple II) from the others.

For most computers of the "8 bit era", sound was actually something they considered when they made the system. The VIC chip in the VIC-20 had as part of it's design 3 pulse wave sound generators. This allowed it to give crude sounds and music, with a range of 5 octaves in mono.

Then you had the Atari 400-800. Since it was made by a game company, it had some of the best sound of the era. And it even had an interesting feature that nobody else used. Since most programs were loaded on tape, that means it took from 2-10 minutes to load a program. And this was generally from a mono track on an audio cassette. What Atari did was allow the second stereo audio track actually play music through the PC speaker as a program loaded. This allowed for such things as music, an introduction to the program you were going to play, or many other things to be heard as the game loaded.

Now if you were playing a game on an IBM until the 1990's, odds are all you heard was noise hash from the PC speaker. Generally monotone beeps, or maybe even a noise hash. That was pretty much it. There was no "music" or other sounds like we are used to today. This is because the architecture was simply not capable of playing anything more (and with no sound output all you could hear had to come through a horrible speaker about the quality of that in a See-n-Say toy).

There were of course a few exceptions to this rule. The PCjr had better sound capabilities, but was really about as good as that from the VIC-20. The Tandy computers had a slightly better sound capability, but few programs were made to take advantage of it (or the PCjr).

Now there were a few other alternatives. You could add a Roland MIDI interface card, but this was expensive and was mostly used by musicians. There was also the Covox, a dongle which holed up to the parallel port. But the sound quality was pretty poor.

Finally in 1987, AdLib arrived. A consumer level MIDI card, which could play 6 FM synthesized instruments at the same time. This finally allowed somebody to actually "hear" a simulated orchestra music track. And companies like Sierra jumped on it with both feet. Suddenly music started to become a big deal in games. Instead of annoying buzzes you finally had real music.

If anybody wants to hear an evolution of MIDI sound, the following video has the sound for 6 different games in the same series. And you can hear how the soundtracks got more and more sophisticated with each version, until you get to the 7th where digital sound technology finally replaced the MIDI sound with an actual orchestra.



However, the AdLib was a short lived card, being replaced 2 years later with the Sound Blaster. This was a much better card technologically. A card not only with true digitized sound capability, it also featured an 11 voice FM synthesizer. Essentially where the AdLib could play 6 instruments at once, the Blaster could play 11. And within 2 years that became the industry standard. Because even though most games still only used MIDI for their soundtrack, the makers started to add in digitized sounds, including voices and sound effects.

But at this point sound cards have largely remained the same. The "Sound Blaster" has now become a generic term, and pretty much every sound card for the last 25 years has been compatible with it. However, there are still some differences if you look for them. Back when I was still heavily involved in sound work, my preferred card was one by Turtle Beach which had 32 instrument voices. And so long as the MIDI song was created with that many voices, it could play them.

But in those early days, many games used some unique tricks to play sounds. One of the most unique I heard was in an early CD based game by Sierra, Jones in the Fast Lane. It had a MIDI sound track and effects, but instead of playing digitized samples through the sound card, the human voices were actually played as CD audio tracks from the disk itself.

 

[OldFatGuy]

Most home computer users did not start to try and network their computers until after Windows 95 came with that capability built in.

Users of the MacPlus and later Macs used AppleTalk over their home phone systems, the spare wire, to network in the home for an LAN as far back as 1987. I had three at home, so I could keep an eye on what the kids were doing on theirs, as my wife worked on her own. I had picked up a precursor to AppleRemote off one of the local BB's, which allowed me to both view what the kids were doing, and control their machine. I'd drive them nuts by making homework assignments temporarily disappear. I'd blame it on the dog. As well, all three machines were connected via the LAN to an NEC laser printer by early 1988. We allowed the kids 30 minutes a day each on Compuserve's kid section, for homework and games. They couldn't understand why their friends didn't have computers at home, or why there were none in school, yet.

