l’ve got eight machines setup with contemporary software and hardware accessories, ready for hands-on use and exploration. I’ve had a couple sessions already and it’s been fun to talk with folks and share these bits of history.
The genesis of the exhibit was Portland Design Month (theme: Weird By Design) and I tied things in by alluding to the time when it was weird to know someone with a computer or to have one in your home. We all had to learn at some point! For me, it was with Apple Ile and TI-99/4A machines.
The machines in this exhibit are:
Atari VCS / 2600 (a stretch to call it a computer, but included as it was a
“programmable computer” as opposed to having a single game built in hardware like the Pong console)
ТI-99/4А
Commodore 64
Commodore 128
Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 / 102
Dolch PAC 386-25 clone
Macintosh Plus
Power Macintosh 8500
If you are local to Portland, let me know if you’d like to visit. If not, l’d still love to hear what you think and if you have any suggestions.
I hadn’t finished High School and was an apprentice Technician. After I qualified as a Technician I eventually moved sideways into computer hardware maintenance. My PCs at home included an expanded Motorola 6800D2 Kit, PDP-11/10, PDP-11/34 and VAX-11/750. Decided I should finish High School and returned to study at night school. At that stage I could write BASIC, COBOL, Fortran, Pascal, and use various assembler programs. Twist my arm and I could hand assemble or write microcode. Thought a computer subject would be easy. Turned out the school didn’t have access to any computer system, everything was paper based flowcharts with no exposure to any systems.
I never thought having computer was weird, with all the computers seen on TV in the
70’s, but rather what did one need a computer for? I consider a real computer has the blinking lights
and tape drives from all that TV.
It really took a long time (1985) to have a computer with a floppy and a hard drive, Monochrome display and 256K of memory with a 16 bit cpu, for what consider a professional entry for a PC to run any useful apps. Still after 50 years I yet to find a keyboard I like, other than the on a Teletype Model 33. While games are a fun app,they had to wait for VGA and 16 colors.
My own strange thoughts.
I’ll go with oldben’s thought, I never thought owning a computer was weird.
I was in a systems programming group on an IBM 370 mainframe for a major airline in 1979 when one of my work buddies bought a Commodore PET. It was super cool. I was 32 years old at the time and had been involved in mainframes since late 1968. I soon got a TRS-80 Model 1. I knew and worked with Jim Lauletta who was the owner of Apparat, Inc in Denver. He was also an airline employee but formed Apparat as a side endeavor. They started out buying Radio Shack entry level TRS-80s, adding memory to them, then reselling them at Apparat’s new store along with hardware peripherals and other 8 bit computers. I soon worked for Jim part time in that store as a sales person selling computers. I was in heaven.
For those first few years of the personal computer, the rest of the world was either simply ignorant of them or thought of them as an electronic hobbyist’s endeavor. VisiCalc came out in 1979, probably one of the first “killer” apps, but the idea of software spreadsheets didn’t catch on for a few years with common people. Computer nerds, yes. People are slow to change, and are often ignorant of the tsunami wave of change coming at them.
In 1981 if you asked one of your social friends if they’d like to own a personal computer, their usual response was, “what would I ever do with it?” You would generally respond, “keep your recipes on it” for lack of a better answer. Then their response would be, “what forever for? 3x5 cards work better!” And, at the time, they were right.
By 1984, things were changing. And you know the rest of the story. The way we did things was never the same again.
Ok, this may actually sound weird to modern ears! Imagine buying Macs at the Apple Store and reselling them with homebrew RAM upgrades along with unlicensed peripherals nowadays. You’d probably hear soon from Apple’s lawyers… It was a different time, indeed.
More seriously, thank you for the interesting story!
Thanks for these stories. I should clarify that the term ‘weird’ came about mostly to fit the proposal for the exhibit into a local event that was going on, a Design Month with the theme “Weird by Design”. Most of the events and exhibits were more traditionally related to the design field, but I really wanted to get these computers out there and to experiment with hosting an exhibit that allowed hands-on time to visitors. So I came up with the title “When having a computer was weird” to do that
I think the moment I was trying to capture was best said above:
The strangeness of the idea that a computer would take a major place in your life and home was commonplace among people I knew well into the 90s.
On the other hand, “computer people” being weird was already a known phenomenon. When I expressed my interest in a voluntary computer class (of course, this wasn’t called like this, rather, it was “electronic data processing”) in the early 1980s, I received multiple warnings about not falling too deep into that rabbit hole and to proceed cautiously (or better, not at all, if I couldn’t manage this), as about everybody seemed to know a story of a teenager who got lost in that weird little machine and subsequently failed in school. — And this wasn’t even about home computers, but programmable calculators!
(None of the “Trinity” was an option here: the Apple ][ was subject to export regulations [we are a neutral country], Tandy/Radio Shack didn’t distribute here, and the PET was considerably expensive with various markups and tariffs and so on, out of reach of any teenager. So it took another year or two, until home computers became a viable scenario… I guess, you could have obtained an Asian Apple ][ clone at a reasonable price via Germany by unofficial mail order, but this was much like buying Bitcoin in reply to a spam mail nowadays, more an act of faith than a regular business transaction. )
My thought of when it would’ve been weird was in the early 1960s, with the LINC (pictured on the left, and the large cabinet on the right of Mary Wilkes in the picture).
When I was a kid in the 1970s and '80s, it was highly unusual for someone to have a computer in the home, but it wasn’t weird. It was exciting. I wanted to check it out.
The strangeness of the idea that a computer would take a major
place in your life and home was commonplace among people I knew well
into the 90s.
In a 2019 talk ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM9h89Vo_Qo ),
Bryan Cantrill mentions that following Gordon Moore’s prescient
1965 article in Electronics Magazine, a mocking cartoon in the
same issue gives the flavor of the mainstream reaction to the idea
of a “home computer”.
I knew of computers before I knew what they were, because in his youth my father worked with some COBOL mainframes, and I (at 4-5 yr old) filled copious amounts of used continuous accordion paper with my doodlings. I vaguely remember visiting his work and seeing … something, on afterthought it was more likely to be a tape drive (or the printer) than the actual computer.
After that I saw imaginary computers in TV shows (beep boop flashing lights) and at around age 12 or so talked my father into having an 8-bit micro, though now that I think of it he probably didn’t need much talking into, because I remember him and me coding together a music playing app, using the keyboard as a piano keyboard.