I’ve recently begun to use TRS-80 Model I emulators to recapture some of the programming experiences of my younger days. The emulator I’m currently using under Windows is trs80gp which can be found here:

http://members.shaw.ca/gp2000/trs80gp.html

I invoke the emulator with the command-line parameters -m1 to force Model I emulation and -na for non-authentic display.

While trs80gp does not support any of the Disk-Operating-Systems of yesteryear, it does provide a menu option that will load /CMD executable files and BASIC files. You really can’t save any information back to the Windows filesystem, but that’s okay. For my purposes, I want to write some programs in a cross-assembler or cross-compiler environment and will just load the files to try them out. At some point, I will either look for or will build a utility that will tokenize a text listing to a BASIC listing so that I can create BASIC programs as well.

My initial goal, however, is to write Z-80 code and run it on the emulator.

My first task was to find a cross-assembler for the Z-80 that would run under Windows. The trs80gp site references ZMac which sounds like a great editor, but it doesn’t appear to compile in its current form under Windows.

I found a utility called Pasmo here:

http://www.arrakis.es/~ninsesabe/pasmo/

Like some of the others I tried, Pasmo basically generates a binary machine-image file. I chose Pasmo because of the -d option which shows an assembly listing on the standard output device.

I would like to be able to package up anything I write into a standard /CMD file so that it can be used with other emulators or on the real hardware itself. In order to do that, I was going to have to determine how to convert a machine-image file into a /CMD file.

As a test program, I would use the example routine I published in my post http://jimlawless.wordpress.com/2009/11/07/learning-z-80-assembly-language-on-the-trs-80/. That routine fills the video memory with the all-white character (191) and then returns.

I have several /CMD images of games that I have on cassette and began looking through them. I could see some control-codes and such, but my initial stab at trying to interpret them was not successful. After a little searching on the web, I found a reference to an article from The LDOS Journal volume 1, issue 4. Tim Mann has copies of this issue and others on his site here:

http://www.tim-mann.org/misosys.html

The article that describes the format is in the column Roy’s Technical Corner.

Roy describes the record formats permissible in a /CMD file. The format is not unlike the binary tag-based system used in the TIFF graphical image file format. The first byte one encounters is a record-type byte. The next byte is a length of bytes that will follow … sort of. The remainder of bytes should match the length specified in the length byte. The next record in sequence should be another record ID / length / payload sequence, but that doesn’t seem to hold true either.

I wrote a short C program readcmd.exe that lists each record in a /CMD file. While number of my /CMD files parsed correctly just fine, some did not.

Roy explains that the 01 record indicates a loadable block of binary data. The length byte in many of my /CMD files was zero, which I correctly assumed would yield a 256-byte block. However some of the /CMD files in my possession use a value of two in the length byte and seem to have a payload bigger than two bytes in length.

The article further explains that each loadable block of data first contains a load-address and states that zero and one are special values that indicate a two-byte load-address will be followed by 254 and 255 bytes of data respectively. The article doesn’t mention the value two, but I assume that since the 01 record will always have a load-address, two bytes will always follow. The values zero, one, and two are then used for machine-images of size 254, 255, and 256 respectively. The value three is a complete mystery to me. I have seen a small block with a length of four and the payload that follows the load-address is four bytes in length. I’ll tinker later and see how the emulators load a record with a length value of three.

I should state that my readcmd program is dependent on the Intel representation of a 16-bit integer ( Least Significant Byte followed by Most Significant Byte ). An unsigned short integer must be 16-bits in width in order for the program below to run correctly.

readcmd.c

// readcmd
// Dump the record information for a TRS-80 /CMD
// executable file
//
// License: MIT / X11
// Copyright (c) 2009 by James K. Lawless
// jimbo@radiks.net http://www.radiks.net/~jimbo
// http://www.mailsend-online.com
//
// Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
// obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation
// files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without
// restriction, including without limitation the rights to use,
// copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
// copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the
// Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following
// conditions:
//
// The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
// included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
//
// THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
// EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES
// OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
// NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT
// HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY,
// WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING
// FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR
// OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc,char **argv) {
   FILE *fp;
   unsigned char buff[258];
   unsigned int len;
   unsigned short address;
	printf("readcmd v1.0 by Jim Lawless\n");
	printf("http://jimlawless.wordpress.com\n\n");
   fp=fopen(argv[1],"rb");
   for(;;) {
      if(!fread(buff,1,1,fp))
         break;
			// record type is "load block"
      if(*buff==1) {
         fread(buff,1,1,fp);

         len=*buff;
				// compensate for special values 0,1, and 2.
         if(len<3)
            len+=256;
				// read 16-bit load-address
         fread(&address,1,2,fp);
         printf("Reading 01 block, addr %x, length = %u.\n",address,len-2);
         fread(buff,1,len-2,fp);
      }
      else
				// record type is "entry address"
      if(*buff==2) {
         fread(buff,1,1,fp);
         len=*buff;
         printf("Reading 02 block length = %u.\n",len);
         fread(&address,1,len,fp);
         printf("Entry point is %d %x\n",address,address);
         break;
      }
      else
			// record type is "load module header"
      if(*buff==5) {
         fread(buff,1,1,fp);
         len=*buff;
         printf("Reading 05 block length = %u.\n",len);
         fread(buff,1,len,fp);
      }
      else {
         printf("Unknown code %u at %lx\n",*buff,ftell(fp)-1L);
         break;
      }
   }
   fclose(fp);
}

I found that after the 02 record is encountered, all kinds of garbage data can follow. I assume that most /CMD loaders halt interpretation of the file after the 02 record is encountered. You’ll notice a break out of the main input loop when readcmd encounters this record.

My readcmd program was able to parse through all of the /CMD files in my possession. Now that I have a way to verify the correctness of a /CMD file, it’s time to try and build my own.

I really can’t remember where the first bytes of free memory really start on a Model I. Address 17129 looks to be the spot where BASIC begins, but I’ve never owned a DOS on a Model I, so I don’t know if that address can change.

I noticed that a lot of the games I have begin at address 6C00H, so I chose that as the starting-address for my program.

Here is the slightly modified source code from my prior post:

fill.asm

    ORG     6c00H
    LD      HL,3C00H ; 15360 in hex
    LD      A, 191
    LD      [HL],A
    LD      DE,3C01H
    LD      BC,1023
    LDIR
    RET

I then assembled it with the command:

pasmo -d fill.asm fill.out

The output from Pasmo is as follows:

		ORG 6C00
6C00:21003C	LD HL, 3C00
6C03:3EBF	LD A, BF
6C05:77		LD (HL), A
6C06:11013C	LD DE, 3C01
6C09:01FF03	LD BC, 03FF
6C0C:EDB0	LDIR
6C0E:C9		RET
Emiting raw binary from 6C00 to 6C0E

My load-module is fifteen bytes in size. I need to create a load-record that accommodates fifteen plus two bytes for the load address. My 01 record will have a length of seventeen ( or 11H ) bytes. Here’s how the 01 record should look in hex:

01 11 00 6C 21 00 3C 3E BF 77 11 01 3C 01 FF 03
ED B0 C9

The total space occupied by the 01 record is nineteen bytes.

I then needed to add a 02 record to state the transfer address of 6C00H:

02 02 00 6C

The total size of the two records is twenty-three (17H) bytes in length.

I manually created the /CMD file using the Windows console DEBUG utility.

debug fill.cmd
e 100  01 11 00 6C 21 00 3C 3E BF 77 11 01 3C 01 FF 03
e 110  ED B0 C9 02 02 00 6C
rcx
17
w
q

I first used readcmd to ascertain that the records looked reasonable:

readcmd fill.cmd

readcmd v1.0 by Jim Lawless
http://jimlawless.wordpress.com

Reading 01 block, addr 6c00, length = 15.
Reading 02 block length = 2.
Entry point is 27648 6c00

I loaded fill.cmd in trs80gp and it correctly filled the screen with whitespace.

I had expected the RET instruction to drop me back into BASIC, but it did not. I’m not sure if that’s an idiosyncrasy of trs80gp or if all emulators and the actual hardware/software will behave in this manner. ( NOTE: after fixing my code to use 1023 bytes to move instead of 4095 as George Phillips, author of trs80gp notes in the comments to the post, I did indeed drop into BASIC, but received a ?SN ERROR message at the prompt. I may try George’s suggestion of JP-ing to 1A19H at a later time. )

In the near future, I will write a program that will convert a larger memory-image file ( such as the one produced by Pasmo ) into a /CMD file.

The source and EXE files for readcmd can be found here, along with the source and /CMD file for the fill program.

http://www.mailsend-online.com/wp/readcmd.zip

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Unless otherwise noted, all code and text entries are Copyright © 2009 by James K. Lawless

My first computer was a second-hand TRS-80 Model I with 16K of RAM and a cassette-recorder for auxiliary storage. I was 17 years old when I received this computer in the Fall of 1982. My goal? Like many kids my age at the time, I had intended to write a video game or two and live happily on the riches that would befall me.

The computer was purchased at an auction and came with a fair amount of books on BASIC including many that just contained BASIC games.

My eldest brother had his own TRS-80, so he let me borrow from his vast library of 80 Micro magazines as well.

My first task was to really try to learn BASIC. I did so by typing in programs from the books and by trying to write my own. I had been familiar with BASIC for a couple of years, but only some of the more simple aspects. I had known that if I wanted to write games, I was going to have to code using some mysterious black art known as machine-language. All of the good games from Big Five seemed to be written in machine-language.

