I have been a journo for more years than I care to remember. Well that’s not quite true, as I know it was 1979 and I was 23 years old. And I got involved in computers way before most in 1980.
A few months back, I thought it might be a hoot to document my involvment in the computer industry, as looking back, that history is quite chequered, and maybe some may just be interested. I am one of not that many who were there from the original days of the Tandy TRS-80 through to the current PC, the Apple IIc to the current Mac, Visicalc to Excel and Viatel to the current internet.
And what better way than to serialise it here in my blog? And maybe in the near future to podcast it.
Anyway… so here is part 1.
Any comments, critiques or even “go away, not interested” most welcome 🙂
Introduction
This is not intended to be a history of the origins of the PC, or personal computer. That has already been done far better than I ever could, by a certain Robert X Cringelly.[1]
No, this is intended to be the personal computer history as it related to me, and my path through it from 1979 until the present day. I am writing it partly for my own amusement, and partly before that period of time, so important in today’s makeup of just about everything we do or are involved in, is lost to memory. Just think, in between then and now, computers have become a standard in every house, school classroom, business, used in all our banking, shopping, doctor’s appointments, bill payments and more. Even our person-to-person communication is now dominated by computer based practices.
[1] See https://www.cringely.com/2013/02/04/accidental-empires-part-1/
It all started for me though, oddly enough, with a set of three books that made up the role-playing game, Traveller.
Chapter One – The Beginning
Cast your mind back to 1979. Where were you? Were you even born yet?
I was 23 years old and already had a bunch of ‘careers’ under my belt, from working in banks, as a roadie and sound engineer for a band called Nirvana (no not that Nirvana, the first one!), a tyre fitter, storeman, storekeeper, purchasing officer, had run my own business at 20 years of age in automotive air conditioning, flogged industrial chemicals, worked behind bars in pubs and clubs, been a gardener (a short term gig that one!) and even had a stint as the PR Manager for a major international record company. Quite a mixed bag really.
Right now though, and just married, I was slumming it a little as a freelance photojournalist for two of Australia’s motor sport magazines thus making use of a passion for photography passed down from my dad, and ridiculously, by an accident of just being at the right place at the right time, seemingly a small talent for writing a story.
How did that happen? My co-roadie for Nirvana (my brother’s band), Blair, also worked at AGFA and managed to get hold of one the first batches of AGFA 1000ASA black and white 35mm photographic film.
Now anyone who understands photography knows that this at the time was gold for night photography, as the higher the ASA (now known as ISO), the more sensitive to light it is.
That weekend was the national Rally of the West through the forests of south west Western Australia, and it was a perfect occasion to try this film out as there was a lot of night photography involved.
When we had finished at around 1am, we headed back to Perth and to the offices of West Australian newspapers as Blair knew they were the only people who could develop the negatives. When they came out of the machine, the Sports Editor asked if he could buy some of the photos as their regular photographer had been unavailable for the event. He then asked if anyone could write a story of a few hundred words to support the images.
And I swear everyone in the room looked at me.
So I sat down with a typewriter and banged out what I could remember in to a reasonable story, the editor liked it, published with a byline and I got paid $50, which in those days was a nice amount of cash!
When I got home, I dragged out an old typewriter I knew we had hanging around, rewrote the story twice, and set each off by post to the two top weekly motorsport newspapers at the time – Auto Action and Motoring Reporter – with some photos.
They got published too, and I got paid again. And so my photojournalism career began and continues to this day some 40 odd years later.
My Brother and Computers
The biggest influence in my life, my older brother Stephen, 7 years my senior, had recently snagged a job at one of the new computer companies that had sprung up during this period – Prime Computer. At this time, computers were generally either “mainframe’ or “mini”, and either way, were large machines with reel-to-reel tapes locked away in airconditioned glass rooms and operated by weirdy, beardy people in white coats and black horn-rimmed glasses.
Stephen’s job was selling ‘time’ to corporate companies on the beast tucked away on the 3rd floor of a building in King’s Park Rd, West Perth. I am not sure what that the ‘time’ was for, but in hindsight I’d suggest some accounting functions or other, maybe a payroll for example.
