| Big 5 Anniversaries |
[Dec. 4th, 2006|03:43 am] |
Some years ago a work colleague of mine told me how he and his family celebrated birthdays and anniversaries. If the birthday or anniversary was not evenly divisable by five then they would celebrate quietly at home. However, if it was divisable by five, it would become a "Big Five" celebration and family and friends would be invited to a big blowout party. It was a good way to keep the parties and celebrations down to a managable level. It's a cool concept but one I never practiced.
Until now...well sorta. I've turned the concept on its side by remembering events in my life in years evenly divisable by five. Originally I just wanted to remember events that were computer related but I've added a lot of non-computing memories as well. (Warning: this is a really long post. Sorry, I was feeling self-indulgent).
45 Years Ago
I was one year old. Um, I got nothing.
In 1961 in computing history, however, the APL Programming language was invented.
40 Years Ago
6 years old. A year earlier I went on that trip to Germany I talked about in my LJ profile but that was a distant memory when I was six years old. Entering the first grade is the only significant event I can remember (I may have also learned to ride the bicycle then, I'm not sure. Or was I 7 years old when I did that? Dunno.)
In 1966 in computing history, however: "Hewlett-Packard entered the general purpose computer business with its HP-2115 for computation, offering a computational power formerly found only in much larger computers. It supported a wide variety of languages, among them BASIC, Algol, and FORTRAN" (from Wikipedia).
35 Years Ago
1971 was the year my family moved from Proctor, Minnesota (a small town just outside Duluth) to Albuquerque, NM. Back in December of 1970 we visited some friends of my parents in Albuquerque (my dad just bought a trailer and we drove there). When we returned home I remember my mom stating that ABQ was a nice place to visit but she wouldn't want to live there - boy was she in for a surpise! My dad is an asthmatic and when we were in Albuquerque my dad discovered that he could breathe freely and mostly asthma free. So, the next spring my dad quit his job (a CPA firm he was with for the past ten years - if he stayed he probably would have become a full partner), drove down to Albuquerque in our second vehicle (a Toyota "Hi-Lux" pickup truck) to buy a CPA firm and buy a house. Meanwhile, back in Proctor, we were busy packing our stuff and getting ready to move. After all our stuff was packed in a Mayflower moving truck (a big semi-trailer, basically) and after my dad flew back from ABQ (and boy! his arms were tired) we got in the car (with the trailer attached) and drove to New Mexico. On this particular trip we went to ABQ by way of I-35 to OKC and then I-40 to ABQ. I don't remember where we spent the first night camping (we left late the first day so I think it was in Iowa somewhere) but I clearly remember we spent the second night at a campground in OKC. I remember because the campground was decorated with cliche tepees and these two hobos tried to sell me their tattered, matted-haired, old dog (I left them quickly @_@). Moving to ABQ was a big change for me and my family especially since New MExico is so radically different from Minnesota. I think this move literally saved my dad's life. If we didn't move here he would probably be dead by now or at least hospitalized by his asmtha (I remember his asthma attacks in Minnesota were very debilitating).
1971 was also the first time I got to see and operate an electronic calculator. I don't remember the model number but it was manufactured by Craig and it cost $400. It was portable but it was larger than most of today's calculators (4 inches wide, six inches long and two inches thick!). My dad was always looking for ways to speed up the process of calculating taxes, mortgage payments and other accounting related calclations. Before he got the Craig calculator, his only option was to use a slide rule (very tedious) or a mechanical calculator (very sloooow). I remember being very fascinated by the calculator and I remember making a drawing of it in elementary school (6th grade). I recall playing with the mechanical calculators in my dad's office back in Duluth but the fascination with those died quickly. The Craig, however, kept me endlessly fascinated and I played with it whenever my dad brought it home from work. My dad liked the calculator so much that he bought a second one the next spring. No doubt this calculator led to my first step towards a career in computing.
1971 was a banner year in the computing world. The Intel 4004, the great-grandfather of the 8086, was released. Texas Instruments released the first easily portable electronic calculator (Craig must have sold theirs under a license from TI, cloned TI's model in record time or was working on their own model at the same time as TI - not sure but I know my dad didn't get the Craig until late 1971). 1971 was also the year the first program was developed to send E-mail between computers.