As I kept poring through the backlog of issues of 80 Micro, I learned how to use little machine-language subroutines via the USR() function. In order to execute machine-language from BASIC, you had to first reserve some space at the top of BASIC at the MEMORY SIZE? when the computer powered up. ( Note: there are ways of getting around this that I’ll explain in a future post. ) After that, you had to POKE your machine-language routine into reserved memory a byte at a time. Authors usually placed these bytes in a series of DATA statements and used the READ command to read each one in a loop.

After the subroutine was placed in memory, the last task was to point the USR() function to the routine. The address of the routine had to be broken down into two bytes, the least-significant-byte first. I began to grow comfortable with the conversion routine … dividing by 256 to get the high-byte and taking the remainder to get the low-byte.

I also became very comfortable with hexadecimal notation and conversion to and from decimal notation. The only thing I was really lacking at this point, was learning machine-language itself.

I began reading Hardin Brothers’ 80 Micro column The Next Step. This column was a tutorial on machine-language in a sort of cookbook approach. Brothers would present some sort of a short program in assembly-language ( the human-readable syntax that is then assembled into machine-language. )

Most of his programs were very compact and were wonderful to study. He would present the assembly listing for the machine-language routine complete with hex codes by each mnemonic. I found that by converting those hex codes to decimal, I would see the same numbers in the DATA statements for the BASIC loader for the particular routine.

This revelation enabled me to tinker a little with some of the subroutines presented.

One of the machine-language subroutines that was presented in the Radio Shack Level II BASIC manual was a simple routine that would fill the screen with white space. This was done by storing a character with the ASCII code 191 at each location in the machine’s video memory ( located at locations 15360 to 16383 inclusively. )

To see what the program was doing, the BASIC equivalent was easy enough to understand:

As the program ran, each character position on the screen would fill with a white block:

The equivlent assembly language program usually looked something like this:

    ORG     0H
    LD      HL,3C00H ; 15360 in hex
    LD      A, 191
    LD      [HL],A
    LD      DE,3C01H
    LD      BC,1023
    LDIR
    RET

The first line is the ORiGin directive that tells the assembler ( the program that translates assembly-language to machine-language ) what address we plan on starting at. This little routine is relocatable; it can be placed anywhere in memory because it does not internally depend on addresses within itself.

The major work is performed by a Z-80 instruction called LDIR ( LoaD-Increment-Repeat ). LDIR is a block-memory move command that begins by taking the byte at the address held in the HL register pair and stores it at the address in the DE register pair. Then, it decrements the BC register pair by 1 and if BC is not zero, it will increment HL and DE repeat the load-from-HL / store-at-DE / dec BC operation until BC reaches zero.

This routine uses a trick with overlapping memory locations. Note that HL starts at 3C00H and DE 3C01H. When the second iteration of the LDIR loop commences, the value it reads from 3C01H to store in 3C02H was the same as the one in 3C00H. This trick with the source and destination addresses differing by a byte causes the memory at DE for a length of BC to fill with the first byte specified.

So, this is a quick memory-fill routine.

The assembler’s output of this routine might look like the following:

                ORG 0000
0000:21003C     LD HL, 3C00
0003:3EBF       LD A, BF
0005:77         LD (HL), A
0006:11013C     LD DE, 3C01
0009:01FF03     LD BC, 03FF
000C:EDB0       LDIR
000E:C9         RET

The hex digits to the left of each instruction comprise the instruction and its operands (if any). Note the line LD A, BF. This is the line that loads a character 191 into the A register. I found that I could poke any character I wanted into byte number five of this routine and could fill the screen with that value.

I was slowly making headway to learning assembly language itself as I was beginning to understand that the output of the assembler program was ultimately a binary with a bunch of bytes that the Z-80 processor understood.

As I continued to study examples in 80 Micro, I showed some of these programs to my brother. He brought over a couple of items that he’d gotten at a clearance sale at Radio Shack: The Radio Shack Editor/Assembler on cassette and William Barden Jr’s book “TRS-80 Assembly Language Programming.”

I tried to leap into the middle of the book as I had done when learning BASIC, but failed miserably. I started anew and took it step by step. I finally started getting somewhere.

It took a while, but I was able to separate the pseudo-operation command from the actual Z-80 commands and began to make my own subroutines. I also began to use tricks with the cassette load-module format that I had seen some video games use. I figured out how to auto-start a program ( no need to type in a slash at the SYSTEM prompt), scroll the contents of the screen and blur the video in a manner similar to the effects that began the game Attack Force. I also figured out how to load a message immediately on the screen and that the asterisk that normally flashed during a casette load could be replaced with a character 191 for a more graphical effect.

By the Summer of 1983, my goal was to finally write this game. Alas, I knew nothing about software design. I would design fragments, but I was used to just sloppily coding something together and cajoling it to work. I really didn’t have a game idea. I was just working on different effects and animations and was trying to stitch them together into a game.

Unfortunately, my cassette recorder ( like many ) was unreliable when saving / loading my games. The EDTASM program required one to assemble to cassette, then reload to test. This process took forever. I had found a way to put my program at a high-enough spot in memory that I luckily found a re-entry point for EDTASM, so that once my code was tested, I didn’t have to reload EDTASM … I just entered SYSTEM and then an address ( that now escapes me ) that would leave me back at EDTASM’s ‘*’ prompt with my source-code intact.

I spent many late summer nights working on that code while my TV was affixed on a then-independent cable channel from Kansas City. I coded while listening to the audio for The Three Stooges followed by a mix of Get Smart, Hogan’s Heroes, and similar syndicated television shows from the 1970’s.

As I toiled away, the TRS-80 video games market crashed. New computers were becoming popular as was the Atari 2600 video game console system. If I had finished a game and had tried to market it through Big Five Software ( see http://www.bigfivesoftware.com), chances are they wouldn’t have taken it. Nor would any big-league publisher likely have taken on any new games for the TRS-80.

However, I didn’t finish a game. The slow development cycle and the inability to save reliably ultimately left me no choice but to move on. I had looked at getting an expansion interface so that I could then buy a disk drive and a Disk Operating System to minimize my turnaround time, but those options were costly. More attractive computers with color video and relatively inexpensive disk drive options started to take over the landscape.

Using my knowledge of Z-80 assembly-language, I taught myself 6502 assembly-language on one of the Apple ][’s at school. In the Summer of 1984, I bought a Commodore 64 and 1541 disk drive. My days of hacking the TRS-80 were over.

…almost.

I amassed quite a bit of knowledge in a very short amount of time about that little computer. I had wanted to publish some of the more esoteric things I’d found in a magazine like 80 Micro, but I never did. I have some TRS-80 emulators and am planning on revisiting some of these subjects on this blog in the near future.

Oh, by the way … if you wish to email me nowadays, you can reach me at:

jim@trs-80.com

How cool is that?

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Unless otherwise noted, all code and text entries are Copyright © 2009 by James K. Lawless

Dreadfully sorry about the lateness of this post.

I chose verbosity because it is obviously a namsake to this blog.  Not a particularly obscure word, it means the use of more words than necessary. It is, however, a great example of how you can have a literal understanding of a word but entirely miss the semantic one.  The dictionary makes the connotation of verbosity clear: it is a negative phrase.  As a child, however (and well into young adulthood),  I saw it as a compliment.  Someone who was verbose was someone who spoke in great detail with discriptive language to provide the listener with a complete picture.  Where did this mistake come from? When I was young, my favorite form of entertainment was text adventures on the TRS-80.  The most famous of this was, of course Zork.  When you reentered a room, the computer would only repeat the name and mutable information (e.g. whether or not a door is open).  A careful player though needed to reread information over and over again, making sure nothing was missed.  By typing “verbose” you would be given a full description each time you came back to the room.  One of the most important commands in the game, verbose carried only the best of connotations to me.

The original name for this blog was supposed to be eDiction, but the word was already taken.  It is a rather weak word blog that never has not been updated since its original nine entries ending in May, but it is easy to lose a good name to a weak blog when they don’t cost a thing.  Instead, I chose eVerbosity.  The name was free, but after I thought of the title, I did notice that someone else had coined the phrase before.  A google search brought me to a review on Yelp by Jon “Motor Mouth” B.  EVerbosity to him is using more words than necessary online.

The title of this post is the first “output” I had to program way back in highschool on a TRS-80 Model 1 in BASIC (yes, folks, BASIC for DOS – can’t remember the DOS version, but it pre-dates the 6.21 & 6.22 for sure). It was the stuttttteeeeerrrrriiiiinnnngggg keyboard model if any of you out there can remember that one.

Just wanted you to know I’m still alive and haven’t dropped off the face of the earth. Just have had a whole bunch of summer things going on and gearing up for some new events on the horizon. Hopefully I can write some more things in another week.

Signing off. STOP End of Program // 99 and so on.

Oh, and by the way, later, to quote Geico, “So easy a caveman can do it” would have been what I said looking back on that first step in programming.

I’ve been interested in computers since I watched them on Star Trek reruns when I was a kid.  Back then in the 1970’s, computers weren’t exactly interactive.  I remember when my friend Greg got a program called ELIZA for his TRS-80.  It was an early attempt at artificial intelligence.  Mathematician Alan Turing tried to answer the question whether or not a computer might be considered intelligent.  He came up with the “Turing Test”.  Basically, if you could talk to a computer and didn’t realize it was a computer, the computer would be considered intelligent.

Greg and I could type in statements in English and ELIZA would respond back in English.  While that was a novelty (generally all typing on the TRS-80 was in BASIC), the actual conversations with ELIZA sound more interesting than they really were.  The original ELIZA program was written in 1966, the same year Star Trek debuted on television.  The TRS-80 version of ELIZA struggled to make conversation from whatever words could fit into 4,000 bytes of memory.  Pretty much anything we typed in was answered with something like “That’s interesting, please go on.” or “Why do you say that?”  It was like having a conversation with a Magic 8-Ball.

