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By Jim Kuzma, Contributing Writer, Kooz@CompuServe.COM
From the Editor: Jim Kuzma has been a very important person in my life who not only introduced me to computers in general, but to the Amiga in particular. His talents are myriad, and the scope of his point of view on the evolution of computers is virtually unparalleled. He, like many of us, is conscious of the rather disturbing trends in the computer industry today; and so I asked him if he would like to share his point of view on the subject, in the context of the entire history of modern computing, and what the earlier philosophies embodied (the same ideas as the Amiga). This, the result, is the first part of a series.
Michael Webb
Publisher and Editor-in-Chief
I'm a design engineer, working with computers every day and designing control systems that use computers.
The perception that most people have of them involve the work or play or information station with keyboard, monitor, disk and processor. Few see them as tiny single-chip complete packages that execute programs to control appliances or adjust their car's brakes. To the scientist, they are vast banks of processors, acquiring data and performing mathematical calculations on it at fantastic speeds to aid research. To the businessman, they are the slate on which his figuring is done. They are all of these and more.
Within my lifetime, I've watched them arrive in daily life and sometimes take over our lives. At a minimum, they influence us and our behavior whether we know it or not and whether we like it or not. As a high school senior in 1971 in Binghamton, New York, I had never seen a computer in use. There were no calculators you could carry around, and after-class experimenting with a desk-top programmable calculator that weighed forty pounds to solve pythagorean equations was as far as it went. A friend of mine had a model of an accumulator using falling marbles and mechanical flip-flops that could add numbers. This all seemed pretty pointless when a well-oiled slide rule got the answers you needed so much faster and without as much trouble to program and enter data. At most, computers were a curiosity. Division long hand on paper, or even log tables worked fine.
At Syracuse University, the IBM 360 with Selectric typewriter terminals scattered all over campus that ran APL interactively were incredible. The sheer racket of half a dozen terminals printing out data or programs was enough to get you to hate them. The worst part was having a fixed budget of log-on time per semester that got swallowed up in a few weeks just learning the language and doing a few simple programs. The Selectrics would, half the time, be chattering away with no type ball over blank white and green paper, stolen by some undergrad with a warped ethical standard. I remember watching in disbelief the paper volcano of a terminal locked in a form feed loop, filling the room in a matter of minutes. Why anyone would want to work at the computer center's unique video terminals on APL, where, as soon as the information scrolled off the screen, you had no typed record of what you had done that you could take to your dorm and work on later was beyond me. Getting ticked off at some four-hour batch that was being run that froze all the terminals on campus just when you needed them was enough to get you to really hate that central computer. The CPU cycle hogs were despised.
They were the serious users that carried around boxes of Fortan program punch cards like some cherished brain-child, paranoid that they would drop it down the stairs and the quad would be filled with wind-blown confetti that represented two years of work and the grad student's thesis. The lady punch card machine operators had to be treated like royalty to get them to spend hours creating your magical deck with their painfully bandaged wrists (long before carpal tunnel syndrome was a household term). Magic marker arrows and words on the edge of the stack of cards was documentation and flow chart. I was curious enough about this power computing to take a numerical analysis course. I dropped it after two weeks. Computers were mysterious room-sized monstrosities with hugh spastic tape recorders that couldn't decide what they were playing. They were, in my mind, unreliable specialized machines that only huge corporations and Big Brother would use for some unfathomable and unscrupulous reason. Cheap calculators were becoming common-place, and they worked better than APL in immediate problem solving, and could add up a check book balance faster than writing it down. Some of the early calculators (notably my Sinclair) had "quirks" that my roommate would delight in finding, repeatedly showing me an absurd number glowing red under the little lenses and laughing at its stupidity. Hey, perfection was not required from this little white battery-powered marvel with an oil company's name. After all, I wasn't even allowed to use it in an exam anyway (as if I would trust it). Slide rules were still allowed. Life was good. All you had to do was correctly place the decimal point.
I took a few years' detour creating the world's most spectacular parallel real-time analog color music and sound spectrum analyser on permanent display at the Boston Museum of Science called Visible Music, but that's another story.
I was involved with some in-the-clouds designs using programmable controllers for a job-shop subcontracting firm in the early eighties for IBM production line equipment. We "programmed" ladder logic devices with pneumatic wire guns on pin grids, shooting interconnections on logic circuit boards with a couple of "or" and "and" gates or flip-flops or timers per board. I barely squeaked through an Alan-Bradley certified crash course in programmable controllers (no pun intented). I had the incalculable thrill to build and program the actual first externally produced non-IBM "out-sourced" computer-based production line tester allowed to enter the IBM Endicott facility. It was a vacuum frame for a "bed o' nails" circuit board continuity tester. The computer was a Commodore Pet. That was the first time I had actually fried a circuit complete with smoke and pyrotechnics by hitting "Carriage Return" on a keyboard. It wouldn't be my last. The X-Y tables with 1/4 horse stepper motors and pneumatics were alive. Programs for different jobs were carried around in shirt pockets in EPROMS and paper tapes. The book marks in electronic data books had notes on them from the boss that ignorantly misspelled "look into microcompressors". I interfaced a computer-controlled laser resistor trimmer at IBM. That day when my boss pressed the "on" button, we smoked more computer boards in a single push than I have ever seen before or since. The computer screen jumped into an insane splay of meaningless characters. It was to Teledyne's credit that we were debugged, up and running in less than one day afterwards, watching a ballet of laser cutting on microscopic closed-circuit TV.
It wasn't until ten years after my first view of that high school nixie tube clunker that true and familiar love-hatred of computers would infect my life. Enter the Sinclair ZX-81. (to be continued...)
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