Dean's World

Visacalc, now that's a product that changed the world. At least it changed mine.

I really started thinking about it after reading your (short post) above. Started writing a long comment and ended up just turning it into a post of my own.

This is how it affected me.

I never liked Netscape.

Oddly, I like Firefox.

Go figure.

A copy of MS-VisiCalc came with my first IBM-PC, which I bought in late 1981. Mine was one of the first that came through Computerland after they they were announed in summer 1981.

I'm talking 5-1/4 inch floppy disks. (They really were floppy, compared with the little 3-1/2 inch plastic disks that followed a few years later. The IBM-PCs all came with either one of two drives for these disks, and cost over $500 each.

You would insert the MS-DOS v 1.0 disk in the "A" drive and power on the machine. Then you would insert one of the program disks, which in 1981-1982 were limited to Visicalc, EasyWriter, an asynchronous communications program, and a few others.

The machine not only ran slow, 4.7 Mhz, but had limited memory until auxiliary memory boards from Quadram and other companies came onto the market. So after you loaded the program disk, you would swap out that disk for another on on which to store the data.

About a year or so later, you could readily buy some of the first hard drives available for the IBM-PC, in capacities such as 5 MB, 10 MB and even an unbelievable 20 MB.

Just about the very first things I did with my early IBM-PC included the following:

1) I bought a mechanical kit to wire key-linked solonoids into an IBM Selectric typewriter, so I would use it as a true letter-quality line printer. Slow as molasses, but it still could type faster than me.

2) I rigged up a 2400 baud modem in order to get into remote-access online technical databases such as those on the Lockheed Dialog network. Using this capabability, I was able to sell quick-research services to engineering firms all around Madison and Dane County; espcially from online abstracts related to engineering, water resoources research, and similar information. (I had earlier worked for a UW-Madison engineering library project writing and editing abstracts of technical and scientific literature for use in one of these databases.)

Within a couple of years, my computer-related focus had switched to assembling and manipulating large databases. For this purpose, I got a copy of dBaseII, the first of several variants of the same kind of software, and learned to program what some of us still refer to as DBF language. Anyway, people were (and still are) paying me to do this, so I must have been doing something right.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

Arnold...

Oh my, you didn't just start a "when I started with computers" thread, did you?

The one-upmanship of such threads ends up with old fogeys like me claiming to have programmed vacuum tubes with soldering irons and wire cutters, just to create a tic-tac-toe program...

"I used to have to write programs in one program and compile them in another!"

"What, you had compilers? You were so lucky man, I used to have to use text editors to write hexidecimal code, and then convert that directly to binary!"

"What, you had binary-hexidecimal converters!? You were so lucky man, I used to have to write programs on a TYPEWRITER, then transfer that to PUNCH CARDS and carry them to a punch card READER and wait my turn for my program to run!"

"What, you had PUNCH CARD WRITERS?!? You were so lucky man! I had to write my programs IN PENCIL and had to put my INITIALS on EVERY LINE, with the date, and then I had to punch my programs into PAPER TAPE that always tore at the worst possible moment and I had to start all over!"

"What, you had PAPER TAPE?!?!?! You were so lucky man! I used to have to write my programs in MATHEMATICAL LOGICAL NOTATION and then I'd have to convert that into CIRCUIT DIAGRAMS and then rewire the LOGIC BOARD to run my programs."

"What, you had LOGIC BOARDS?!?!?!?! You were so lucky man! I used to have to chisel my programs into STONE TABLETS......"

It goes on and on forever....

"I wrote my programs in DIRT, using a FLINT ROCK...."