My wife, a textile designer, was working from home, using Apple Draw and Paint, transferring her work to Hypercard, later Supercard which allowed for colors, and a MacII with graphics card for a color monitor. She wrote off all the computer hardware we had from her taxes, but was pulling down such large earnings, it barely dented her tax bills. At one point she was designing movie posters for Indie companies, charging them more than she charged the textile companies, doing a tenth of the work. Her biggest problem, rendering time. She'd love what we have now.

One of her customers built a factory for silk screening bed sheets. They'd buy huge bolts of white material (usually cotton, silk/cotton or cotton polyester blends) weighing a half ton, run them through a silk screen press for each color, the press the larger than the size of small house, then send them to another factory for cutting and finishing. The press ran off a MacII and she'd bring her work to them on floppies. An amazing advance for that industry at the time. Gave them a production edge that multiplied their profits 20 fold. The silk screen stencils still had to be measured and cut by hand, and that alone was an astonishing craft. 4-5 days work for each stencil, a different stencil for each color, all precisely cut. A floral pattern or a child's comic book hero motif could have as much as 20 different colored inks, and the stencils had to be replaced for each bolt of material because they wore out. It took 5 years for their competitors to catch up with them, by which time the computer industry had grown by leaps and bounds, the stencil cutting precisely cut by computer instructions in a few hours, a process still in use.

I've read the first common industrial use of mechanical computers was for the textile mills in Britain and France as early as the 13th century, counting threads for early weaving machines, and color designs, following patterns for mechanical embroidering. We've come a long way.

 

[Oozlefinch]

Game Evolution

For most of the first years of computer games, they generally fell into 2 categories.

First you had the text based games. These were like "Colossal Cave", where you had a 1 or 2 word parser and would enter a verb-noun command and the game would enact it. "Go North", "Look", "Get Lamp", and the like. They were pretty linear, and were generally variations of "Enter the dungeon, find the loot, and escape" style of games. Absolutely no graphics, everything was written out.

Then you had the "turn based" games. Chess, checkers, and the various ROGUE clones.

Now the ROGUE games were some of the first "adventure" games that actually had graphics. However, they were generally ASCII characters with the letters and symbols representing yourself, treasure, and monsters. These "dungeon crawl" adventures were all top-down, and generally used "fog of war" to keep things hidden from you. Then later advances in graphics and power saw a shift where pre-rendered "sprites".

But in 1981 you had 2 main games break out. First was Ultima, the first major game that not only used the top-down approach, but also included a 3D effect when going through the dungeons. But like all other games, it featured only you as the single character (later named an "avatar"). Then 3 months later you had Wizardry. It dispensed with the 2D top down view, and was entirely in a 3D world. But it also allowed you to create a party of up to 6 characters to adventure through the dungeon.

At about the same time we also had the first platformers start to migrate from video arcades to computers. Donkey Kong, Frogger, PacMan, and just about any other arcade game came to computers. But by and large these were really just clones of what was popular in arcades so nothing really "new".

But in 1985 Interplay released a new game, Bard's Tale. It was like Wizardry, but also added a town to explore, as well as color and music. And this was a formula that they would then follow for many years to come.

Now Interplay started as a hybrid company between the two styles, much like Sierra Online. They started with typical text adventures then migrated to include graphics. This was started by Sierra, which was really the first to integrate graphics into a text adventure. But where Sierra started as a husband and wife team making games at home, Interplay started as a "true games company". And by 1988 had involved science fiction authors and traditional game designers like Ken St. Andre and Michael Stackpole to create games like Wasteland. A post-apocalyptic adventure game set in a post WWIII Western US.

This basically used a modified system from Bard's Tale, but was far more ambitions. Because the game had to fit on a single floppy disk, there was not much room for story. So each copy came with a booklet with paragraph numbers. When you got to a point in the game it would say something like "Read Paragraph 67", and that was the text part of the story. This allowed it to have far more story detail than other games at the time. It was also one of the first with a "persistent world". You had to copy the game to another disk and play on it, because changes you made in the game were permanent. Kill somebody and they were gone forever. Blow up part of the landscape, and it remained blown up. Things did not reset as they did in most games of the time.

