Compute This (What's A Computer?)

From www.computerworld.org

"What Was The First PC? The Computer Museum in Boston asked that question in 1986, and held a contest to find the answer. Judges settled on John Blankenbaker’s Kenbak-1 as the first personal computer. Designed in 1971, before microprocessors were invented, the Kenbak-1 had 256 bytes of memory and featured small and medium scale integrated circuits on a single circuit board. The title of first personal computer using a microprocessor went to the 1973 Micral. Designed in France by André Truong Trong Thi and Francois Gernelle, the Micral used the Intel 8008 microprocessor."

Yes, I wanted to get your attention with something you probably didn't know, but then neither did I. While there were many individuals and companies that were working on designing computers, it was John Blankenbaker who brought the first commercially available personal computer to the world in 1971. He was looking to build a small machine that anyone could afford, though escalating costs forced them to sell it for $750. His aim was for this computer to be educational as he didn't see the long-term impact on technology.

The Kenbak-1 personal computer

Just five years later, in 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak completed their Apple I prototype to the Homebrew Computer Club and began selling their 4K system for $667. A year following that successful debut, three companies came out with their latest in personal computers: Apple with their upgraded Apple II, Radio Shack with the TRS-80, and Commodore with their PET (which stood for Personal Electronic Transactor). This brought the need for software in order to use these computers for particular tasks. The computer revolution was now underway.

The Apple I prototype computer

I got interested in the concept of computers during college. I remember in 1977 being brought into a huge cooled room in which mainframe computers were running. It was fascinating to me that something seemingly so complex could do all that from that room. Mainframes were used only by large companies at that time because of the high cost. But just a couple years later I began reading some of the new magazines in the college library and was amazed that they were now selling small "personal" versions of these computers which anyone could purchase. Well, I didn't consider myself part of that crowd as I was in college, but it made for interesting reading.

Mainframes in large cooled rooms

In 1980 I graduated college, began married life, and quickly found the local college library where I caught up on the state of computers. I became friends with a guy at church who worked for IBM and told me about the computer they were getting ready to sell. In 1981 he purchased his own IBM personal computer system with monitor and printer and invited me to see it. Yes please! It looked just like the picture below and I had to have one. Of course, that was before he told me what it cost. For that initial offering by IBM the cost was $10,000 though his did come with the optional floppy drive. But by now I was hooked and knew I'd land a computer system some day.

IBM Personal Computer, 1981

Then came 1982 and it all changed for me. That was the year that the Commodore 64 was introduced with great fanfare. It was more powerful than most of the other personal computers and much less expensive. I visited the local K-Mart to play with the one on display as they left it on for all to see. (As an aside, did you realize that there are only five remaining K-Marts in the USA as of March 2022? Unreal.) In addition to checking out the K-Mart, I had friends who had the Atari system and another who had the Radio Shack TRS-80 and I had the chance to play with those. Pretty soon I was getting invitations to check out all sorts of computers including a very tiny one and a Commodore portable computer. This was all great recon work to figure out which one I wanted to buy.

One day I get a call from a stranger who wanted my help and invited me to his home. He had purchased the Commodore 64, monitor, printer, and the floppy disk drive. I had never seen all of those pieces together and working so he showed me what it could do. Not much, as it turns out, seeing that there weren't many computer programs written for the Commodore 64. What few he could find could not be adapted to the task he had in mind, which was putting all his paper route business into the computer so he could quickly enter new customers, bill those customers, and make any changes needed easily. This proved harder than he had imagined, and he was hoping I could write a program for him. Take a moment and re-read the last sentence. Write a program? Are you kidding? But there was money involved so I listened to his pitch. Since he wasn't in a rush he said I could learn how to program and he was fine with that. So I packed up the system into the car and set it up at home. I spent many months writing that program once I understood all the necessary commands and the syntax. In the end I was able to come up with a program that did all he needed and he was pleased with the result. I was sad to see the computer leave my house.

As we started the second half of the 1980's I eventually couldn't resist a terrific sale at Target which offered the Commodore 64 computer, monitor, and disk drive for $500. Later I bought a printer for $200, bringing my system total to $700. During these years I wrote two programs for use on the Commodore 64 to help me in the church. One was a membership program that kept track of members, their family, and weekly attendance. It also printed labels for the monthly newsletter. The other was the contributions program which kept track of weekly giving and printed year-end reports. When I started up the annual Christmas letter in 1989 it was printed out on that dot-matrix printer. Looking back it seems so ancient but it was cutting edge technology at the time.

Commodore 64 computer system

As my name got around in the Warren community I was asked to help out with other projects. The local lawyer wanted me to set up a network system in her business offices, only nobody knew how to do it. So I learned all about networking and got hers set up over several months. I know that all sounds so simple today but back then everyone wondered what it was for. But accessing and editing one document from many locations was a great help in a lawyers office, just as it is wherever it's used today.

I was also asked by the county if I could find out what was wrong with their computer. Turns out they had a bad disk drive but it seemed to them like a bad thing to open up the computer. I took out the drive, put it in the freezer for awhile, then gave it a whack and reinstalled it long enough to get all the data off of it. Disk drives of that era would lock up and the platters would no longer move so the advice was to freeze and then whack it. That worked for a number of years with great success but I can assure you that it doesn't anymore, so please don't try that at home and make things worse. Got a new hard drive and transferred the data and it worked like a charm. They asked what I wanted and I said I wanted five tickets to the county fair, with their cost being $7 apiece. For $35 they got their computer fixed and our family got to attend every event held at the fair over the course of that week including all the rides, the tractor pull, the demolition derby, and all the exhibits. The ferris wheel even got stuck with us at the top and we enjoyed a bird's eye view of the town for a half hour. That still remains one of the highlights of Andreasen life.