30 Years Ago
This was a big year for me in computing. 1976 was the year I first learned to program a computer. The computer was an Altair 8800 that my dad bought for his CPA firm. It was in kit form and he hired my older brother to assemble it for him. Over the next four years my dad used it to calculate taxes, process payroll and perform other time-saving tasks (he hired me and my brother to write those programs or him). It saved him a lot of money because, without it, he would have had to hire some accountants to perform those tasks. I don't know how my dad found out about the Altair but it turns out his office was only a couple blocks away from MITS headquarters at the time (a small office on Linn Ave. A couple months later they moved to a much bigger place near the airport). The Altair computer was already a year old by then and so most of the glitches in the manufacture of the kit were resolved by then and my brother was able to quickly assemble the computer with little difficulty. In the summer of 1976 he set up the computer in our garage, loaded up 4K MITS BASIC (written by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, no less) and showed the rest of the family how it worked. My dad saw how much money he could save. What I saw completely changed my life.
Before I saw the Altair I had a bad attitude about computers. This attitude was prevalent despite the fact that I was a die hard electronics geek - I loved working on radios, TVs and even digital electronics. However, I wanted nothing to do with computers. I pictured them as these huge machines, filling a room and serviced by technicians in white lab coats. This attitude, I admit, was fueled by the Science Fiction books I was reading by Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and others - books that were written more than 20 years earlier in a time when simple computers really did fill rooms and require technicians frocked in lab coats. When I saw the Altair, I had no idea a computer could be that small. I was hooked for life and I wanted to know everything there was to know about computers.
So, when I had the chance, I sat down by the Altair, opened the Altair BASIC manual and learned how to program in BASIC. The timing couldn't have been more perfect for me. If I had access to a computer five years earlier I probably would have found BASIC difficult to learn and I would have given up on it (2 or 3 years earlier might have been OK but not 5). I knew a lot of trig and algebra by then and so I quickly learned most of the concepts in the book.
The Altair spoiled me, however. In my senior year of high school I took a FORTRAN class and I was very disappointed because the experience was exactly what I expected it to be. The computer used by the school was a DEC-10 and it filled a 2000 sq. ft. room (bigger than our house). It had much more capability than the Altair but it wasn't fun to program like the Altair. It wasn't until my junior year in college that I found a computer that was fun to program (a pdp-11 running bsd Unix).
The first original program I wrote on the Altair? It went something like this:
10 FOR I = 1 to 100
20 PRINT "MY BROTHER IS A JERK!!!!!!"
30 NEXT I
I remember his reaction when I showed him the printout. It was classic! :) My brother and I had issues (still do). :D
1976 was a banner year in the computing world. Intel came out with the 8085 microprocessor (an improved version of the 8080A which is what the Altair ran on). Commodore bought MOSTEK (a semiconductor company that built calculator chips) and released the Commodore PET computer. The CRAY-1 supercomputer was introduced and Zilog came out with the Z-80 microprocessor. Also, Apple computers was founded and they came out with the Apple I computer.
25 Years Ago
By 1981 I had moved out of my parents house (in 1978) and I was going to college. By then my dad was no longer using the Altair for his business since he bought a Burroughs computer to replace it (I took the opportunity 1980, after he bought the Burroughs, to borrow the Altair from my dad). The Burroughs computer cost over $20,000 - more than 4 times the total investment he put into the Altair (including expanded memory and a floppy drive he bought in 1977 for the Altair) - but it could do a lot more including complete corporate tax returns and payroll taxes. Cool to watch but I couldn't program on it and never worked on it.
In the fall of 1981 I moved back to my parents house after 3 years of living on my own. In 1978 a friend of mine moved to Seattle and I rented his bedroom from his parents who were already renting two other bedrooms to some Iranian students. My friend's mom was nice lady but his dad was a jerk. After 3 years I got tired of the man (long story) and wanted out. I couldn't afford an apartment and so I moved back to my parents.
