Hammering the pixels by hand…
I was talking with my friend Lydia about our first computers. Mine was old in 1991 (probably a 1988 model), a used Office Equiptment International (OEI) 8086, which had a two 5-inch floppy drives, a 1-meg hard drive, 64 k of RAM and a monochromatic (orange) screen. I ran Word Perfect 1.x in DOS on it, and used it to write some of what eventually made its way into Starving in the Company of Beautiful Women, my first novel.
I got a 386 running Windows 3.1 in late 1995, and didn’t get online (at home) until 1996, on dial up. I had a website by Thanksgiving that year, and had DSL by 1997.
Lydia responded with her story, which I find fascinating:
Technically, my first computer was, as vague as I can remember, an AM Typesetter, with a cathode ray, green monochrome screen. in 1983. My mother would have to type up the interface every time she needed to get working. These computers were huge, and we had two of them in our tiny apartment (later, print shop); they were bought for about $7,000-$10,000 a piece. I remember them being so big, that I could stand on top of one and jump down from it, as well as sleep under it. I’ll try to get the manuals for you to look at.
My parents used to do this type of graphic design work, using SGML (HTLM is a subset of SGML) - and the whole terminal’s sole use was for SGML layout formating.
The printer, a Dupont 7500 developer, looked like this:
and was about 4′X3′x2′. It was literally a mini darkroom, with photo-chemicals and photo paper that would get dark when the package got a tear in it.
——
1987-1993 :
My next computer would be the Apple IIes we’d play with at school (when I was in kindergarten), and the Apple SEs.Very soon after, while I was still in elementary school, we got a Macintosh Quadra 605, and I got one of the firsts CD-ROM drives for the Mac. One had to place the CD in its own plastic case, before pushing the case into the drive.
My first “Internet” experience was in the library, in 1992 on dialup BBS. They had a 9 baud modem, using IRC chat and posting on bulletin boards where people were playing Zork, but I had no idea what was going on (I’m still not very good at RPGs
and I’d be writing stupid comments. Not long after, because my friend and I were the “computer kids” of the elementary school, we got to spend our lunch time on AOL.
Yes, I remember when typing Amazon.com brought up a “reserved” screen with a construction bench image.As for the IBM keyboard, I really liked that click. It made me feel like I was working. I have a real problem with “soft” keyboards, they don’t make you feel productive.
August 23rd, 2007 at 9:42 am
Update: This is what the screen looked like:
“What the screen on the Comp/Edit 5400 (I think) looked like — this was our hot modern version of WYSIWYG. All the little indecipherable symbols at the top were the codes we had to type in in order to get to WYSIWYG. “
August 23rd, 2007 at 9:44 am
Ey, Michael, you turned off the HTML? Anyway, here’s a link to the picture:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/carlsoldphotos/232635493/
August 23rd, 2007 at 12:48 pm
I got an email just now about the above photo’s model, which I’m sure is the same one as my parents’ had.
—————————————————–
:: Re: AM Typesetter
The company AM was Addressograph Multilith (and on some
nameplates, Addressograph Multigraph). Addressograph was an
early technology for doing envelope mailings — you would
make up individual stencils of each address on your mailing
list, and then could reuse those stencils in a machine to
batch print envelopes. From that they branched into
phototypesetting. The original Varityper
was perhaps the earliest typewriter that could be used
almost like typesetting, and once offset methods of
printing, including photonegatives, became possible, the
Varityper was used to set type in various fonts. (Just
google “varityper”). How or when AM acquired the Varityper
brand, I don’t know, but they made phototypesetters from I
think the ’60s until phototypesetting died in the early
’90s. At the end, with the company spending a long time in
bankruptcy, I know AM was trying to spin off Varityper,
whose chief competitor at the time was Compugraphic.
Linotype was another competitor, though less prominent as I
recall (ironic, given that the Linotype brand survived).
The first Varityper I worked on was the Comp/Set 510, a
model that let you see the type you were working on in
preview on screen — in the sense that you could see the
codes and letters you were going to send to the typesetter.
You could see a few lines at a time, but once a line was
committed to the typesetter, it was gone. You could not go
back and fix mistakes or store large material. The next
series was the more sophisticated Comp/Edit series, which
allowed you to edit and store materials (on 8″ floppy
disks). This was a huge advantage, as you could now
proofread and go back and fix things without introducing
new errors, and produce clean typesetting without pasted-on
corrections for the first time. However, even the Comp/Edit
6400, in my picture, couldn’t really preview fonts in any
way — it just showed approximate size and placement in a
generic screen font.
August 23rd, 2007 at 2:33 pm
Thanks!
Wow. The stuff people had to do in the dark ages, before Jobs and Gates stole thunder from someone who stole it from the aliens!
MWD
August 24th, 2007 at 2:31 am
My first computer was a Commodore 64. My dad bought it in ‘84. It had 64k RAM, one 5.25″ floppy drive, a CASSETTE TAPE drive and a slot on the back of the CPU that accepted game cartridges (like an Atari). I remember writing a few small programs with it, but mostly, I used it for video games. Lots and lots of video games. The 64 had nice 8-bit color and sound, and was connected to a regular TV set. It was actually pretty high-tech for the time.
First Internet experience was rather haphazard. I was interning for a small radio station, and had some time to kill. (This was 1995.) I decided to fire up the station’s Compuserve account. Had no idea what I was doing, or how it worked. Somehow, I wound up chatting with a woman in the U.K. About a year later, I got online at home, and never looked back. I posted my first site also in ‘97, and around the same time, I figured out how to do live audio streaming with RealAudio. Real broadband wasn’t available for me until 2001, and it sucked waiting that long to get it. No way I could live without it now.
August 25th, 2007 at 9:46 pm
TRS-80 color computer! (trash-eighty)
I used to sell them at radio shack.
http://oldcomputers.net/coco.html