Surprisingly, the concept behind ELIZA – having a large pre-programmed list of words and phrases – is still in use in artificial intelligence programs today.  The major difference is speed and scale.  Even a basic system today can hold a million times as much data and access it in nanoseconds.  I was curious to see how these new artificial intelligences matched up against old ELIZA.  I found a few so-called “chatterbots” online.  They all seem to work the same way.  A chat window is available on the page.  You type in English and it answers in English.

The first one I tried – Yeti – was pretty bad.  Everything it answered with was all in caps, so it seemed like it was shouting random things at me.  I guess it could have passed for human if the person was seriously deranged. I had a better time with Jabberwacky.  I managed to talk back and forth with it a half dozen times before things started to get a little… off.

JABBERWACKY: London is my favorite place in the world.
ME: Why?
JABBERWACKY: My friends don’t like me. 

I lost my connection to Jabberwacky shortly after that.  I hope it didn’t do anything rash.

After talking to machines that were obviously machines, I thought I’d try an actual Turing Test.  I was supposed to have a chat for five minutes.  Sometimes the site connects to actual people, other folks talking the Turing Test.  And sometimes it connects to a machine.  My chat partner was named “Landru”.  We had a very pleasant chat for about a minute and a half before he froze.

Apparently Meka was right.  I watched too much Star Trek as a kid.  Like Captain Kirk in so many episodes, I am able to bring a machine to its metaphorical knees just by having a discussion with it.  So, note to NASA: if Pioneer 11 shows up again, rebuilt as a planet killing death machine, give me a call.  I should be able to take care of it in a jiffy.

My friend Greg was the first person I knew who owned a computer.  We spent many hours after school working on his TRS-80 Model I from Radio Shack.  We played games, we connected to Bulletin Board Systems via his modem, we wrote programs in BASIC.  In the spring of 1981, he got a music synthesis package called Orchestra-80.  It consisted of a little hardware device that attached to the back of the CPU and a cassette tape of software that allowed us to enter musical notes.

We had used a simpler program called Micro Music.  It allowed you to enter musical notes by name (A, B, C) and note length (quarter notes were 4’s, half notes were 2’s).  So, Mary Had a Little Lamb looked something like this in Micro Music:

That had been pretty cool… in 1978.  It sounded like someone plunking out the melody on a piano with a single finger.  Orchestra-80 had four “voices” that could play notes simultaneously.  This allowed us to not only play the tune, but the chords as well.  However, more abilities meant more work for us.  Notes were converted to numbers based on how close they were to Middle C (which was zero), whether they were sharp (+) or flat (-), and how long the note should be played (like Micro Music, quarter notes were 4’s).

It wasn’t enough to just type in long strings of note information.  With four voices going simultaneously, it was easy to get out of sync with a single mistake.  Like real music, Orchestra-80 split a song into discrete “measures” that only contained a small number of notes, rests and voice information.

The beginning of the song contained information relevant to all the measures: clef, key signature, tempo, what instrument each voice was playing the notes on.  Greg and I spent a lot of time entering a single song – Maxwell’s Silver Hammer by the Beatles – into Orchestra-80.  We had to translate the musical notes on the page to the numbers the application would understand.  We had to come up with a way to write out the chords so they would simulate a beat.  Finally, as we started playing the song back, we had to make corrections to the music from typos and actual goofs in the music book where they had one note, but we heard a different one played on Abbey Road.  We debuted it in our music class at school that fall.

The syntax of the Orchestra-80 software was based on the MUSIC programming languages developed in the fifties and sixties.  When we were typing in songs, we were actually writing a program that would be compiled into music.  I haven’t typed a song into Orchestra-80 in twenty years, but the idea of breaking up a large “song” into smaller pieces – measure, voice, note – is something that resonates with me when I write programs today.  Almost all programming languages are “object oriented”; they split a complex program into smaller, manageable chunks.  When any programmer finishes their latest “killer application” and they run through it successfully for the first time… no matter how dominant their logical right brain might be, it’s literally music to their ears.

And so it starts.

Not just the journey into the realm of Apple computers, but into another WordPress blog. The idea to chronicle my sojourn with Apple came to me shortly after I had posted an entry into my dSLR blog about the purchase of said Apple computer. “If I’m blogging about my photography journey, why not blog about a whole new way of computing?” thought I. Why not indeed? And so I came to the conclusion that it seemed like both a reasonable and interesting thing to do.

So here we are…..but now what? I think that with this first blog entry I should offer some history as to how I came to find myself at this place in time. Moving to Mac is, for me, a monumental step in a different and possibly exciting direction, but context is necessary. Or so I think. And since it’s my blog what I think rules! Into the abyss, shall we?

Let us go way back in time, shall we? Way back to when personal computing really didn’t exist. To a time when a computer at home was one that was built from a kit (like Heathkit). I remember seeing these things advertised starting way back in 1977, but I never knew anyone who owned one. But I, like some of my friends, were very interested in computers and computing. I think some of us were prescient enough to recognize the potential of not just computing, but home computing in particular. However, my interest could go nowhere other into the realm of dreams as my family had neither the money to acquire this sort of stuff nor the technical skill required to build such.

Jump forward to my junior year of high school (1981-1982) and my how the world had changed in just a few short years! Home computers had moved from kits you assembled to complete packages, but they were still rather crude and most anybody in America couldn’t come up with a single reason why they needed one, so they remained relatively obscure. Yet, my particular high school was lucky enough to have in its possession a variety of computer equipment and classes to go with it. The school owned an IBM 026 card punch machine (or was it two?), an IBM 129 card punch/verifier machine (or was it two?) as well as, and this is the greatest part, a Tandy/Radio Shack TRS-80 Model II computer!

In that junior year of college I took both of the computer-related courses the school offered. One class was geared towards the history and future of computing (lots of text reading, note-taking, dates and names to remember – very unexciting), while the other was a hands on course, whereby we learned how to use the punch card machines (with practice sets and such) as well as learning how to use the Disk Operating System (DOS) of the TRS-80 Model II along with about the only software we had for the Model II; some word processing application. The school year proved to be very exciting in that at some point the computer in Tallahassee, Florida, where our grades were processed and printed, died and it meant our grades would not be tabulated, printed and mailed for some weeks. The instructor for these classes volunteered the hands-on class students to process the student’s grades via the punch card machines. We actually took the handwritten records presented by the schools teachers and input them to punch card templates, then verified the punched cards, processed them and then forwarded that information to Tallahassee where they were able to do the actual printing of report cards. It was a great task and a great learning experience and while punching cards is not exciting work, it was one of the best things I ever did in high school.

My senior year presented me with no more courses to take, but did allow me to become a teacher’s aid and so I put in my name for such so that I could be an aid to the instructor taking over these two courses for the 1982-1983 school year (the teacher who had taught me left to teach at a local community college). Having finished both courses with A’s and showing quite an aptitude for the work I was immediately selected for the aid position. This was another great moment for me and allowed me to grow even more within the computing environment.

Again, my school was very lucky in that with the commencement of the 1982-1983 school year the school had purchased and was receiving a bunch of the brand new Tandy/Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III computers. I don’t recall the exact number, but it was somewhere around 40. When the gentlemen from Radio Shack arrived to deliver and install these computers, I, as the teacher’s aid, was tasked with giving them any and all help they needed and to soak in as much information I could so that I might be as of much help as possible to the new teacher. I spent the next three weeks or so helping the two gentlemen un-box, set-up, connect, wire, turn-on, test, etc. these new machines as well as help install a printer hub device that would allow each computer to print to a single networked printer. (this was really cool, but so rudimentary compared to today’s networks – a person had to physically operate the hub – whenever a student needed to print the hub had to have a dial turned to a number that indicated what station was the computer requesting to print before the station could actually send the document to be printed)

The truly special thing about this entire experience was the lead guy from Radio Shack. When all was said and done and he was around for a few days to answer questions for the teacher, he pulled me aside and said to me how much he had enjoyed working with me over the past few weeks. He further explained that he thought I had what it would take to work for Radio Shack in their computer division. He believed that I could be a salesperson or set-up technician or both if I wanted to do such. We actually spoke about this off and on during the course of the school year, but in the end I decided that it wasn’t the direction in which I wished to go. Good thing too seeing how short-lived was the computer division of Radio Shack after the Model III. Regardless, the gentleman was really quite kind and I appreciated that he saw something in me that I didn’t see myself.

After graduating high school I began working for a local bank’s computer operations center. Making decent money my mind turned towards purchasing a computer so that I could tinker, if you will, with what I had learned over time. There was actually a local Kaypro dealer and I regularly visited them in hopes of getting up enough nerve to commit to spending what was a princely sum of money at that time (maybe $1,500?). Alas, my better judgment was to not make the purchase (entirely for fiscal reasons) and I moped about my decision for many, many months. And if you ask why I would have purchased the Kaypro over the Osbourne 1 it is quite simple: (1) 9-inch screen versus a 5-inch screen AND the metal case of the Kaypro was just begging to be painted something cool!

In junior college I took all the computer-related courses I could get my hands upon (and enjoyed seeing my old junior year instructor again!) and seriously considered a career in computing. However, something bad occurred on the way to this dream. When I visited the guidance counseling office my counselor pointed out that so many students were going into the world of computers, software, etc. that it would likely create such a glut of graduates I would find it both difficult to find work and that wages would be pushed downward. Regardless of how much I enjoyed what I was doing I heeded their advice and abandoned this direction. Needless to say, the counselor couldn’t have been more wrong as there was explosive growth in the computing world and graduating students were making money hand-over-fist for years and years to come.

There was, after this time period, something of a darkness in my world regarding computers. I withdrew from junior college and wandered fairly aimlessly for some years. However, wherever I worked I almost always had exposure to computers and regularly learned as much as I could and often became the de facto go-to guy for questions about software and such amongst my fellow employees.