Anyway, one afternoon I had arranged to meet him there before a trip to the local pub, the Blue Note Tavern, to share an ale and catch up. But the moment I saw “the computer” I was fascinated.
This is where the Traveller books I mentioned earlier come in. Traveller is a role-playing game, much like say Dungeons and Dragons. But instead of dungeons and monsters, it is in space with a whole galaxy to map out, planets to explore, tasks to run (or not), rewards to be made and battles fought while you build bigger and better spaceships and recruit characters to assist in your quest(s).
At school, I had always been particularly good at mathematics and algebra, and I wondered whether the plethora of rules that made up the Traveller universe, being mostly numeric and based on a throw of two or more dice, could be somehow automated so that Traveller could be played as a single person game.
(40 years on, I have a pile of the Traveller books including add-ons, scenarios, adventures and so on but still never actually played the game with anyone! And I am still fascinated by it and drag out the main rule book on occasion for a read).
Back at Stephen’s work, I was introduced to his boss, and as you do, I straight out asked him if he’d give me a job. My internal logic of course was maybe I would be able to get time to learn programming on the Prime minicomputer and therefore transfer the Traveller books to it. I had no idea of the ridiculous enormity that task would actually be, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.
His response was one of those you never forget, and indeed can be life changing. And turned out to be so as it transpired.
“In the short time I have got to know you, I don’t think you have the aptitude to ever understand how these things work”, he told me.
To all intents and purposes then, that was that.
Except it wasn’t. Red rag to a bull.
As was the case those days, smaller computer companies came and went, either not being able to adapt or grow, or were swallowed by the likes of IBM, DEC, ICL, NCR etc. And so it happened with Prime, and with it, Stephen’s job.
Never one to rest on his laurels though, he soon snagged a job running the brand new “flagship” Tandy Computer Centre just up the road in Subiaco. For American readers, Tandy in Australia was the name used here by your Radio Shack.
As for me, married life and freelance journalism were not exactly compatible, so a full-time job was needed. By coincidence, a new, large shopping centre complex (read “shopping mall”, again for my American friends) had just opened in the suburb we were renting a house in, and one of the new shops was a Tandy retail outlet.
Tandy Electronics
Brother Stephen arranged with the Tandy State Manager for me to get an interview, and I landed a gig there as a salesperson on the floor. I loved it, retail selling everything from electronic components to stereo systems, clock radios to calculators and intercoms to CB radios. Right up my alley.
Oh and of course, arguably the start of it all, the TRS-80 personal computer, affectionately called the “Trash80”.
The retail stores were only allowed to sell the consumer version, the Model 1, which consisted of a green screen monitor (really a black and white one with a clip-on Perspex green screen overlay), a keyboard with 4K RAM in it, and a cassette player for loading programs and saving data. You read that right, 4K by the way or, 4096 bytes.
The retail price of this was $699.
The business version of the Model 1 started at 16K, with an expansion box, went up to a “massive” 48K, and also allowed up to four 5 ¼” floppy disk drives to be connected, each with a capacity of 360K. It was these business computers, along with a newer model, the Model II, that Stephen and his staff were selling at the dedicated computer centre in Subiaco.
I took to it like a duck to water, spending as much time as I could learning about them, reading the programming training books and in quiet moments, writing little programs in the BASIC programming language that popular lore would have it, was actually designed by none other than Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft himself.
One day I got home, and my wife Pam said she had a surprise for me. Sitting on the kitchen table was a Tandy 4K Model 1!
Apparently, she had convinced her parents, Bill and Pat, to buy it for me as a gift, and I was as chuffed as hell as you can imagine.
I learnt all I could in my spare time, and if I do say so myself, became quite an adept programmer using the BASIC language, considering the constraints of the small memory available. I even managed to write a program that generated a small Traveller universe from my books. That was a red-letter day when it was finally bug free!
And then fate stepped in again.
You can read other chapters by clicking the links below