A game which few remember now, but because they wrote the game and it was distributed by Electronic Arts they got into a dispute over sequel rights. Finally after years of trying to get the rights for their creation back from EA they finally gave up and started over again. Changing just enough of their original backstory to avoid getting sued.

Their new game had a new name. Fallout.

 

[Irwin Corey]

… they really have no concept how "new" all of what many of us use on a daily basis (including forums like this) simply did not exist a decade or so ago.

A decade ago? Not really, 10 years ago what "MOST" people used they are still using. The "backbone" may have moved from Fiber to "WiFiber" and they may be storing their "stuff" in the "cloud" but basic "internet" hasn't changed much in the last 10 years other than it is "better". Better means faster, easier, more storage, but the basics … existed. There were LOT's of message/discussion boards 10 years ago … and before. Of course there has been improvements, but to see the real difference between the past and now … you have to go back more than 10 years.

 

[Oozlefinch]

Users of the MacPlus and later Macs used AppleTalk over their home phone systems, the spare wire, to network in the home for an LAN as far back as 1987. I had three at home, so I could keep an eye on what the kids were doing on theirs, as my wife worked on her own. I had picked up a precursor to AppleRemote off one of the local BB's, which allowed me to both view what the kids were doing, and control their machine. I'd drive them nuts by making homework assignments temporarily disappear. I'd blame it on the dog. As well, all three machines were connected via the LAN to an NEC laser printer by early 1988. We allowed the kids 30 minutes a day each on Compuserve's kid section, for homework and games. They couldn't understand why their friends didn't have computers at home, or why there were none in school, yet.

I have been generally avoiding the other systems, since few here would have ever used them.

Yes, I used LISA, as well as the original Mac. One of my first professional computer jobs was as a Mac tech on the PowerPC 7200 using OS 7.

And yes, there was AppleTalk, if you could afford to have 2 Macs. Not many people could afford that kind of expense unless they used them professionally.

But in those old systems, you actually had a fair amount of specialization. Most today are familiar with the idea of using a computer for just about everything. But back then, that was really not the case.

If you used an IBM, odds are you were doing some kind of professional application like spreadsheets, databases, or word processing.

If you used an Apple, odds are you were in either graphics or desktop publishing. That was one of it's strongest abilities.

If you used an Atari ST, you were probably using it for music. A great many professional musicians were using the ST for composing, as it probably had the best MIDI capability of any computer of the era. In fact, it's capabilities were so strong that some clever hackers figured out how to network 2 or more ST machines through their MIDI ports. This led to the creation of one of the first real time multi player games, "MIDI MAZE". Amazingly crude and simplistic today, this game was mind blowing in 1987. My first experience with it was in 1988, playing with 5 other players in a simultaneous deathmatch.



And if you were using an Amiga, odds are you were using it for video. The Video Toaster is what really made the Amiga shine in this area. For the first time it allowed somebody to use a single inexpensive computer to do advanced video animation and editing. Chroma key ("Greenscreen"), switching between different feeds with various effects, advanced character generation with animation, even image manipulation. It was so revolutionary that the creators won an Emmy Award for technical excellence in 1993.

And although the Amiga and Video Toaster are long gone, the software actually lives on to this day. Today people in the video area know it as LightWave 3D, and has been used in movies ranging from 007 GoldenEye and Avatar and Star Wars: The Force Awakens to CSI, Firefly, and Stargate SG-1.

I am not ignoring these older systems for any reason other than most here have probably never seen them (if they have even heard of them). And I also consider the "Classic" Mac series as a distinctly different computer from those that came out after OSX. To be honest, I really consider the "Macintosh" computer to have died in 2001 when OSX came out. Today, I tend to place all of the Macs that followed the return of Jobs as successors to the NeXT computer. They really are not Macintosh computers.