I've been working with computers for a major portion of my life. Let's see, my very first interaction with a computer was when I was 6 or 7 I think. My uncle bought a Commodore VIC20, which I eventually inherited after he moved on to the Commodore 128. Poor Commadore. Great ideas, poor management.
So I learnt to program a little bit on the VIC20. Well, as much as a 6 or 7 year-old learns to program(i.e. copy the code for the game out of the book and debug by checking for spelling errors). I was more interested in playing games. Well, I'm still very interested in playing games. I've lost many hours of sleep over games.
Anyways, that VIC20 is still kicking around the house somewhere. I plan to see if I can find it this summer when I return home from school and get a power supply for it. I'd like to hack it and see if I can get to the assembler level of it. If anyone has info on the VIC20 (I haven't had time to search www.google.com yet.) feel free to email me at [email protected]. I'll put up any info that I get or find.
After the VIC20 and a extended stint with a clone Famicom (Japanese Nintendo machine) and a Nintendo (Yes, I did have a ROB.), I somehow managed to convince my parents to buy me a computer. My family and a friend's family drove down to Vancouver and bought these 286's. Big clunker of a machine. 5 1/4" HD and 3 1/2" DD floppies (That's High Density and Double Density for those of you who have only see 3 1/2 HD's). 40 MB hard drive. I eventually I added another 40 Megs. 1 Meg of RAM. They did a crazy thing to get that 1 Meg. The RAM chips were extra long and fit over 1 and a half chip slots, thus getting the 640K plus a little bit extra. That became 4 megs later. ATI VGA card. 12 MHz, I think. I eventually bought a Roland LAPC-1 sound card for it. Wavetable while everyone was still blipping and bleeping on their 8 bit SoundBlasters. No digital effects and speech though. So I've seen and been through the rise of the sound cards.
Many enjoyable hours on the 286. Did a lot a games swapping with my friends. One of my friends had cracking software to copy some of the copy-proctected games, like some of Sierra's. Played all the Sierra games that were playable on it. The old AGI and SGI games like Kings Quest 1-4, Space Quest 1-3, Police Quest 1 and 2, Quest for Glory 1 and 2 (I played it when Quest for Glory 1 was still called Hero's Quest), etc. Ultima 6, and Wing Commander 1 and 2. Wing Commander 2 was really pushing it. It would eat up all 4 Megs of my RAM, and take up a quarter of my hard drive space. Needless to say, I got fairly good at configuring DOS. All I can say is, "many reboots". Maybe as many as Windows 95. ;)
I also managed to get a old 1200 bps modem from a friend and did some BBSing. For those of you who have only heard of the Internet, that's Bulletin Board System. You dial up another person's computer and play multi-player text-based "Door" games (with other's in relatively real time if the BBS had more that 1 line. Otherwise they were turn-based. You got so many turns per day, or session.), read mail that other's have sent you, read local newsgroups, download shareware games (like Kroz, Apogee's first game. Anyone remember Kroz? ;) ), and perhaps read FIDOnet news groups if the system was hooked up to FIDOnet. FIDOnet was(is?) a system where BBSs would call up other BBSs on the FIDOnet and exchange their local messages. Kind of like Internet packets, but without a constant connection. Usenet newsgroups I think work this way still, but the update is much faster since most Usenet servers have a constant connection. You could usually expect 1 or 2 days for the message to get to whoever you were writing too. It was interesting, but I never was, and still am not, a very active newsgroup participant.
So I hogged up the my parent's phone line. I even dialed up some BBSs out of town in search of games. You don't want to be downloading files at 1200 bps (usually less due to line noise) ever. There wasn't unlimited long distance then, so you can guess what my parents asked when they got the phone bill. Then, of course, there was the annoyance of call waiting kicking you off in the middle of a download. We got call waiting but no suspend call waiting!
That was my 286. It's still kicking around. The modem's gone (I gave it away). My father still uses it to run Accpac Simply Accounting for DOS (formerly known as Bedford Accouting) do manage the books for the local Scout district. We're a bit worried about what will happen at the end of this year with the Y2K bug. Heck! I still have 600 dollars worth of Accpac Plus sitting at home that is isn't Y2K compliant. What a waste of money. Bought it when I was taking Accounting 12 it high school. Never used it. Ahh, well.
I still use the 286 to play a few old games that are too fast to play on my new machines. I've been working on Ultima 5 for the last 4 years. I've finished 1 through 4. (As you may have noticed, I'm a fairly linear person. Do something from beginning to end.) I plan to also see if I can learn 286 assembler an it this summer.