My first real exposure to anyone who owned a computer at home was through a girlfriend I dated in the mid 1990’s. Her brother owned a 1993 Apple Color Classic (also released as the Performa 250), but I really didn’t have any appreciable exposure to it other than he thought it was the total bomb. Not too much later, my best friend, George, acquired a computer from his father. George was off to university and his father, having loads of dough, thought his son could make use of these wonderful machines during George’s matriculations. And he was right. George did make good use of the computer, but to be frank we never did anything with it. It wasn’t like today when folks play games, get on the Internet, e-mail, IM, etc. It was really a tool for school. For writing papers mostly I imagine (and maybe some game play). Jump forward just a bit further and my other best friend, Tad, also left for school and his parents acquired for him a desktop computer. Still long before the Internet and e-mail, Tad made use of the device for school, but by now computer games had really come into their own. He actually owned and we regularly played (when we visited him at school, which was out of Florida) computer games on his machine; being particularly fond of Atomic’s V for Victory. But still, a computer had not yet entered my domain.

Leaping forward to around 1995 I met the woman who would become my wife. She actually owned a personal computer and because it had a host of problems (no doubt brought about due to a lightning strike) we elected to purchase a new PC together when we started living together. It was some Hewlett Packard model running Windows 3.1. I do not have any particular memories about the machine other than it worked as advertised and we used it mostly for getting onto the burgeoning world of the Internet and for e-mail, which had become more well-known, but was still in its infancy in so many ways.

In or around 1999 we replaced our first HP with a second HP computer with Windows 98. This computer also stands out for nothing in particular, which is probably a good thing when you get down to it. Not standing out in my mind means that it didn’t do anything stupid or otherwise untoward. I think these are positive qualities in a computer when you get right down to it. A computer should be a means to an end and not get in the way. It was with this computer that we started to find more and more uses for a home PC. We used it for all our letter writing. For lots of e-mail. For plenty of Internet access (even at dial-up speeds it was still a brave new world). And for school. In 2000 I returned to university to work towards obtaining a degree in accounting, which I finished in December of 2004. During my time back at school the computer became an indispensable tool; a requirement actually. There were required courses in computer-related areas and there was such a need for one we purchased our first laptop: a HP zt1130 (very basic, but it was all I needed and all we could afford, but it was a trooper and a most excellent laptop, which we still own, but do not use).

Wow. I just realized how much I have been typing. To be frank, I really haven’t ever given much thought to my long history with computers and computing-related issues. And I’ve left out a bunch of stuff (if you can imagine such) that could further expand this entry, but I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to jump into the more recent history, which helped bring me to where I am today: a new iMac owner. So please hang on for a bit longer….

Around the end of 2003 my wife and I began to think that it was time to update (i.e. replace) our then-current HP desktop PC. We now had two digital cameras as well as a Sony MiniDV camcorder and the HP just wasn’t quite up to spec to work with these devices and the files they create. We began our search at Best Buy and with Hewlett Packard. And why not? We had, by this time, owned three HP computers (plus two HP printers) and they had all performed just fine for us. And this includes the various versions of Windows operating systems which had been installed upon those machines. We really had no reason to consider doing anything other than another HP desktop PC and so the window shopping, comparing and contrasting began.

However, by this time I had also become rather aware of the home-built desktop PC market. I really didn’t know much about it, but I knew that there were folks out there building their own home computers. Successfully. Reliably. But I wasn’t anywhere near considering this route. After all, in my mind folks still had to solder together motherboards and hand-craft RAM….or so I thought. About the same time as all this shopping, my sister had been married to a nice young man who was very computer literate. So much so that he had been building his own home PCs for some years. When I was discussing my issues and concerns in trying to find the right HP model he suggested I build. “But I don’t know anything about it,” I replied. However, he assured me that it really wasn’t that difficult. He talked to me at length regarding how to go about this endeavor. He suggested some web sites for me to read and suggested I try putting together a PC of my own by selecting the components through some online retailers and that he would look over my choices to make certain they were compatible. And this I did.

I had a budget for the replacement PC and I used this budget to assign my priorities. I read the recommended web sites. I carefully culled the components that I thought would be both compatible with each other as well as meeting my needs and expectations. I shared my selections with my brother-in-law and upon his approval I placed my order. Once all the components arrived I drove over to my sister and brother-in-law’s home and together we assembled my new PC on a lovely Saturday afternoon. The actual assembly of the PC took maybe two hours, which surprised me as I had anticipated it taking much longer. It was, however, the installation of the OS (Windows XP Pro) and other software/drivers that took the rest of the afternoon. But this was, of course, a good time to enjoy some libations!

Let me say this about my home-built PC: it was an incredibly rewarding process. Not only had I done something I would have never considered doing on my own, but I was now so much more aware of what goes into a computer as well as how they work. This home-built PC has been fantastic. We’ve had zero problems with it. It only has loaded onto it software that I want as opposed to what a manufacturer might wish to install. It’s been a wonderful device to own. Really. I can’t say enough good things about having built my own PC. I think everyone should do it. I was so excited and happy with the results that I offered to build one for my parents as well and they still have and use it daily as we do ours.

And so we now jump forward to today. Or, to be more accurate, we jump to November 2008. My home-built desktop PC would be celebrating its fifth birthday in January 2009 and we have long held a belief that computers have to be replaced at regular intervals so that we can take advantage of new software and features that come along, which are more taxing on a computer’s hardware. The interval that has worked for us thus far is five years and this date was quickly looming. As I saw things I had one of four options: build again, buy from a big name (HP, Sony, Dell, etc.), buy from a custom builder (Puget Systems being my choice), or go Mac.

My foray into dSLR photography has had a very real impact on the need for us to update our computing power. If it weren’t for this hobby I think we could have put off this purchase for another year. Maybe two. Upgrading the current desktop to new and larger hard drives along with another stick of 1GB RAM would have been more than sufficient for 99% of our needs. But more powerful photo and video editing software really drags our current desktop PC to a screeching halt; sometimes crashing the poor rig. But as long as I’m involved in both photography and video (and hopefully high def video late this year/early 2010) the current desktop wouldn’t suffice.

And so I began the process of determining which of my options I would take. Honestly…..I really thought that I would wind up buying a custom-made rig from Puget Systems. I could build again, but I saw what I thought was the smart choice of paying a bit more to have someone else do it and offer a warranty (and a long warranty at that!). I’m certain a home-built machine would have been fine, but there is the advantage these custom builders have in that they see, over time, how well the components they use work together, which is something I could not do. But there was a fly in this ointment: Windows Vista.

In December 2007 I purchased a mid-level HP laptop for my tiny home business. I had no choice and took the laptop with Windows Vista Home Premium. I really did not want Vista. It had received so much bad press during the year-plus it had been out, that I was in no mood to deal with it. But my choices were thin. I could have obtained a Dell or IBM laptop with XP installed, but they were out of my price range. So Vista it was. During those first few months of Vista ownership I could be found thinking to myself “You know…Vista isn’t too bad. I don’t know what all the bad press was about.” But after the first few months of ownership things started to change. I began to encounter more and more problems with the laptop (which doesn’t have much loaded on it anyway – it’s pretty stripped down software-wise) and in most every case I was able to eliminate both the hardware and/or other software as the culprit. It was, time and time again, Vista. And as my first year of Vista use came to a close I was quite certain that I did not want Vista on a new desktop PC. I would pay the extra bucks to have XP installed and when Windows 7 came out I would then determine the desirability of upgrading. (as an aside, the press has been very positive thus far regarding Windows 7 and I truly hope that Microsoft has a winner on its hands as XP was good, but not great, and Vista has been an unmitigated disaster for them….and for most of us using it)

So, there I sat, staring at the specs of a machine I had built via the Puget Systems web site, and I was satisfied. But there remained this niggling sense of doubt. This feeling that I could do…..better, if “better” is the right word (and I’m not certain it is). This sense that I needed to try something new instead of once again putting all my eggs into the Microsoft basket. And so I began looking at Macs.

The Mac Mini was my first choice. This may seem strange considering that it really is nothing more than a laptop in a small, but elegant box. But it seems awfully pricey at $599 and $799. No keyboard. No mouse. No display. Okay, keyboard and mouse: $60. Monitor? No problem….I could attach it to my current 20-inch Viewsonic monitor and use the monitor for both my desktop PC as well as the Mini. But there remained one killer to the whole deal: the 64MB of onboard video. As I would like to go with high-def video in the not too distant future I didn’t see 64MB of shared video as appropriate. Not at all. And so my interest in the Mini quickly disappeared. Next up was the iMac. I’ve never been fond of Apple’s all-in-one philosophy on their desktop counterpart. Granted, the iMac line is very beautiful to behold; elegant. But it never felt right to purchase an all-in-one and I really don’t know why, other than that I’m so accustomed to the whole separate tower and monitor set-up. There probably isn’t any real reason for me to dislike it other than it is outside of my sphere of experience.

As I’m doing the whole photography and video thing it was clear that I should be looking only at the 24-inch varieties of the iMac. But wow. The prices really were hard to swallow. I know there is a premium for Apple equipment (for a variety of reasons: elegant and thoughtful design, Mac OS, the additional software that comes loaded, etc.), but it is a bit hard to handle when one looks at the price tags. But as I read more and more about them and considered what I was getting with my Puget Systems customized rig I quickly realized that there wasn’t that much of a difference in price. But there was one thing holding me back at that time: the iMac line hadn’t been updated in some time and rumors were rife that an update was coming. If Apple remained true to their history it was most likely that they would update the specs of the machines while holding prices steady. So I opted to wait. I didn’t need the new machine right away and why purchase a current rig at the end of its life cycle? I mean, other than trying to get a deal on it, but Apple keeps supplies pretty tight in advance of a new replacement, as such I wasn’t certain I could really get that great a deal on an out-going model anyway.

