retrocomputing

Sitting there watching with satisfaction as MSDOS 6.22 DEFRAG.EXE did its thing.

Modem noises.

Floppies. So many floppies.

Reading computer magazines and books, and eagerly anticipating getting my hands on such material. Today's kids born in an online era of infinite content just can't imagine how difficult it was back them to get technical publications and information, printed or otherwise.

In 8th (?) grade our larval computing lab was a row of Commodore 64 but there was only one 5.25" floppy drive between them. When you wanted to save or load your proglet you had to

• walk over to insert your floppy
• return to your seat to do your load/save
• walk back over to retrieve your floppy to free up the drive for someone else

At some point I realized that while the owner was walking back and forth you could load their code to see how they approached the assignment. And doing so did not affect their workflow or anyone else at all. It felt like the earth shifted a bit at that moment.

Another thing - my windows 95 era PC was packed to the gills with bad desktop themes. Usually South Park related with annoying soundclips that played whenever you did something. Obnoxious mouse cursors and wallpapers that hurt the eyes.

I was upset when everything moved to ATX and computers powered off by themselves because I didn't get to see the modded 'It Is Now Safe To Turn Off Your Computer' screens that came with the themes

Don’t even breathe near it until the hard drive is parked!!

Booting from tape to do a clean install.

I grew up pretty poor. When I was a kid my dad brought home a pentium 2 that didn't work. He picked it out of the garbage, told me I could have it, but that it didn't work.

We often rode the bus to school. We would get off at school and my parents would get off at work. And then we would meet them on the bus on the way home.

After getting the computer we started stopping off at the library, so I could check out books about computers. I would take them home and start reading. (I was illiterate until I was 10 years old, and this really kicked off my reading ability, to this day I still read 100-120 books per year)

Over time I was able to figure out enough to diagnose the issue (bad PSU and bad HDD), garbage pick replacements, and then install DOS from floppy I got from school.

From there I started picking up as many parts and computers as I could and filling my corner of our studio apartment with parts. I loved writing text files and documenting what I was doing, like a little knowledgebase of what I was figuring out. Eventually, we got evicted, and due to having to live in our car for a couple of years I had to give up my computer. Left it out in the curb. Ever since, I have been obsessed with terminal based interfaces and to this day almost exclusively use terminal.

Two big ones. I bought the VIC-20 shortly after introduction when I was 21.

Big memory 1: writing machine language programs without the aid of an assembler. I couldn't afford the assembler cartridge, but I wanted to break out of the BASIC sandbox.

Big memory 2: finding a military surplus acoustic coupler modem and using the schematics to make my own connector, then writing a terminal program so I could dial in to these crazy things called BBSs.

Sitting the lab as an undergraduate plunking away on an 8086 on a token ring network. Mostly telnetting into OLGA. Blew my mind.

The #1 defining moment for me has to be Second Reality by Future Crew. We got it an a local BBS not too long after it was released. It was kind of like the birth of a new era, like "ahh so this is what PCs are actually capable of".

Typing in a 6809 assembly program from 5 issues of a Dragon 32 magazine and having it do absolutely nothing when I executed it.

Trying to fly in Chuck Yeager's Flight Simulator and not experience vertigo 🫠.

Got my first PC when I was ~8 in the 90s. My dad explicitly told me not to touch the 110v-220v switch on the back of the PSU. It didn't take long :)

Oh, lots. One that comes to mind is my surprise and joy when my mom brought home Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken. They had just been released. Until then I had mainly played shareware games like the original Star Trek game (that had you shooting Klingons in a top-down grid) and Captain Comic.

Playing Repton 2 also on a BBC micro in my parent's bedroom.

I remember using QEMM for the first time and finally being able to load games and applications that would otherwise not work.

I remember having to fiddle with IRQ settings to get sound working.

I remember the C64 emulator and finally being able to play Ultima 4 without having to constantly switch disks.

I remember the experimental OS and hardware explosions: QNX (still alive as an automotive OS), BeOS, MenuetOS, Transmeta Crusoe.

The Voodoo graphics cards!

You remind me of my mistakes, hehe.

But also the good times.

1974. Programming big multi-media rigs with eight-hole paper tape and a thumb punch. #FourYorkshiremen

Copying code out of a magazine to put into debug.com to run

Flipping 5.25 disks over on Apple II since their drives weren’t dual-sided

If you don’t like vi, you should try edlin

Pressing the “interrupt” button on Mac classics and feeling like a hacker

Hey that sounds like only about 19.2k not 28.8!

X/y/zmodem wars

Lots

For me as a kid growing up in the 80s, it's absolutely walking into Radio Shack (my favorite place in the mall next to the arcade!) and seeing a TRE-80 Model II set up for demo.

Kind of intresting as I think about it that I ended up not going for a Tandy computer and instead bought an Atari ;) No regrets. I still adore my 800XL!

• Desqview, swapping between GoldEd and the BBS watching the users playing LoRD and other games. And before that, scrambling to quit my game and get the BBS back up when I was using my 286 for gaming instead of leaving the BBS running.

• Those terrible, terrible CGA games that I played because for a couple years, I only had CGA and no EGA. The high pitched whine of the CGA monitor whenever I stood behind it.

• When I finally got OS/2, and could play Descent or Doom, while the BBS was handling a phone call in the background.

• Even older, printing out yet another Bill the Cat on my dot matrix printer.

• Typing in games from Compute Magazine into my Atari 130xe, but the checksum being wrong because I used abbreviated basic commands due to being a lazy typist.

• Getting killed by that darn Terminator in Zone 2 of LOD again...

• Going to my Uncle's house to transfer all of Kings Quest 6 from 1.44mb to 1.2mb floppies.

I remember mom setting me up with my own 3.5" floppy for all my files. Later on it was CD-RWs for me and my little brother.

Felt like I had more storage than I'd ever know what to do with at the time.

To add devices for your computer (like a disk drive, a serial or parallel port, or more memory) you needed a huge box with a very rigid cable and a lot of space.

This was for the TI-99/4A.

A couple:

1. CRC Errors when restoring 9-track tapes (the large reels) on a mini at work.

2. A manager not knowing a removable 256meg Disk Pack suffered a heard crash. So he mounted it on 4 or 5 production drives, destroying the hardware. He did this to test if the Disk pack was OK. This caused almost a month of agony while we went looking for hardware to replace the drives. This caused manufacturing to slow down since inventory could not be ordered.

I can almost laugh now :)

Loading games from big floppy disks, hearing the CLINK CLUNK CLUNK WRRRRR noises, on the BBC Micro computers at school in the early 90s. There were boxes of awesome games like Chuckie egg that we had to work out how to load during lunch breaks.

Then getting our first home computer with win 3.11 which was a huge deal then