With my involvement with BBSs, I managed to convince my parents to get me a new computer when I turned 13. Well, the deal was to be at the top of my class in Grade 7, which made it a give away, since I had been in the top of the class for all of elementary school, and would stay that way until I graduated from High school. So I got a 486DX 33 Mhz, 8 Megs RAM, 200 MB hard drive, 14400 bps external fax/modem, and a phone line. I was working for my parent's now so I could sorta pay for the long distance bill. I move the LAPC-1 from the 286. Dos 5, Windows 3.1 (not 3.11). I later added on a SoundBlaster 16 with a CD-ROM when they became popular, and (the best group of soundcards in the world) a Gravis Ultrasound (ACE, to be exact.)
Well, more games. Lots of Wing Commander. Wing Commander 2 ran a lot better. Wing Commander Academy, Wing Commander Privateer. More Sierra games. Sierra once had this sort of clearing out sale. They were selling old games at about 10 for the price of 1, or for some other cheap ass price. My parent's agreed with the idea, and a month later, TEN games arrived in the mail. Talk about knocking yourself out with fun!
I did more BBSing. 14.4 was acceptable for file downloads. For a few moments, I was the faster kid on the block. I tried my hand at running a BBS using a BBS software call Virtual BBS. 1 of the 2 shareware items that I actually paid money for. (The other is Opera, the much awesome web browser. Wish the Linux one would come out faster. Check out www.operasoftware.com) I think I still might have the registration code somewhere. I wasn't a good SysOp (Systems Operator) though. Too often I would be online myself on other BBSs and lots of times I wouldn't have the BBS online. Up until the Internet boom, I still got people phoning up my line looking for my BBS long after I had shut it down.
Then one day, by friend (Colin Haines) and I, through the gifted and enrichment program that I was a part of in school, were invited to attend this session about the Internet. Some people from Simon Fraser University (SFU) came up to talk about some system that I forgot the name to. I'll ask Colin to see if he remembers. Basically, it was a gopher server for the school districts, and was connected to the Internet. A couple months later and with a little nagging, both of us got access to the Internet via what was called a U-dial port. I think it was a phone number run by BC Tel that was a portal to the Internet. Maybe a ISDN line or something, I'm not sure. So Colin and I spend many a hour on the Internet via gopher, jumping from menu to menu. We were on the Internet before there were even graphics on the web.
I, being a much less religious person than Colin, of course, went looking for porn as soon as I found out that it was there. What else is a teenage boy to do with access to Usenet. (I couldn't post to Usenet, but I could sure read. Just download the messages, and use UUDECODE. The things you learn from FAQs.) No hardcore stuff, but for a teenage boy, nudies will work. So many late nights online after my parents were asleep or at work.
Lynx, the text based web browser, existed already, but we didn't have Lynx, so couldn't browse the then text-based web. Well, the web is still technically text-based, just with extensions to handle graphics and all sorts of other shit.
After a year or two of that, the portal got a bit unstable, or we lost access. Anyways, it was getting pretty boring. Porn gets boring if you have too much. A year or two later, came the beginning of the Internet explosion. I was still BBSing and running my BBS for a little bit before then. There was a meeting of all the local BBS SysOps about trying to get a satillite dish or something to port in the Internet (mainly Usenet) into our local BBS "network". (Maybe distributed system would be a better name.) Anyways, the fellow who's idea it was died of a heart attack that summer, and so the who thing fell apart. I think a year later, the first ISP came in. Others soon followed. Most of the ISP's were run by the local computer shops in town. One of my best friends, Brian Marshall, was working for one of the shops, so I signed up with that ISP. My parents are still working with that ISP. If you're interested, you can check out there web page at www.stardate.bc.ca.
To say the least, this meant more file downloading, and more porn. The web was much more graphical now. (Well, I didn't know that it actually used to be texted based until I found out what Lynx was.) I downloaded lots of files, and checked out lots of shareware. Apogee was still producing cool shareware games. There was Wolfenstein 3D, and later DOOM. Cool stuff for the time. With all that downloading, I was surprised that I never caught a virus.
With all that downloading though, I found that my UART wasn't a 16550. This meant that my 14.4 was running faster that my serial port could handle. Many annoying moments because of that. So my suggestion to you, get an internal modem.
