My Early Days in Computers
I’ve been working in the Computer field since 1973 and have seen a lot of changes in the industry during that time. My early years in the business involved working on IBM mainframe computers using Assembler and Cobol. Even though the company I worked for at the time was pretty large, we had a small data processing department so I got the opportunity to do a lot of different things. The company didn’t believe in buying vendor software very much so we developed most of the company’s software applications in house.
When the personal computer first came on the scene, I was one of the first people in Memphis to get one. It was in the late seventies when I heard that Radio Shack was coming out with their own personal computer (TRS 80 Model 1). Up until that point, if you wanted a personal computer, you had to build it from scratch or from a kit. I had built several computers from kits, but they really couldn’t do much. The blinking lights were neat to watch, but beyond that they really didn’t do much useful work. I remember being in the Radio Shack store one day to buy more parts for the latest computer I was building when the store manager told me about the computer they were coming out with. Since the number of systems initially available would be limited, they had a waiting list for those wanting to be the first to get one. I believe that when I signed up, I was only about the 3rd or 4th person on the list.
I think it was several months before the first TRS 80’s came in. I was in heaven. Although primitive by today’s standards, I thought I could conquer the world with this thing. It had a monitor and keyboard all in one enclosure. At first there was no disk drives available for the TRS80. It came with the ability to save programs and data to a cassette recorder. I remember it being pretty sensitive in that the volume on the recorder had to be just right before it would save anything.
Later, they came out with an external disk drive (I believe it was made by Shugart) that used a 5 1/4 inch diskette. Now I was really cooking. I started writing several applications in the Basic language for my system. One of the first applications I wrote was a Genealogy program to keep track of the family research I was doing at the time. Talk about fun.
When IBM introduced the IBM PC, I had to have one of them too. It had two 5 1/4 inch floppy drives built in. Then when the IBM XT came out, I got one of them too. It came with a 20 MB (yes, megabytes) hard drive. Talk about high end computer processing power. This was also in the early years for Microsoft. I bought their Cobol compiler and was really in the big time. I remember this one program I had written which had several thousand lines of code took about 30 minutes just to compile.
Over the years, I’ve had at least one of every generation of personal computer that was made. I’ve actually thought about starting a little museum with all the computers I have. I don’t know where I’d put it though. You can read about my latest system in my Blog.
