I do not normally bother to read computer magazines. Take away all the adverts and the reviews of things I am not interested in and not a lot remains. But I used to read them in the 80s and this week I bought the Personal Computer World 30-year anniversary edition for a bit of a wallow in nostalgia.
It was interesting to review the short history of personal computing with a bit of perspective. I can remember reading about the Apple Lisa when it came out and about VisiCalc or the MSX spec. At the time I was working for a computer manufacturer which was making the transition from its own CP/M computers to the IBM PC standard in parallel with its own proprietary workstations, so it all had some relevance to me.
Much more interesting though was to be reminded of all the products I actually used, the bits of software which look primitive to us now but which totally transformed the way I worked back then. OK so I now have a computer running Windows XP, where I can have umpteen programmes running and switch between them, but I still have some fond memories of running Desqview in order to run several DOS programs at once.
The thought occurs to me that I must have known more back then than I do now. In the 80s we would spend ages tweaking BIOS settings, putting exactly the right settings into config.sys, autoexec.bat and .ini files and playing with dip switches on printers to make everything work properly. Most things just work now. I think you had to have been working with computers before plug & play to be able to really appreciate how good it all is now.
Anyway, a few things to remember from back in the day:
- Wordstar
- Borland Quattro Pro
(I used SuperCalc mostly myself, but sometimes dabbled with Quattro Pro. Someone a floor below had Lotus 1-2-3, and some computers had the Psion Abacus. About the only software you were guaranteed to find on every computer was Tetris) - Digital Research GEM
( I used to have a whole computer just to run GEM and do graphs and overhead slides. None of this switching between windows – move to another desk just to do a graph!) - The 80386 processor – and running chips at 25MHz externally but 75MHz internally.
- Hayes modems. Miracom Courier modems. How amazing it was when they leapt from 9600 to 14.4K. When V.34 came along we couldn’t imagine it getting any better.
- TSR utilities
- The Sinclair QL
I used to have the ICL OPD based on the QL motherboard. - Windows 3.1
Unimaginably better than Windows 3.0 - The Psion 3a
I would still be using it now if mine had not totally seized up - Iomega Zip drives
- Double-speed CD-ROM and Microsoft Encarta
- Netscape
At home it was all Sinclair Spectrum, until about 1990 when I had a company 486 so I could dial up the mainframes from home. When a bog-standard 386 was costing several months wages in the 80s there wasn’t really an alternative.
Happy days – but I wouldn’t go back to them now.
Here’s a few extra to play havoc with your head:
“D Variable Not Found”
Edlin (the text editor of choice)
Borland Sidekick (very handy if the boss walked into the office while you were playing Leisure Suit Larry)
“Fast” mode on the ZX81, that made the screen jump when you used it.
“R Tape Loading Error”
Windows 2.0
I remember Sidekick – but never had the dubious pleasure of a ZX81.
For editing I was a big fan of the ICL 2900’s batch editor and that hex editor which you could use to look at the source files for LSL and get some clues about which objects to go for.
The ICL editor was a neat little editor. You could run some really crazy edits by writing the line, then keeping it and taking something else from it. The nearest thing I’ve found for Windows/Linux is SED which has even more features.
(Writing code, I was relieved when they brought out a proper screen editor for ICL, though).
I used to edit very large table files on a monthly basis, with very repetitive edits. It would have taken ages to do by hand but took seconds with one batch edit.
I’ll admit it was quite a complicated edit instruction, but it was like magic. When I started doing websites (and before style sheets came along) I wanted something similar for the PC to edit a couple of hundred HTML files and found nothing to come close to the 2900 editor.
Glad you enjoyed the issue! We certainly enjoyed putting it together.
regards
Kelvyn Taylor
Editor, PCW