I bought my very first computer in 1981 after I moved back to my parents house. It was the RCA COSMAC 1802 single board computer. It was a kit I bought from a company called Jameco electronics. The computer had very limited abilities (only 256 bytes of memory) but it had a built in video chip and I could hook a speaker up to it and generate sounds. I learned a lot aout machine code programming and it was a lot more fun than the computers I programmed in college at the time. The computer was small enough that I could put it in my backpack and I remember taking it into the library to write programs. No disk drives and so all my programs were written by hand on programming sheets I hand drew on Xerox paper I got from my father's office.
1981 in the computing world? TCP/IP was established. The Sinclair ZX81 was released and Bill Gates release MS-DOS 1.0. IBM released the PC for $2880 using the Intel 8088 CPU.
20 Years Ago
In January of 1986 I moved out of my parents house and got an apartment. By then I was working full-time at the Philips Semiconductor factory and I was making good money (I worked part-time there from May of 1984 to December of 1985). Even though I was still in college, I had saved up enough money to afford an apartment and moved in (I only had one class to take in the Spring of 1986 before I graduated).
In May, I graduated from college with a Computer Engineering Bach. degree. It took me seven and a half years to get that degree. A big reason for the delay was because I didn't have the common sense to drop classes I was doing poorly in. As a result I had to retake at least 6 or 7 courses I originally got D's or F's. I was also going only part time at least 4 or 5 of the semesters I attended (especially during the last two years of school).
By 1986 I was programming on VAX computers. That was a lot more fun and easier to do than programming on my Atari 400 even though the Atari had faster graphics than the VAX (the VAX could do graphics by sending text characters to a serial line terminal using ReGIS graphics. We only had 9600 baud hookup to the VAX and so the graphics was slow but still better resolution and more colors than the Atari 400). (Nevertheless I got a lot of use out of my Atari 400 by the time I discovered ReGIS graphics on the VAX. I bought my Atari 400 in 1982 and by 1986 I had done all sorts of cool things with it. I hacked the heck out of it - adding keyboards, memory and so on - and so I didn't regret abandoning it for the VAX at work).
I bought my first new car in 1986 (a Plymouth Sundance) but the purchase that excited me the most was a brand new Atari 1040 ST! Screw the VAX, I thought once I got the ST, this computer ROCKS! I remember a friend of mine bought a Mac in 1984 when they first came out. I really wanted one but couldn't afford it. The ST more than made up for the lack of a Mac. It was faster and it had color! I bought a lot of games for the ST that year and I also bought a C compiler so I could do some programming. 1986 was a great for me in regards to personal computing.
I also acquired my dad's Altair 8800 that year (I returned it to him when I moved back in 1981). He didn't want it anymore and so I grabbed it the first chance I got. I didn't do much with it the first few years I had it primarily because I didn't have a serial terminal to hook up to it (a couple years later a friend at work gave me his LSi ADM3a terminal).
1986 in the computing world? Apple came out with the Mac Plus and the Mac 512Ke. Sinclair came out with the ZX Spectrum 128 and Atari came out with the 1040 ST (the 520 ST came out in 1985). Amstrad produced the fast and cheap Amstrad PC 1512 with memory upgradeable to 640 KB (no wonder I bought an ST none of the competetors came out with a 1Mb computer!).
15 Years Ago
In 1991 someone broke into my house and stole a bunch of stuff. :( Mostly the guy stole CDs but he also took the tiny TV that came with the Fisher-Price PXL-2000 video camera I bought several years earlier (it was basically a toy camera but it was cool alternative to a real video camera that I couldn't afford). Thankfully my Atari ST wasn't stolen.
As a result I spent some big bucks to put iron bars on all the windows. I also spent money to re-roof the house and have some wiring redone (including a motion sensitive security light). I got a big bonus from my job that year and I spent it all on home improvement.
My Sundance was totaled in 1991. :( I still had two or three payments left on the car which was an important lesson to me. I bought my current car in November of that year (a 1992 Saturn SL2) and made sure to get only a three year loan on it (I also payed off the car a year early). Long loans on cars is a bad idea and not having car payments is a wonderful feeling. 15 years is a long time to own a car and I sure got my moneys worth out of it. I hope to keep it going at least another 5 years.