And so it came to be. On 3 March (if memory serves) Apple announced a whole slew of updates to their computer line. New Minis. New iMacs. New Power Mac. But Apple had done something different this time. While the new lines were introduced with little fanfare they were not only updated on specs, but at lower pricing for the entry level iMac. Mind you, the entry level iMac, while a competent machine, wasn’t going to serve my needs. One quickly learns that purchasing entry level computers only leads to replacing them sooner than one might otherwise. In other words: spending a bit more up front will save you in the long run (at least in my opinion).

The new iMacs were a nice step up from their predecessors, but they were not marked improvements. Sure, they doubled the size of the hard drives (but hard drives are cheap) and they doubled the RAM (which is also cheap, but they did upgrade to DDR3 from DDR2!), but no quad-core option, which was what some in the Mac rumor crowd were suggesting we’d see (at least as a top-of-the-line version). Otherwise it was pretty much the same, but hey: better specs for the same dollars is nothing to sneeze at. And while looking at Apple products online is fine, seeing them in person and asking questions is even better. However, there is no official Apple store where I live (Dayton, Ohio), but there is an authorized Mac reseller who I quickly went to visit.

My trips to MacTown (“Behind the Dayton Mall”) were well spent. I asked all the questions I had and I didn’t leave until I felt I had a more thorough understanding of the iMac and how they work, etc. And let me offer a shout-out to the staff at MacTown, who were always polite and helpful, which, in no small part, helped cement my decision to purchase from them instead of directly from Apple (which would have allowed me to spread out my payments for the Mac over time instead of paying for it all at once).

I’m really not certain where or when the tipping point occurred in regard to this purchase. Having been a life-long Windows user I confess to being slightly weirded out by the addition of an iMac to our household. It is, the OS that is, weirdly familiar, but foreign at the same time. I really wish I could identify the precise moment when I said to myself “I’m going Mac,” but I can’t find it in the recesses of my memory. It just happened. Suddenly I was no longer interested in anything other than the iMac I had settled upon (budget being important I opted for the 2.93GHz middle-of-the-pack model). And just as suddenly I was at MacTown and laying down the dough for an iMac. Maybe, as the next few weeks roll by I will discover what exactly it was that made the decision for me. I mean, there are plenty of reasons why to make the change (no need for anti-virus software, the Mac OS, reliability, its popularity with the photography crowd, etc.), but I really want to know what it was that pushed me over the line and into the arms of Woz and Jobs.

And here we are. Last Saturday night (two days ago) I dropped by MacTown with Amex card in pocket and selected the 24-inch iMac with 2.93GHz dual-core processor along with a copy of iWorks and the AppleCare extended warranty (three years – hell yeah!). I drove home, feeling slightly nervous and queasy (because I had (1) just spent a buttload of money – the sort we normally don’t drop all at once for anything – and (2) I bought a Mac, which still seemed very weird) and upon arrival made room for the new computer on my desk in my small office area for my little home job. I brought up the boxed Mac, opened said box, pulled out the little box with the user’s start-up guide and read through the directions (all what? 8 or 10 pages?) and then followed the directions.

Funny….it actually took me longer to take off the protective plastics and anti-static cover than it did to plug it in and turn it on. I mean really….all that was involved was to remove the protective coverings, install the power cord, plug in the keyboard, then mouse and turn it on. It found our wireless network without any intervention from me (granted, we don’t have it running with any security options because they are not necessary where we live) and quickly sped me through the registration and set-up process. From clearing off the desk to downloading Firefox (sorry Safari) maybe 30-minutes had passed. I was impressed already.

I was also rather intimidated.

On the display counter at MacTown the 24-inch models didn’t look particularly large. But once I had it home, out of the box and on the desk, it suddenly loomed over me and the rest of the room. It seemed massive, but still delicate. The screen truly overwhelms the rest of the device so it appears huge, but weightless at the same time.

But what are my impressions thus far, right? What do I think from my five or six hours of playing around with it? Well, I’ll tell you:

It’s gorgeous. It’s very quiet (except for when the DVD drive first engages). The built-in microphone looks more like a spot on the frame than a microphone. I don’t like the Mighty Mouse (but I don’t like mice in general and have been using trackballs for probably 10 years or more). The packaging is nice, but I find it bit funny that they boldly display “Designed in California”, while not bothering to boldly announce that everything is made in China. It has been, thus far, pretty easy to navigate around and find things. When you put it to sleep it goes right to sleep and when you wake it up it wakes up right away (my laptop with Vista constantly struggles to do either appropriately).

But it’s not all sunshine and bunnies.

As I already stated, I very much dislike the Mighty Mouse. The method by which one actually completely closes a running application is a bit more convoluted when compared to Windows (at least in my opinion and since this is my blog it is my opinion that counts). The stand could use more in the way of non-skid pads on the bottom. I think there could be a bit more resistance built into the tilting mechanism (it works very smoothly, but feels like it is too loose and could fail to hold the body in place in the future, but I don’t know that this would ever occur). And why o’ why does Finder remain up all the time and light with a light in the doc? One or the other would be fine, but both seems needless.

As you can see, my complaints are really pretty insignificant in the great scheme of things. I’m already looking into a trackball option for the Mac and I could always purchase a few non-skid pads from the local hardware store if I really wished.

I do have one final complaint issue, but it is not related to the computer itself. As MacTown is closed on Sundays I had to resort to contacting Apple tech support for a quick question, which was actually about my AppleCare plan and not any question I had about the computer or software. While speaking with folks about the AppleCare plan it was made known to me that the technicians to whom I would speak would be Americans, thus letting me know that AppleCare was not outsourced to folks in countries where English was not their first language. This was very satisfying to know and you would feel the same way if you have ever had to deal with technician who not only speaks English as a second language, but also comes with a heavy accent. (Let me make this perfectly clear: I have no problem with folks living in other countries, having their own languages and cultures. I don’t speak a second language and it’s amazing how well these folks are trained in speaking English. But none of this changes the fact that they can be difficult to understand and this isn’t good considering the importance of the information one is trying to obtain from them. Something as important as tech support really should be coming from within the United States as far as I’m concerned and shame on U.S. companies for not doing such.) However, when I was on the phone with Apple tech support the person to whom I was speaking definitely had a heavy Indian (continent) accent and I had some difficulty understanding her. I don’t know if this means that I was given inaccurate information or if the U.S. tech support facility hires employees who do not speak English as their first language, but whatever the reason, I wasn’t particularly thrilled. But we’ll see how that goes in the future as well.

And here we now are….at the end of this opening tome. I’m so very sorry that this opening blog entry is so incredibly long and winding, but I confess to enjoying blogging. And typing. And telling a story, regardless of how boring it may be for you. But I felt it important, if for no one else but myself, to get out there the history I have experienced in the world of computing and how all these various roads have led me to this point: the owner of a Vista-driven laptop; a XP Pro-driven, home-built, desktop PC; and a brand spanking new iMac from Apple. Never mind that I’m not really certain how I’m now with a Mac, but getting this all out of my head may help illuminate the matter as the next few days pass.

Hope you have enjoyed the ride just a little bit and come back for updates as they appear, which should be regular and frequent.

My house can be compared to a computer graveyard.  Over the years I’ve owned a number of PC compatible machines.  While I’ve stripped most of them for usable parts: RAM, hard drives and so on, I do have a couple of complete machines.  I kept my first PC – a 486 SX – less for nostalgia and more for money.  It cost me $2,500 back in the day.  All of my other computers put together didn’t cost me that much.  I can’t just let it go.

I have my first computer – a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III – set up in my office closet (yes, I’m a closet TRS-80 user).  My second computer – a Color Computer 2 – is down in the basement on a shelf in its original box.  I also have two old laptops.  I kept my laptop running Windows 95 because it is the only machine that will run certain apps.  And I have my TRS-80 Model 100 on a prominent place on my bookshelf along with my TRS-80 related books.  They’re all about the same size; it appeals to my technical feng shui.

All of these machines could probably be emulated by my current home computer.  I have a number of virtual machines I use for work development.  Supposedly, you can load up other operating systems besides Windows: Linux and even DOS.  Virtual TRS-80’s are available on the Internet in many flavors from the original Model I through the early Tandy machines that I sold when I worked at Radio Shack.

I can understand the appeal and – eventually when the hardware finally dies – I might go that route.  However, emulation only goes so far.  I can run the programs; I can see a (similar) interface on the screen.  But it lacks the true input and output and what made the machines themselves important or intriguing.  My TRS-80, for example, had its own key for the [@] symbol (ironically, this was before e-mail addresses had “@” in them).  While they may be able to run programs, they wouldn’t be able to run them off the original floppy disks or the cassettes that I have.  There is no cartridge interface available for the emulated Color Computer.

Ultimately I feel there is still room for growth when the original hardware still exists.  A quarter century on, there is new and exciting hardware being developed for the TRS-80 Model 100.  Without the special characteristics, the quirkiness and – yes – the limitations of the hardware, there would be no need for this kind of creativity.  Emulation is – at best – static.

The Obsolete Technology Website  is a great resource for photos, chronological history, and features of computers that kicked off the pc revolution.  These computers bring back a lot of memories and it is hard to believe that most of them are only 4k-128k in memory while the memory card in my cellphone is 8,000,000,000k (8 gig).

I owned the Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer (that my parents bought me as a Christmas present) which provided hours and hours of fun and learning even though really all it could do is play chess and write BASIC programs.  I think I had a couple other games as well.   The computer attached to a cassette player to save programs on tape.  I wish I still had that thing.

