Moore's Law, Part I: My first computer
It was 1983. I’d been saving paper route money for years, and my parents generously contributed the last $500 to buy the then new Apple IIe .
- a 6502 running at over 1 MHz! (2% over, to be exact)
- 128K of RAM! (sort of — the 6502’s an 8-bit processor and could only address 64K, so it “bank-switched” between one 64K and another)
- A 5 1/4” floppy drive capable of storing 140K!
- A green monochrome monitor that could display text at 24 x 80!
And I loved it. Killer apps for me included the built-in BASIC interpreter, everything by the Beagle Brothers , Serpentine , Dino Eggs , Ultima III (or was it IV? or both?), and, once I got to college, the shareware terminal emulator a classmate had written — the first shareware I ever registered.
By contrast, my 4 oz. Palm m515 has a better processor running at 33 MHz and 16M of memory — as much as the Apple IIe + 116 disks. Let’s not even talk about the 64M SD card I’ve got in the Palm.
Eight years ago, when I faced moving to California, the Apple and its monitor had done nothing but sit in boxes in the closet for years. I knew that was all it was likely to continue to do. I sold it for $25 before I moved.
Sometimes I still have qualms about that. But I’ve got enough things sitting in my closet (figuratively — given my state of unpacking, sitting in the closet would be an improvement.)
And if I were ever really inspired, I could download an emulator . And I haven’t done that, either.
Actually, it's because the 6502 had a 16-bit address bus that it was limited to 64K memory, not because it was an 8-bit processor.
I was lying in bed this morning, horrified to realize I'd made that mistake.
Posted by Zed on October 17 2003 09:12
Ah, more techno-nostalgia. Keep it coming, Zed!
My family had a terrible track record for buying early computer systems. My first computer game console was an Odyssey 2, and my first home computer was a TI-99/4A, with a whopping 16K of RAM and cassette tape storage. (Taught me early on to label my media, though. "Hmm, I think this tape is the Police... ARRRGH! Nope, must be my D&D character generator.")
Imagine my delight when, for christmas in 1984, my parents sprang for a Commodore 64, complete with floppy disk drive and dot-matrix printer. Of course I spent more time playing pirated games on it than programming, which should have taught me that maybe I shouldn't major in computer science when I got to college, but it all turned out good in the long run.
One bit of irony is that, once I got a hold of an early word-processing program, I was the only kid in my grade who was turning in term papers done on a computer. The print was, of course, dotty and had no true descenders, but the teachers were too impressed ("he's doing his assignments on a computer!") to ding me for it. Of course, when the other kids saw it, it was just one more point on the already impressive tally of "why Jim is a nerd".
But that's not the ironic bit. The ironic bit is that my senior year English teacher made a note on one of my term papers to "Check with a prof before using this print in college". Of course, next year brought me to RPI with its MTS computer system, *TEXTFORM word processing, and Xerox laser printers, which were advanced for 1986 and light-years ahead of my Commodore printer.
Posted by Jimcat on October 17 2003 10:35
Good lord. What are you doing hanging out with an ancient machine like the 515? $200 will get you an E with 32 megs of ram, OS 5.2, a transflective screen, and native Word, Exel, and Powerpoint, in Docs To Go 6.
Let alone the 64 megs and landscape screen in the T3.
Why, they've almost caught up to where the lamest PC machines have been for, er, a year now, with their 64-128 megs of RAM, Media Player, handwriting recognition via Transcriber -- no, wait, the only thing coming in playing distance on the Palm side of Transcriber is Decuma, which is only on the newest Sony Clies, and Palm is still steering clear, having had to pay off that Xerox lawsuit, and buy Jot, an awful decision, and keep people learning Graffiti, a truly s/m writing system.
Did I mention that newer Pocket PCs take Compact Flash, so you can get a gig memory card today, or add a modem, WiFi, Bluetooth, a camera, GPS, today, for $69 for most?
The Toshiba 755 comes with 96 megs of ram, and built in WiFi. The Compaq 555 has Wifi, Bluetooth, a fingerprint scanner, and 128 megs of ram.
The 515 has, what, 16 megs?
Of course, the UX 50 from Sony is also lovely....
I pay too much attention to this shit.
And I didn't mention how my parents spent a week's salary, about, getting me a Casio calculator capable of doing both division and multiplying, back in the beginging of the Seventies, kid.
So, to say: ha.
Posted by Gary Farber on October 17 2003 10:40
I'm planning an upcoming entry on why I'm still with the m515 and expect to be for some time, Gary. The handheld world's priorities have been moving further and further from mine...
Posted by Zed on October 17 2003 11:11
I'm old enough that my first experiences using and programming computers came more than a decade before I actually owned one of my own. My middle school somehow acquired a PDP-8 when I was in 6th grade in 1970, and it sat there in a room accessible to students. I had the full run of the computing center when I was in college in the mid- to late-seventies.
And it's hard for me to decide precisely which device was the first computer that I actually owned. Was it an HP-25 programmable calculator? Not if you use the von Neumann definition where the memory works interchangeably as instruction storage and data storage.
The first unambiguous computer that I owned is still in my basement: A Sage II, that I bought for myself in 1983. 8 MHz MC68000 processor, half a megabyte of RAM, two 5-inch floppy drives, and (God help me) the UCSD p-System for an operating system. I wrote my own "terminal emulator" for the thing ... actually just a short bit of assembly code that passed characters back and forth between the console and the serial port.
Posted by Alan Bostick on October 17 2003 16:18
I don't know what boggles me more: that my current machine (a PowerBook with 256MB memory) has 512x the RAM of my first computer, or that today's software is so ungainly and bloated that that it needs that much to function at all.
Posted by Alan Bostick on October 17 2003 16:23
Read this entry just after this Guardian piece and they dovetailed nicely. My earliest computer was somebody's used Apple }{ on which I managed to learn some Logo programming, but the Forth disk that also came with it never made any sense to me at all, and thereby hangs a tale.
Posted by Kate McDonnell on October 17 2003 21:33