By 1991 I had been managing those VAX computers I started programming some seven years earlier. My system admin duties started back in November of 1989 but I spent most of my first year training (I remember taking a VMS system admin class in Denver when the U.S. invaded Panama in December of 1989). By 1991 I was in charge of user accounts and managing disk drives. I put my programming skills to good use by automating the account creation process (buying software to manage acounts was not an option then - way too expensive and my employers were cheap). Until then the operators would create accounts by hand and it took them 15-30 minutes to create one account. My program built an account in less than 30 minutes. Good thing I wrote those programs because in 1990 they laid of all our VAX operators and I wouldn't have been able to create those accounts in a timely manner without the programs. I was definitely the junior system admin at the time and I still had a lot more learning to do.
1991 in the computer world? Linux was born, the 80286 SX was released and the Sound Blaster Pro was introduced.
10 Years Ago
By 1996 I owned two Atari STs: a 1040 ST I bought to replace the original I bought in 1986 (the motherboard went wacky one day) and a 1040 STE that had the cool blitter chip (I HAD to get it). I had a couple Atari 400's by then and I think I even got an Atari 800 XL. I also scored a bunch of old Altair computers from some surplus stores. My computer collection started to grow big time in the 1990's.
I also owned at least two or three PC's. My first PC was a laptop I bought in 1993 but I also bought a used 486 tower system a year or two later.
1996 in the computer world? Netscape 2.0, Quake, Tomb Raider, Hotmail and Opera came out that year.
5 Years Ago
Well, we all know what happened in September of 2001. I didn't know about 9/11 until at least two hours after it happenend. I overslept that day and didn't wake up until after 8:15 Mountain time (10:15 Eastern). It wasn't until 30 minutes later, after I showered, shaved, ate breakfast and was in the car driving to work, that I discovered what was going on. By then one of the towers had collapsed (on the radio they said the tower fell and I imagined the building tipped over instead of pancaking like it did). When they described that airplanes smashed into the building I thought they were small Cessnas and not big commercial planes. It wasn't until 30 minutes later, when I arrived at work, that I could actually see the damage done. Someone set us up a TV in the cafeteria and I was able to see how big of a disaster 9/11 was. I remember trying to get news from the Web and I couldn't find a web site that could respond in a timely manner. A lot of people were trying to use the web that day.
In 2001 I bought my first PDA, a Cassiopeia. It cost me something like $350 and I got a lot of use out of it. About six mojnths later I bought a second Cassiopeia (same model) from Internet resale house for half the price. It was my backup system and it was a good thing I bought it: A year ater I bought my first PDA, it started acting flaky and bit the dust in late 2002. The second Cassiopeia? Still works today.
By 2001 I owned my own VAX computer and my own Alpha computer (the successor to the VAX). They were desktop units I got back in 1997 (I bought the Alpha from a OEM resaler and the VAX was from work - they wanted to get rid of it and so I helped them out. :D). The Alpha, dubbed The Valiant became my file and web server in 1997 and I used it for that role until 2003. The Alpha and VAX still work (and I've gotten a bunch more Alphas and VAXen since then) but I don't use that often anymore.
2001 also marked a turning point at the facotry I worked at. That year management announced that they were going to shutdown the 8" Fab. That was a major blow because that Fab was building our cutting edge technology and it's operation meant that the facotry was guaranteed to run at least another ten years. We had 4" and 6" fabs operating at that time but the whole facory ended up being shutdown in October of 2003 (I was able to stay with the factory until March of 2004 dismantling the computers and other equipment).
I went to my fourth CGE in 2001 (if you include the 1998 WOA). I think that was the year Ben Heckendorn first showed his portable VCS. I remember I was able to play MAME on my PDA at CGE (impressed a couple people with it too).
2001 in the computing world? The iPod was released along with Mac OSX. Windows XP and the Xbox were also released.
Well, that wasa long trip down memory lane. I thought this was going to be a short entry but I guess I had a lot more memories on these big 5 anniversaries then I originally thought. It was fun writing about them I hoped you enjoyed reading it.
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