Why

Why work with early microcomputers?

March 2021

In the early 90's, I went to college with a new 16MHz Gateway 2000 386sx desktop running MS-DOS 6.0. I may have had Windows 3.1 installed, but I don't remember using it that much until my sophomore year. Even then, I'm not sure I booted Windows unless I was procrastinating by playing minesweeper or solitaire. The machine had an 80 megabyte hard drive, 14" color VGA monitor, and 1.2 and 1.44MB disk drives. I had bought it with my life savings of paper route earnings and graduation gifts. I think it cost about $1500. When I arrived at school, I was issued an email account and granted access to the campus network. My dorm was equipped with Token Ring. After ogling the beautiful Macs at the campus computer store (well beyond my meager finances) I plunked down the cash for an IBM networking card. In a week or so (we had to apply for static IP addresses on a paper form, just like our class schedules) I was on usenet and ftp, downloading documents and abusing my limitless printing privileges at the central printer facility. Jobs were posted hourly and I can remember 2AM walks down to pick up reams of quality works such as "The Skinhead Hamlet" and "The Anarchist Cookbook".

Logging into the central system gave us access to Unix. It was mesmerizing. I'm sure that I'm also conflating the X-terminals in our computer clusters and my summer job working on SGI Personal Iris machines. At school, we had networked games (Netrek, MUDs) and vibrant newsgroups to read and post messages to. This drove strong feelings of wanting our own personal Unix workstations. In 1993, I was working a summer job at the university, programming data visualizations for a lab. It would be my last programming gig before I turned to experimental work. One day, a senior lab scientist and I met with a math professor. At the end of our meeting -- why did this even come up? -- he made an offhanded remark about a free Unix for PCs -- Linux. I spent the rest of my summer job (well, a good part of it) downloading the Soft Landing System distribution and installing kernel 0.97 on my trusty 386. I think it took the better part of two weeks to even get it to boot. It required 30-odd 1.44MB disks and a lot of fiddling with the xconfig.

I've come to think that the desires for our own Unix workstations were the same type of feelings that early microcomputer enthusiasts had years before -- striving for the opportunity to have and program your very own computer, free of the constraints of access and cost institutional machines had. A computer to explore and hack on without interference or worry. The early microcomputers (the Altair 8800 and IMSAI 8080) even mimicked the mainframe and minicomputer front panels, with blinkenlights and switches. So, working with early microcomputers is a chance to explore and maybe experience a little of what those pioneers were feeling.

Early microcomputers have an aesthetic appeal, too. Within them are delightful puzzles. They are fun machines to get "under the hood" with. The electronics are relatively simple and accessible. You can typically fix them if they're not working, a task made easier by their through-hole ICs and other components and, often, the full schematics and theory of operation available. The computers click and clack with toggle switches, they blink away with each calculation, and the disk drives whir and stutter. Creative coding can be toggling a few dozen bytes into the front panel and hitting run, halting the processor, and examining memory. It's tactile, full of stimuli. And you can take pleasure in crafting simple tools in assembly or perhaps BASIC. The limitations become intriguing constraints for your creativity to explore, much like haiku.

From there, it is a chance to branch out through computing history -- run emulators of IBM System 360's or PDP-11's; try the programming environments of the elders; program Bourne shells with fussy syntax, calculate sets of numbers in the original C language (hello, world.) It's an environment where the output is strictly ASCII, an early information age celebration of type and stream of glyphs. You can go as far as I have, restoring a teleprinter and daisy wheel printers to recover the clacking and clattering sounds of slow output, now largely replaced in life with the drone of laptop fans and HVAC cooling, the lonely night light of LCDs and endless scrolling.

I started down this journey of early microcomputing when I picked up an Apple II Plus and a TRS-80 model III in 2013. These were among the first personal computers that I learned on and played with as a kid. Friends and relatives had the Commodore VIC-20, TI-99/4A, and we eventually our family bought a used Timex Sinclair 1000. Computers were fascinating to me. I attribute my middle-age interest in these machines to the development of dopamine receptors that I developed in my youth pining over the Sears catalog computer section or loitering in Radio Shack for far too long. The fact was, I was interested in piano lessons as a kid because my teacher had an Apple II Plus, and I could use it for 30 minutes while I waited my turn (Lemonade Stand! Compute type-in programs!) Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the Apple II keyboard had shrunk in the intervening thirty years since I last used one. No, wait, that was my hands that grew.

More than nostalgia, this journey over nearly a decade has given me the opportunity to explore and study different eras of computing history, creative coding, and computer art.