During that time I was also asked if I would be willing to teach computer classes at the local library. They had been given a late-1970's vintage Commodore PET computer along with its 8-inch floppy drives as there was no hard drive. The operating system was on one disk and the program on the other. I taught a Word Processing course, showing a half dozen or so how to type into the computer, save their work, and then print it out when necessary. Each of those attending even got their very own 8-inch disk to store their documents on so they could use the computer on other days. Yes, there was a time when using a computer was considered a chore and it's taken many years until it has become a natural part of our lives.

Newspaper story of Computer Class at Library

In the 1990's and 2000's we were living in central Illinois and my fascination with computers continued. It wasn't long before some of those early IBM and IBM-clone computers made their way to my home. People dropped them off, others called me to come get theirs, and I amassed a large number of full computer systems. Most of these were very slow and limited but when your sons need to do their school work on the computer and you don't have the money buy one or more, you're happy for what you've been given. I learned to take apart the computers and dispose of any non-working parts, and put together whole computers from what was left. 

The church had a more current computer with the Windows operating system on it and that was a great departure from the command line text only system we had used up until now. Point and Click, as well as WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) became common phrases. Laser printers and desktop publishing brought high quality results down to the average person. Eventually I had enough computers to set up in a classroom and start my own computer class at the church. This time we went into more detail of the various programs available as well as the internet. There was much to learn about this new feature.

When my stash of computers got too large I looked for people who needed one. In some ways computers were still considered a luxury though prices were starting to come down. I must have gone through 50 or 60 computers over that time and always had a box of parts handy. If I was called to fix someone's computer I brought the box along and usually had the parts to fix it.

My pile of parts was not quite so large

When I finally had the chance to buy a new computer I bought from Dell. If you know me at all you know that it's more because of the price than any fancy new way of doing something. Though I was buying new I was still buying a couple generations back, in other words not the latest hardware. For quite a few years they had amazing sales and I was able to buy new machines at used-computer prices which made me happy. In 2008 I decided to buy a more up-to-date system and couldn't pass up a close-to-gaming special. Gaming computers have all the latest hardware and upgrades so they can run complex games quickly. That same explanation tends to apply to many other computation-intensive applications like engineering software, desktop publishing, and video editing. So these gaming computer systems are always popular. Mine was a step or two behind those but many steps ahead of what I usually bought. 

Over the years I replaced many parts including the power supply, hard drives, fans, optical drives, and also upgraded memory and added graphics cards. And it kept going. It started out with a Windows Vista operating system (which I did not hate as everyone else seemed to do) and was upgraded through Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10. (Don't even ask why they skipped 9!) Though it still seems to be running fairly well as when I bought it I am coming to the end of the line with Windows. Version 11 is out now but Microsoft doesn't like my computer anymore. Technology has changed and many of those changes cannot be accommodated by my 14-year-old computer. Microsoft tells me that Windows 10 will continue to be supported until October 14, 2025 (seems pretty specific, no?) and even then my computer will still work but I won't be receiving security updates and my computer may be at risk.

So.....I'll likely just keep using this computer until the processor catches on fire or the motherboard shorts out or a lightning storm fries the whole thing. (April 2022 update: Or until I find a killer deal on an i9 Alienware desktop gaming computer that I can't pass up. Oh yes I did!)

I started out married life around the same time as the arrival of the IBM personal computer and now, in 2022, I'm seeing high-end gaming machines being used for numerous purposes. The IBM was limited in memory and speed (as we consider it now) but cost $10,000 at the time. A new Alienware gaming computer as shown below would run nearly $7,000 including monitor and printer. 

Let's take a look at the specs for both. The IBM ran on a 4.77 MHz processor, had 64 kB of system memory, two 160K 5.25" floppy drives, and an 11.5 inch CRT screen in only one color, which was green. Users still had to load the application on one floppy drive and store their data on the other. Hard drives came later.

For the Alienware gaming system you would expect some improvement and you'd be right. The CPU is a 12th Generation Intel Core i9-12900KF with a 30MB cache, 16 cores, 24 threads and a variable speed turbo boost between 3.20 and 5.20 GHz. You may not know what all that sentence means but it means the Alienware is screaming fast, and I mean screaming. For graphics it runs the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 with 24GB GDDR6X onboard memory, which is blazing fast. System is 128MB in 4x32GB sticks with DDR5 3600MHz Dual-Channel memory. The operating system is stored on a 2 TB NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD for extremely fast boot speeds, while the storage hard drive is a 2 TB 7200rpm SATA 6Gb/s very fast unit. The power supply is 1000W and the speedy CPU sports a liquid-cooled circulation system. (Yes, I know, I'm not all that sure about liquid running around in my computer case but I'm sure they've got it sealed up tight.) The Alienware 38 inch Curved Gaming Monitor sports 3840x1600 4K resolution with enough room on the screen for several windows at once. And for the printer you could get whatever you'd like but I'm choosing a color laser printer for anything you need printed.

The Alienware system may be pricey but it is one fast computer!

So has the state of computing changed in the last 42 years? Most certainly, and no doubt it will continue to change. Who would have imagined that the smartphone would have a mini computer inside of it, allowing us to do much of what a full computer can do. In fact, there are some who only have their smartphone for a computer with no desktop or laptop to use. But whatever work you need to do, there's a computer to fill that need.

Later,

Arktander

(aka David Andreasen)