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The Old Hack

Ye Olde Computeres of Yore

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So I decided to start a computer reminiscing thread inspired by the derail on the COVID-19 thread. It is intended to share stories about old computers we once loved. Any story is good, be it technical, a tale of frustrations, amusing or all three.

My first computer ever was an Amstrad CPC 64. I loved that thing so much. At the time I practically lived together with a guy named Karsten who was a bigger computer fanatic than I was. It had an amazing 64K of memory, putting it way ahead of the ZX Spectrum and most of the rest of the field. You could eventually get a lot of good games for it, but one of our big joys was creating our own programs for the thing.

We also played pranks on one another. Karsten discovered the joys of the SPEED KEY command. The keyboard was set to a default of 30 milliseconds before pressure would result in a character repeating and 3 more milliseconds before further repeats. Thus you held a key down and got character repeats to that time. But with SPEED KEY you could change the parameters any way you liked. So Karsten waited till I had entered a large program without saving and gone off for a minute, and entered a SPEED KEY (1,1) plus a clear screen command so I wouldn't suspect anything. As you could imagine, this made typing completely impossible because even grazing a key would guarantee two or three character repeats. At the end I had to give up my attempts to restore normal function and thus lost an hour of work. Karsten was a little taken aback when he saw that his prank could not be undone and apologised, but I was not pleased and swore vengeance.

So I did some peeking into the manual and discovered that you could set a function key to execute a specific command. I waited patiently until Karsten had left a huge program of his own unsaved and gone off into the kitchen. I then defined a function key to execute SPEED KEY (30,3) and then again entered a SPEED KEY (1,1) plus clear screen command. When Karsten returned and saw what I had done, he was furious. He yelled at me and said that that was just mean and that he had apologised and that it was really petty of me, and so forth. I merely listened with a bland expression until he had run dry, whereupon I pressed my predefined function key to restore normal keyboard speed. Then I executed a LIST command to show that his program was still fine.

He stared at the computer with an expression like a poleaxed steer. That was a very satisfying moment for me.

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As I said in the covid thread, my first computer was a DEC PDP-11.  I had a time share account on it where I had a total of 20 blocks of disk storage.  As near as I can calculate a block was 2K of storage, meaning I had a massive 40K of storage available., unless I used the tape drive, which was tricky because you could not be sure the right tape was loaded from day to day.

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17 hours ago, mlooney said:

As I said in the covid thread, my first computer was a DEC PDP-11.  I had a time share account on it where I had a total of 20 blocks of disk storage.  As near as I can calculate a block was 2K of storage, meaning I had a massive 40K of storage available., unless I used the tape drive, which was tricky because you could not be sure the right tape was loaded from day to day.

One of the earlier available home computers was based on the PDP-11. They made an LSI-11 chip set, and Heathkit sold a microcomputer based based on it. I believe it was possible to order it assembled, don't recall. It is noteworthy that this predated many of the more popular 8 bit micros. Not cheap, but not astronomical. Actual DEC hardware was an order of magnitude more expensive, and even that was cheap by IBM standards.

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My first home computer was an Atari 400. Had a 6502 processor running at just shy of 2MHz - where every other manufacturer making PCs with 6502s was running them at 1MHz.

At about the same time IBM came out with their first "PC", which ran an 8088 processor at 4.77 MHz.

Tricky thing though: the 8088 used a single-phase clock. So that speed meant it got 4.77 million clock signals per second. The 6502, on the other hand, used a 4-phase clock, so that Atari's processor speed meant it was getting nearly 8 million clock signals per second. The two processors did approximately the same amount of work per clock signal. In particular fetching a byte from memory took 4 clock signals on both processors.

I did some calculation and found that the Atari 400 could do 8-bit arithmetic *faster* than the mainframe at work, a Univac 90/80, could. Another tricky thing: the mainframe had a 32-bit processor, so could do 32-bit arithmetic slightly faster than 8-bit arithmetic. Where the Atari, of course, took several times as long to do 32-bit arithmetic.

-----

The first computer I ever worked with, though, was (if I remember correctly) a PDP-8 at the local college, while I was in high school. There were a dozen or so interactive terminals time-sharing it and allowing us to write and run BASIC programs. We found a bug in the BASIC interpreter: the low-bound checking on array subscripts was so completely lacking that we could look into memory belonging to other users. (Couldn't change it though.) When the system administrators found out about this bug, it got fixed PDQ.

Several years later, when I was in college, we found a bug in the batch-job scheduling algorithm on the university's trio of CDC 6000 series machines. The scheduling algorithm was designed to shovel a lot of small jobs through quickly, so the job card had to specify the maximum amount of CPU time the job would be allowed to take. If the job exceeded that, it was just cut off. If the job failed for *any other reason*, there was a way to set up the job such that it would catch the error and be able to attempt some sort of recovery - with an 8 CPU second allowance. We found that if we wrote the job card to request ZERO cpu seconds, it would get a very high priority and start pretty much right away. Then if the next job control card was blank, the job would abort over the blank card and we could immediately pick up the recovery allowance. The system administrators, of course, eventually learned of this bug, but they decided that it was actually perfectly consistent with the design of the scheduling algorithm so didn't need fixed.

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10 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

The system administrators, of course, eventually learned of this bug, but they decided that it was actually perfectly consistent with the design of the scheduling algorithm so didn't need fixed.