It was during that time that Brian introduced me into demos. Demos are multimedia programs that tend to push the system to the limit. They're awesome display of what you can do with your computer graphically with tight code. Remember, this was before graphics accelerators; so rendering and ray-tracing was a bitch and very memory intensive. This is one of the main areas that I want to learn to program for. Demos are also why I love the Gravis Ultrasound. Besides being one of the first sound card to use wave tables, they also gave the programming specs for free. Creative Labs charged money to get there "developer's kit", so the demo programmers were on there own to figure out the Soundblaster. Also, the Ultrasound is much more efficient CPU usage wise. Which is why demo programmers of the period would have different demos for the Ultrasound than for the Soundblaster. For more info on demos, checkout out this link.
So that brings me up to the almost present. Games were getting a bit too heavy for my 486/33, 8 MB RAM, 200MB Hard drive computer. But I was going off to university soon, so I held out. Anyways, things were moving much faster. The Pentium came out, and I thought that I'd wait until the Pentium maxed out and buy the best Pentium system then. Both Brian and I thought that no one would need a Pentium Pro at the time unless you were running a server. I still think that you don't need it. I find that the biggest constraint is RAM. Bus speeds aren't fast enough to accomadate the speed of the processor, so your CPU spends lot's of its time idle. (That's why you should put those cycles to use with RC5! Check out www.distributed.net.) Think of how much computational power it takes to run a word processor. Most of the time is waiting for you to type something. The only reason that MS Word is slow is because that it's HUGE and takes up so much memory for it's bugs^H^H^H^Hfeatures. Memory access is slow. The CPU is much faster that the bus and memory speed, and bus and memory speed hasn't increased at the same speed as the CPUs have. It's simply the Von Nuemann bottleneck.
After my first year at McGill University, and I had moved out of residence and into my own place, my parents bought me a new computer. I left the old 486 at home for my sister, who never uses it. I'm going to upgrade it a bit this summer so I can run Linux(or GNU/Linux if it matters to you) on it. The Pentium had maxed out at 200 MHz, so I got a 200 MHz, 32 Megs RAM, 2 Gigabyte hard drive, Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 (S3 Virge) with 2 MB Video RAM, Gravis Ultrasound PnP Pro, 33.6 internal modem, 16X CD-ROM, and a nice 17" Acer monitor (which died on me within a year and had to be replaced). I didn't quite learn the 'more RAM is better' lesson yet. 32 Megs is not quite enough to run anything GUI (Graphical User Interface) these days, even for Linux. 2 GB isn't quite enough to run Windows 95 if you have a decent complement of programs. Win96 + Office95 + IE4 with everything takes about a 1 GB. You can try running two operating systems on it, but it's pretty tight. I eventually bought a new 6.8 GB hard drive for Linux, which is a bit overkill, but what the heck.
The Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 was the best and the greatest at the time, but the S3 Virge is very buggy. I've even heard people call it a 'video deccelerator'. Anyone willing to donate a Quantum3D Obsidian X-24? ;)
After a year of playing with Windows 95 and getting very fustrated about not being able to play many games on it, and with speed, I eventually installed Red Hat Linux on my computer. A few months of fiddling, and here I am. It works like a charm. I'm running the Enlightenment window manager, and GNOME. I can telnet from work and log onto my own computer if I leave myself connected and write down my IP address. I have all the development tools that I need, for free! I can laugh at all the WinDoze using first year Computer Science students who know nothing about *NIX systems. I never get GPF's (General Protection Faults). And I almost never have to reboot unless I recompile the kernel, which you can also do. Have a custom kernel that has only the things that you need. Want to know more about Linux, try www.linux.org.
Just the other day I installed Caldera DR-DOS so I could play the Quest for Glory Anthology. God, I hate Windows 95 memory management. I could get either sound or mouse for Quest for Glory 3, not both. STUPID! I also wiped both my hard drives clean and put in a clean install of Win95, just to run games, and a clean install of Linux, using GNOME and Enlightenment RPMs. I had been installing from CVS lately, and now feel that I really don't need to be bleeding edge. It took me a bit to get my sendmail working again, but as luck would have it, I managed to notice that sendmail.cf was referring to /usr/local/bin/procmail, as opposed to /usr/bin/procmail, where it really was. So now I can just fetchmail from all 3, soon to be 4 (as soon as I get my new ISP account with Globalserve activated), e-mail addresses and consolidate them on my home computer.
So that is the history of me and computers. I may not have been around for vacuum tubes or screwdrivers and punch cards for programming, but as for the personal computer, I've been around for most of it. Now I need to take it to the next step and learn to hack.
This document was last modified on April 3rd, 1999.