Check out the web site to see what you used to have.

J’ai reçu, il y a quelques temps déjà, deux versions de VISICALC, les versions ATARI 8 BIT et Apple II.

C’est la première KILLER APPLICATION et aussi le 1er tableur de l’histoire de l’informatique… La version d’origine est celle sortie sur l’Apple II, puis elle fut portée sur Commodore PET, Atari 8 BIT, IBM PC, TRS 80 et bien d’autres machines. Bien sur cette très bonne idée a été rapidement copiée. SuperCalc, puis LOTUS 1-2-3, Multiplan, AppleWorks, Excel…. Ce logiciel révolutionnaire pour l’époque a été développé par Dan Bricklin et Bob Frankston.

Bob Frankston et Dan Bricklin

Ce logiciel était le rêve pour tout comptable ! Il a permis à APPLE de vendre des milliers de micro-ordinateurs rien que pour son utilisation. Ce fut donc bien une Killer Application !

Visicalc / Apple II

Dan Bricklin’s Web Site

la section Visicalc du site

Début janvier sera mis en ligne un article complet sur VISICALC, un logiciel qui mérite qu’on explore un peu plus son histoire.

It has been a few days since I have posted anything. I have just been too tired in the evening, mainly due to the lamotrigine I ingest, as well as my desire to play some Call of Duty or Company of Heroes. Hell, I even logged in to Second Life, but what few friends I had are pretty much gone. It’s a terribly boring game I’ll probably leave when my subscription is up.

The dreams are still there. Hey Cathy, you made one of my dreams. Not a main character or guest star. Not even a cameo. More like an uncredited appearance. But, it was you. Nothing funky or sexual, just there. Oh well.

I have really grown tired of the dreams. My mind shouldn’t work that hard when I am resting. I think I will try to quash them with a big ol tub of Margaritas I have chilled. We’ll see how that goes.

The boy is growing up. He has hit those terrible twos, so he pretty much as bi-polar as I am, just I didn’t throw a fuss when it was bath time.

Those who know me and know Chel really well, all 2 of you it seems, know that we haven’t been active in any extracurricular activities. Not sailing or the other. We have definitely hit the doldrums as a couple. We do stuff with Nikolai, but as far as our relationship goes, it’s pretty much idle.

I was thinking about a response I made to Cathy’s blog about how irritating it is for a woman (or girl of any age during any timeframe or point in my life) to blurt out when I first meet them that “I AM MARRIED”. What is even worse are women who can’t shut up about their husbands. I don’t give a rat’s ass that you are married. I don’t. I am not gonna throw down with you. Why does it bother me so?:

·        I don’t tell you something about my life when I first meet you. Your marriage is your business, not mine.

·        If I want to know, I will ask. Especially if I think I might boink you.

·        When guys meet, they don’t talk about their wives, unless that is an established part of their repertoire.

·        By talking just about your husband and not yourself, you either have deep emotional issues about your shortcomings, you are incredibly dull, or you are afraid of what your husband might do to you if you say anything else.

·        As a currently married man, it wouldn’t matter if I was breaking one vow or two because I’d be breaking them if I do boink you, so the point of you being married is moot.

·        If I weren’t married, and you were, it would be only YOUR issue if I were to boink you (that is a willing boink, and assuming your husband is not a ninja, pirate, or NRA member), so the fact you are married will not prevent me from trying a boink if you seemed receptive to the idea of a boink. No means no, regardless of marriage status.

I believe that women do that because they believe by saying so that men would stop looking at them as sexual object and treat them normally. Sorry, hon, men treat women as sexual objects constantly, married or not. The gentlemen just keep it in their heads.

So, what else irks me? Hmmm:

·        People driving and talking on handset cell phones. You don’t notice how bad a driver you are because you are on that damned thing, because you don’t notice anything! Pull over & talk. No drive & text either…

·        I am paranoid about bad breath. You should be, too.

·        People who can’t use Outlook and its Calendar feature. If you have a meeting at 8:30, DON’T schedule one with me at 8:30 as well! I don’t get to see that you have a meeting conflict. Think, man!

·        People who want to get on the web and try to fire up their dusty old TRS-80 and call me asking why it doesn’t work. Read a magazine, figure out what “modern” means, get a book and get you a decent machine.

·        If I do work for you, and install freeware antivirus/anti-malware software on your machine, don’t take it off. The reason I had to work on your machine was because it had 1,000’s of Trojans and worms on it from all your porn surfing. Those will prevent it. And, since I don’t charge for my services, it pisses me off because I wasted my time.

·        If you say you will meet me somewhere, and you cancel at the last second, and it ain’t no fucking crisis but rather something more sinister, I will be peeved but ok. If you do it twice I will be irate. And you can just go fuck yourself at thrice.

·         If you don’t know what a router is, you don’t need one, so stop asking.

·        I let little old ladies go in front of me in line at the grocery. I do not let people go in front of me because they ride in those store-owned electric fat-ass carts. Too bad.

·        People who still write a check at the grocery. Most likely it will bounce anyways. Forgiveness given to those who have dickwad banks who turn off their ATM cards for no damn reason (TDECU).

·        People at TDECU, especially those in the ATM card department. You are ALL a bunch of idiots, including the vice president. Or terrible liars. Or grossly incompetent. Or a smattering of all three adjectives.

·        People who don’t listen. If you aren’t going to listen, just tell me beforehand and we’ll get along fine.

·        Christians.

·        Muslims

·        Wanna-be other religion followers who do it because it’s not Christian and may get a rise out of someone. Usually Wiccans.

·        Actually, anyone joining one religion just because its NOT another.

·        SL n00bz who are on there to see naked avatars and avs having pixel sex. Um, internet porn is much more entertaining sexually.

·        RTS games. I suck at them. Give me the FPS ones.

·        Commercial airports. The whole experience from beginning to end.

·        People who lie about other people, especially my ass.

·        People who take advantage of me. And not the fun kind of advantage.

·        The fact no one takes the fun kind of advantage of me.

·        Unsalted peanuts.

·        Salted margaritas

·        Bad European beer and the snobs who think beer brewed 6 months ago can taste better than a day old Bud.

·        People who make fun of me drinking Lone Star. Fuck you.

·        People who have done drugs and say they haven’t, and those who say they have but haven’t.

·        Modern pop music. Eww.

·        Poor dancing by anyone of any ethnicity.

·        Guys who pretend to be girls online. The other way doesn’t bother me.

·        Anyone who thought the bailout did the country good or was worth it.

Ok, enough negativity. I might do a picture post next time. Who knows?

L8rs-

Peekbot est un “webtool” dévelopé avec Jonno Downes, une application qui permet de voir le contenu d’images disk pour Apple II, Commodore 64, Atari 8 Bit, et Tandy TRS 80. C’est vraiment très utile et simple d’utilisation. Mais il permet aussi, une fois à l’intérieur de l’image disk, de consulter l’HEX des fichiers, de lire des fichiers textes…

Peekbot

quelques screenshots

plus d’informations sur cette page, avec une marche à suivre pour un test en ligne.

a2central.com

source : forum atariage / a2central

Visitez aussi dsktool

Just seen a short segment on the new, That today is the 25th birthday of the first release of Windows. I’ve never seen Windows 1.0, I have use Windows 2.0 though, that’s really going back a while..

Keep in mind, I got my first computer just over 29 years ago An original TRS-80 model 1 with a whopping huge 16 K or RAM and a 1.78MHz 8080 CPU, software was saved and loaded on it on cassette tapes. The web didn’t exist back then. The internet was limited to government, universities and so on. 300 baud (bit per second) were the standard. printers were expensive loud daisy wheel or dotmatix types. I still have my old TRS-80, and it’s fully operational.

I then went to an Atari 800 and then to my first PC in the mid/late 1980’s, a blazing fast XT 8088 with 512K of ram. And since I’ve built all my own PC’s up to my present 2.4Ghz Pentium 4, running Windows XP pro..

Times have changed…

Peut-être suis-je le seul à y être intéressé, mais j’aime à connaitre le passé des individus quant aux équipements informatiques qu’ils ont utilisés au fil du temps. J’aime à voir l’évolution des choix qu’ils ont posés et les raisons qui ont fait en sorte de les amener à telle ou telle autre technologie. J’ajouterai donc à ce blogue ce que j’appelerai mon passé technologique, un terme qui me plait plus ou moins mais qui fait le travail pour l’instant.

Je vous résume pour l’instant la chose…

1982: TI-99 – Texas Instrument 994A… Premiers pas dans la programmation en Basic, j’ai environ 9 ans, nous achetons le magazine TI et nous programmons nos propres jeux, que nous enregistrons sur cassette audio.

1983: TRS-80 et le Baby CO (MC-10):  Encore de la programmation Basic, un modem de 300 bps, début de la fréquentation des BBS, (Bulletin Board System). Enregistrement sur cassette audio, puis floppy disc, sans compter l’impression sur une imprimante thermique et une autre à marguerite… j’envie ceux qui en possède une à matrice de point…

1986 ou autour: Tandy 1000, qui m’apparait alors comme le bout du monde… pas visionnaire pour un sous le monsieur, on ne faisait que commencer!

1990: MacPlus: Je dois m’acheter une machine capable de produire côté graphisme… j’ai un budget qui tourne autour des 8000.00$ à cette époque, alors que je décide d’abandonner la table à dessin pour produire infographiquement. La guerre est commencée, on me présente, enfin de mémoire, Amiga, IBM avec Corel, et Apple… mon choix s’arrête sur le MacPlus avec une laserwriter II NTX. PageMaker, Freehand, et un scanman de logitech. Je défonce mon budget de 2000$

1991:  Mac discontinue son MacPlus et je passe au LC… J’adore l’arrivée de mon moniteur couleur grand format (!). Mon fil corona sur ma laserwriter me lâche fréquemment.