This reminds me of a story a friend of mine who studied Compsci at the University of Copenhagen. He and a friend had been assigned the task of writing a complicated program that could handle and schedule trains on a hypothetical railway. It was supposed to manage a number of trains so they could get to their destinations as fast as possible while avoiding congestion. This required a lot of tricky programming and a great deal of testing.

At one point a train was supposed to go from station A to B but couldn't. All lines between them were already in use. Thus it stood idling at station A, wasting time and space. Then the program spotted a free line between station A and C, and that there was also lines free between C and B, and promptly dispatched the train to station C. My friend and his companion watched in amazement as it happily chugged to C and from there went to B with no trouble. The following conversation took place:

"Did you program it to do that?"
"No. Did you?"
"No. How do we explain this when we turn it in?"
"...let's not. We'll just say it does it and credit it to brilliant implementation, and hope no-one notices."
"Deal."

And so they did, and when they handed the assignment in, it got top marks.

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My first computer was a mainframe of some sort at the Pasadena (TX) Independent School District, dialed into and connected to via an acoustic coupler on a TTY machine. We used BASIC - very basic BASIC - and I can still remember my login (HEL SOU A119). This was when I was in 8th grade, and it carried over into the 10th grade. Programs were stored on a roll of paper tape. God forbid it should rip or break

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My next computer, after working on fairly larger system was a bit of a let down.  I had a COSMAC ELF 1802

I had an expanded version, I had a whole K of memory.  That's right, I was rocking 1024 bytes of memory.  I never did much with it after I built that thing, because I joined the Army about that time.

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Back in the mid 80s, my Uncle Roger won a Commodore 128 in a contest. He used it for a few years before passing it on to my Uncle Jimmy.

I was really close to Jimmy back then, and I would often hang out with him while he used the computer. I remember one time, he explained to me how he could connect to other computers over the phone line, which was a novel concept to me at the time. He had a huge collection of games for the computer (all technically Commodore 64 games),  and occasionally I would play them - but I spent a lot more time watching him play, particularly Zork and Zork II.

When Jimmy moved on to a Windows 95 machine, he passed the Commodore 128 on to me. I was really grateful for the gift, but I didn't get nearly as much use out of it as its' previous owners. I wasn't in the habit of writing on the computer yet, I didn't have a clue how to go online with it and wasn't really all that interested in figuring it out, and I had a NES and a Super NES so most of the C64 games seemed pretty simple and boring by comparison. (For some reason, I never really made a serious attempt at the Zork series; I probably should have, as they at least would have had depth equal or greater to the games I was used to by that point.)

I played some of the games occasionally, but mostly the machine just sat around collecting dust until we finally boxed it up and put it in storage. Despite that, I still look back on that computer fondly.

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19 hours ago, ChronosCat said:

I played some of the games occasionally, but mostly the machine just sat around collecting dust until we finally boxed it up and put it in storage. Despite that, I still look back on that computer fondly.

You are reminding me that my dad was interested in and intimidated by personal computers. We were on our nth one, and he used to quiz us about it, so one time, mid 80s as well, the TI home system was being dumped cheap, we bought him one for Christmas, thinking it would satisfy his curiosity. It sat in his closet for a decade, then he re-gifted it to our kids, who wouldn't touch it, because by then it was lame. But it did curtail his interest.

My mom had been a secretary in the days of manual typewriters; she had no interest in electric typewriters, let alone a computer. But one day, seeing her grand kids enthusiastically playing on one, she got interested, and asked them to explain. They did, then sat her down to play. "Click the mouse here, Grandma." She picked up the mouse, and tapped the base against the glass CRT. "It didn't do anything." Yes, my mom was one of those people, the "my cup holder broke off" folks.

They were not stupid people, my dad spoke a couple of languages, had started at Lehigh in electrical engineering before WW II broke out and he had joined the Army Air Corp, was a sales engineer afterward, an taught a lighting segment at professional engineers training. Mom was a native Spanish speaker, moved to the US in her 20s, was a successful secretary in her non native language for years, and had a larger vocabulary in English than anyone else I've ever met. They used to do the NY Times crossword every week, and played fierce Scrabble. Something about this was a generational gap, they just didn't get it.

I see some of that in myself. I am comfortable using a workstation, but a quirky interface makes me cringe inside. I can get to be more focused on, "What kind of idiot designed this?" than on getting my task done. And I am aware of security and privacy issues, because of which, I am reluctant to do some things other might take for granted. I don't like Cortana, I will never own an Alexa, I am reluctant to use Facebook, even though most of my family is on daily. I find data mining efforts that want to offer me 'tailored products' to be intrusive, shallow, and way off the mark. I am more likely to stop dealing with a company that uses them than I am to by their product.

Case in point, I wanted one of Amazon's free Kindle books the other day. In the process of getting this, Amazon offered some browser insert. It appears that this had nothing to do with Kindle, nor delivery, but let them track what I browsed. Within a couple of hours, a window popped open that I had not opened. I ripped that $#!% right out.

And that is a common theme, isn't it; that lack of candor about what the offered software is intended to do? Bullshit has a distinct odor, and no matter how much you try to pretty it up, it's still bullshit. But the fact that it bothers me appears to be generational. I don't get if thiose around me are resigned to their digital environment, or if they see some benefit that I don't.

 

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