1993 ou autour: Je fais l’acquisition d’un 486 DXII 66. Si j’avais commencé à surfer un peu depuis la résidence de mon père, avec trumpet comme dialer (merci Michel pour la mémoire des choses), là je surf en 28,8 kbps, la vitesse pure (!).  J’aurais bien du mal à me souvenir de sa configuration, vous me pardonnerez.

Le reste de l’histoire nous mène à ce jour… Où j’ai récemment fais l’acquisition d’un portable Dell Inspiron, d’un HP Pavillon Quad Core, d’un blackberry, d’un Palm pour ma conjointe et autres trucs à synchroniser du genre. Caméra numérique Pentax et près de 1000 watts de son pour les ordis au salon. Voilà…

Today I went on a downtown art gallery jaunt with Julie Solomon of Visionary Media House and on our way to the Cirrus Gallery on Alameda, the Elliot Smith song Alameda got stuck in my head… it remained there for quite a while, I sang it all the way there, while enjoying a delicious Ce fiore raspberry pomegranate fro-yo with mochi, strawberries and granola, and even on the way to a late night drink with Eric Fensler of TRS-80 at The Roost in Atwater Village, where Mr. Smith used to regularly haunt. For some unknown reason, the ghost of Elliot Smith has haunted me today and I’m not complaining…

I’m not much of a computer programmer.  However, every so often, I get the urge to just “play around” and write something… just to see if I still can.  It’s not so much the programming that interests me.  I like to see if I can puzzle things out and maybe learn something new in the process.

So, I was thinking about pi (“π”).  For those who aren’t big on geometry, pi is the ratio of the diameter of a circle to its circumference.  If you have a circle that is one inch across, you will measure a little more than 3 inches around the outside edge.  Depending on how accurate you are, you may get 3.1 inches or even 3.14.  It actually breaks down farther than that.  Pi is a special kind of number; it goes on forever (as far as anyone can tell).  But it never repeats in a pattern unlike – say, 1/3, which is .3 and a trail of threes that goes on endlessly.

There are many ways to figure out pi.  The one I was familiar with from high school math was a series of additions that starts like this:

4/1 – 4/3 + 4/5 – 4/7…

It goes on forever and the ultimate answer (if you could calculate this to 4/infinity) is pi.  I started up the old TRS-80 Model III I keep in my closet (yes, I am a closet TRS-80 user) and wrote a little program.  I kicked it off and quickly had a string of numbers marching up the screen:

4, 2.666666, 3.466666, 2.895238, 3.339682…

It took a moment, but it eventually it locked in 3.1.  However, that next decimal place took quite awhile to settle down.  At first I thought I botched the programming.  However it was only six lines long; there wasn’t much to botch.  My TRS-80 isn’t exactly a powerhouse; it can do about 330 calculations a minute using BASIC, but still…  I got online and took a look around.  What I was using is called the Leibniz Series.  I happen to know the first eleven places of pi are 3.14159265358.  Using the Leibniz Series, my poor TRS-80 would have to labor through something like a hundred billion iterations to approach that level of accuracy!  I found an article on the Chudnovsky brothers who came up with a – shall we say – bit more involved way to calculate pi.  It wasn’t as simple to figure out, but it gave me the first 1,234,567,890 digits of pi in less than four hours.

Gottfried Leibniz was a legendary mathematician who came up with calculus (independent of Isaac Newton) and figured out binary.  He was also a noted philosopher in the 17^th Century and developed what is now known as optimism.  He believed that everything in the universe was done in the best possible way.  With that in mind, I wonder what he would have made of the fact his name is lent to the slowest, most inefficient method of calculating pi?

Long ago, in a world quite different from today’s, I actually lived without a computer in my life. Letters were either written in longhand, or pecked out with two fingers on on some clunky typewriter (I still have an old “daisy wheel” model in the garage. Graphic design was accomplished with a pen and ink, with the help of rub on letters and graphic elements (yes, I created many projects in with my technical pen and Letraset sheets).

The first personal computers fascinated me, but I could find little to do with them, other than play games. I did have a friend who could write some rudimentary BASIC and make my old TI 994a do some things that seemed amazing at the time, but apparently didn’t impress me enough to remember. I knew that there was something magical about these machines, I just couldn’t figure out how to make them do anything.

Desperate to utilize these machines hidden power, I even tried to learn BASIC myself. The structure of computer code cause me to suffer from the same type of anxiety I experienced when I tried to learn to type (with all my fingers — not just two). I now realize that this was part of my affliction. I experienced the same symtoms in my 9th grade Algebra class. So, I just kept playing games until I grew bored with them and sold the computer at a garage sale.

Yet, I still knew that there was something special about these highfalutin calculators. I just needed to find something they could do it was actually worth doing. Along the way I wasted a great deal of money (and it was a lot for a married twentysomething) on a string out worthless products from the Coleco Adam to the RadioShack TRS-80 model 100. I do remember visiting a couple computer stores and drooling over the Apple II. The price kept me from buying one.

The Coleco Adam was a hunk of junk (I think I got it because it came with a printer), while the TRS 80 was pretty cool. The only problem was the fact that, again, I couldn’t find anything useful to do with the machine (again, because I just couldn’t write any kind of code). Creating a database of my record albums seemed like such an utter waste of time.

Of course, I regularly ran into IBM PCs. These were mainly found in work environments, so I knew they tended to be more “serious” computers. Plus, the few times I was actually called upon to use them, I found all of the commands and special keystroke combinations a bit daunting for my “right-leaning” brain (to this day, a “PC” creates anxiety and elicits some sort of primeval “fight or flight” response, causing me to either curse the computer or run back to the safety of my Mac –  but, I’m getting ahead of myself).

It wasn’t until 1984 that I saw a hint of light at the end of my dark and dreary technology tunnel. It was called a MacIntosh. It was really expensive, at $2,000 (nothing like the $10,000 Apple had asked for the “Lisa” several years prior), but it was amazing technology. Still, it was tough to justify that kind of expense for a cool-looking word processor.

I wanted to be a true “early-adopter,” but decided to wait (as I have for most new Apple technologies since) until the memory was upgraded to 512k (that’s half a megabyte). Four times the memory for the same price seemed like too good a deal to pass up. So, I pulled out the old credit card and headed to my local Mac dealer in Colorado Springs to pick one up.

It was love at first sight! Not only was the machine beautiful, it was easy to setup and a breeze to operate, and totally intuitive. It still couldn’t do much, but I made the most of it. It wasn’t long before I was creating beautiful letters and proposals using my dot-matrix printer and storing files on those impressive 3.5″ plastic-cased floppies (much nicer than those flimsy 5.25′ paper covered IBM floppies). 

As the years passed, more programs appeared. There was even a audio recording program that I used to create radio features (far earlier than almost anyone in the industry where tape was king). What truly changed my life, though, was a desktop publishing program called “Ready, Set, Go” by Letraset (the same people who made those rub on letters and lines I used in my early graphic design work).

Now I could create page layouts on the screen and carry them to a printer on a floppy disk. This innovation changed one of my avocations into a true vocation. As I grew more skilled at page layout and my fame grew on the radio, I was ready to create my own investment newsletter (by this time I had moved up from a Mac 512k to a Mac Color to a MacIIcx – my third machine). With the help of AppleWorks (for graphics creation and databases), I started my newsletter in 1991 and it grew to more than 1,000 paid subscribers within a year. I eventually traded up to Pagemaker (then made by Aldus).

A year or two later and, I ventured into the world of portable computing with the Mac Portable. This behemoth weighed over 15 pounds, but it allowed me to write my newsletter while traveling. When I was unexpectedly released from my radio network, it saved the newsletter business, when I quickly relocated to Florida to get back on the air. While my wife sold the house, I was able to write and create newsletters on the Portable and FedEx the disks back to Colorado.

From that point, I lost track of the number of Macs I have owned. I am sure they have numbered in the dozens (heck, I am looking at four right now). Add to that a few Apple printers (including that wonderful Laserwriter), Apple’s failed digital camera, a few Newton’s, and many iPods, and I have, singlehandedly, kept Steve Jobs in mock turtlenecks and jeans. Given the fact that he (and his company) were instrumental in my success, I think we’re even.

An evening of visions burning bright. Unseen music videos, documentaries, comedy clips, out-there animation, short films, eye melting magic, and special surprises!

Music Videos Featuring:
American Music Club, Animal Collective, Ariel Pink, Awesome Color, Battles, Beach House, Bon Iver, Caribou, Daedelus, Dan Deacon, Devendra Banhart, Dntel, Entrance, Excepter, Flight of the Conchords, MGMT, My Robot Friend, Nobody presents: Blank Blue, Okkervil River, Sebastien Tellier, The Dodos, Trans Am, and more…

Films By:
Ace Norton, Andy Cahill, Ben Barnes, Clay Lipsky, Dean Fernando, Fernando Cardenas, Damon Jones, Dave Hughes, Derek Waters, Eric Fensler, Erik Barnes, Ghost Town, Hashim Bharoocha, Jimmy Joe Roche, JFR/Fingered, John Leone, Josh Forbes, Julia Croon, Lana Kim, Matt Amato, Maximilla Lukacs, Miranda July, Nima Nourizadeh, No Domain, Ray Tintori, Roel Wonter, Saul Levitz, Skizz Cyzyk, The Masses, The Wilderness, Timothy Saccenti, Tim & Eric, Travis Peterson, Video Marsh, and more…

+ the debut of DUBLAB VISION VERSION

+ a live performance by TRS-80

films: 8-11pm
TRS-80 & dublab djs: 11-Mid

$10 general or $6 members / All Ages

Cinefamily
at the Silent Movie Theatre
611 N Fairfax Avenue
Los Angeles, 90036
323.655.2510

silentmovietheatre.com
dublab.com

I want to thank Honest Tea and IZZE for donating some product for this event… you guys are rad!

Good Old MPUI and Other Merry Pranks

It is no accident that modern information-technology history all but began the day I was born (October 23, 1947). My birth, in fact, coincides with the formation of the Association for Computing Machinery. Which is why I’m sure the Bittorrent Client and Pareto front are part of the Big Con.

Early history: Mistakes are made

As a child, I live, breathe, and eat technology:

1948: The transistor is invented. I discover radio. A Philco. I pull knobs off and gum them.

1949: MIT’s Claude Shannon builds first chess-playing machine. I discover chess pieces — entire drawerful. My experiments yield the following data: The knights are gristly and bitter while the pawns can be swallowed whole. I learn that experimentation sometimes produces intense pain.

1950: Maurice V. Wilkes uses symbolic assembly language on EDSAC. Experimentally, I use language on my dad that replicates model my brother uses with his friends. I hypothesize that my dad, like my brother and his friends, will pee his pants with amusement, but results surpass anything I might have hoped for: My dad washes my brother’s mouth out with soap. I learn that experimentation sometimes produces intense gratification.

1952: Univac predicts Eisenhower landslide soon after polls close. Big whoop. My dad predicted Eisenhower landslide previous February.

1953: Remington-Rand develops high-speed printer for use with Univac. I become highly efficient self-contained printer for use with spelling tests, independent of hoity-toity Remington-Rand, though I do collaborate with Jane Frovick, who sits beside me in back row, on spelling test containing unhypothesized word comb. Based on Univac-type logical algorithm (home = H-O-M-E, tome = T-O-M-E, and so forth), we experimentally print C-O-M-E at high speed on our spelling papers. We learn that logic is inimical to spelling.

1954: I memorize spelling of antidisestablishmentarianism. Univac is still scratching its head over comb.

1955-1956: This period marked by squabbles among large entities such as Burroughs, Sperry-Rand, IBM, and the U.S.A. I am likewise at odds with my brother, a large entity relative to me, over Stan Musial rookie card. In ill-advised midsquabble replication of 1950 language experiment, outcome is again not as predicted: My dad washes my mouth out with soap.

Adolescence to young adulthood: Reactionary period

1959: Computers and ordinary people (which is to say, people who rarely need to calculate guided-missile trajectories) begin to “interface” routinely. Early encounters are not promising. Ordinary people are receptive to computers much as Plains Indians were receptive to Iron Horse. The next few years are notable for…

·   Dawn of Era of Verbing, with nouns such as interface appropriated for simultaneous use as verbs.

·   Mutual suspicion erupting into overt hostility as ordinary people receive electric bills for $17,009.83 and college students enrolling in “History of the Napoleonic Era” end up in “Marine Biology Practicum” doing shrimp census in Gulf of California.

·   Gangs raiding corporate offices, seizing punch cards to Staple, Cut, Fold, Spindle, and Tear.

·   Regression to older, less threatening technologies (carbon-paper consumption surges).

1962: At public library, I discover 25-cent photocopier that produces a negative; for another quarter you can photocopy the negative and get a positive. Machine is slow compared to later models. In same amount of time, I could manually copy page twice, in calligraphy.  

1963: Through volunteer work, I learn to use Addressograph, Mimeograph, and Ditto machines. I discover with glee that Ditto “masters” are available not only in purple, the official public-school Ditto color, but in red, green, and turquoise. Why were we not told?

1965: Technology and I begin a dizzying convergence. Summer job requires mastery of IBM electric typewriter, Verifax “wet copier,” and Thermo-fax copy machine requiring use of special pink tissue sheets and heavy white paper with faint blue flowers on one side. Late in summer we acquire Xerox machine that prints “Xerox” in tiny letters across the top and bottom of every page.

September: I arrive at Stanford University for my freshman year. I gain instant popularity due to ownership of 1930s-era Royal typewriter that has big, fat pica type, filling page with fewer words than weenie elite type of most other typewriters in dorm.

1968: I work for temp agency, accepting every assignment regardless of skill requirement. Confronted with massive cord switchboard like mutant octopus, I plead temporary amnesia and ask for “a few reminders.” I catch on quickly and adopt officious nasal patois: “One moment, puh-leez; connecting you with your party.”

Technology and I grow up, get down to business

1970s find me in vanguard of emerging technology, from dictation equipment that shrinks each generation to sleek 64-line PBX systems and Mag Card electric-range-size word processors.

1977: I am in Arizona and new territory, literally and metaphorically. I edit University of Arizona catalog, programmed in SNOBOL, using HTML-like SOS (Son of Sam) text editor. We take turns arriving at office before dawn to avoid “login queue” since all CRTs on campus are “timesharing” on single DEC 10 computer occupying largish red-brick building three blocks north. Every five minutes or so we have to punch a few keys to let CRT know we’re there. Otherwise it will “throw you off.” Sometimes it throws you off anyway, with maniacal chuckle.

We order printout, wait three days, walk to DEC-10 site, pick up printout, walk back. Done periodically to make sure all coding accurate. If we have inserted code <it> as instruction to italicize text, but we omit <eit> at end of specified text, italics go on and on until halted at state border for illegal vegetable transportation inspection.

Our spellchecker is called Mary Lindley, who astutely points out peculiarities in text, such as Special Education course title entered as “Reading and Study Skills for the Dead,” which ordinary spellchecker, not yet invented, would in any case ignore, at sacrifice of much office merriment.

When time to print catalog, we haul tractor-tire-size magnetic tape to printer.

1983: I am in Hutchinson, Kansas, working at dial-up news service designed for farmers. We have TRS-80 Model II computers with up to four floppy disk drives and zero hard drives. If someone runs vacuum cleaner near server, it (server, not vacuum cleaner) reboots, causing total loss of data. Our modem is telephone-receiver cradle transmitting thirty characters per second.

I am computer genius. I converse smoothly about binary code, bits, bytes, and “baud” (modem speed). Computers produce mainly letters and numbers. It is cake to understand how each bit in eight-bit code represents tiny switch that is either ON or OFF and how sequence of ON and OFF switches determines letters or numbers.

We have full-time staff person, pretty Vicki, to instruct owners of TRS-80, Texas Instruments, Sinclair, Commodore, IBM, Atari, Apple II-e, and other computers how to access our database. It is precise configuration; tiny mistake links user’s computer to Interpol, causes international incident.

1992: Am back at University of Arizona. DEC 10 has been converted to student housing, CRTs are in museum with Commodores, Daisy-Wheel printers. New software is suspiciously colorful. What’s with the sinister floating windows? I balk at using mouse.

Recover aplomb, become adept at learning software, even if not easily comprehended in terms of ON and OFF switches. By end of decade emerge as Internet pioneer with own Web site. Breeze through graphic-design, spreadsheet, database classes. Experience bliss of broadband.

1995: Create “Small Business Builder” feature on fledgling ABCNEWS.com Web site. Is first of many one-hundred-percent-remote assignments made possible by marvel of telecommunication.   

May 2000: Leave secure University of Arizona position with desirable benefits to accept big bucks, cushy job, impressive title with dot-com in posh foothills location. My ship has come in.

September 2000: Ship sails away. Am stranded on Gilligan-type island minus Gilligan, Captain, Professor, Jim Backus, Lovey. Some days am Ginger, other days am Mary Ann. Occasionally am Bishop Desmond Tutu, Pointer Sisters. It is as Teddy Roosevelt on San Juan Hill that I see passing ship, fire musket to signal, provoking Navy SEAL mission resulting in rescue.

I age gracefully, I.T. develops dementia

2007. I am Neanderthal woman. My computer is dinosaur. I no longer have vocabulary to describe problem to computer-fixer guy. I feel like caller on “Car Talk” making sick-transmission noises.

Attempt to download Mplayer for Windows. Do I need Binary Codec Package? What does “supported natively” mean? Is it racist/chauvinist thing, like “American-owned”?

“Great news,” subhead blares. My heart does a little dance. “Mplayer package contains SMPlayer front-end.” Sigh. “Of course, good old MPUI is still included.” Whew!

I click “download.” Do I want “Secure Download (US)” or “Secure Download (RO)”? What is “RO”? Rome? Republic of Ontario?

Am advised that “To download from torrent links” I “must download and install a bittorrent client.”

Scales fall from my eyes, clog keyboard. No matter. Is all Big Con. If I bite on “bittorrent client” scam, will get error message: “Access denied. Could not find active alienated download buffer. Repair by finding Pareto front of simple problem using Genetic Algorithms with fitness sharing. Or you could just stick peanuts up your nose. P.S. Your computer has 2,937 registry errors. Hahahahahahaha.”

The purpose of this blog is not to brag about my place of employment. However, UC-Clermont is farther ahead of the curve than many other institutions. We upgrade our computers every three years and our software every summer.

We have been using Microsoft Office 2007 since September. Some people hate it, but I’ve adapted to it. It’s not perfect, and it’s a total learning curve removed from its predecessor. Once you figure out what’s on all the tabs, it’s not that bad. The problem for me is that a lot of places are still using Office 2003. When I send a document to one of these neanderthals, I keep forgetting to save the doc in Office 97-2003 format. So I get the inevitable reply to resend it in the outdated format so they can open it on their computer. That’s OK when my 70-year-old cousin Frank, a retired construction worker, asks me. However, when a colleague at one of the top-rated research universities in the USA asks, then I get a little irritated.

If you want to play the tech game, upgrade regularly or step away from the workstation! And go play with your TRS-80.