My Stories
My Stories
A friend at IBM Silicon Valley Lab, where I worked as a programmer, told me about a user group building their own computers. It was called “the Home Brew Club” named after brewing your own beer. They weren’t brewing beer but making their own computers.
They meet at Stanford SLAC’s very large lecture hall. Being a main frame computer programmer, I wanted my own computer just like all the other club members. In those days, you could not buy a computer, you either built your own, or bought a kit and assembled it yourself. There were two kits available, MITS had Altair in New Mexico and Processor Technology had IMSAI made in Silicon Valley. They were both cost about $600. I was trying to decide which to buy.
My wife and daughter would come with me.
My daughter told me that her friend’s father was building an IMSAI. I immediately ran to his house and yes he was building an IMSAI and yes he needed help. He was a hardware guy and needed a software guy. I volunteered. He lived in a large 2 story house and had floored the attic. He worked in the attic.
Jerome’s manager at San Jose IBM thought it was a good idea as a learning tool to have the his department buy a computer kit and have each member soldier one of the boards.
When they completed the soldering, they assembled it and turned it on. Great disappointment, nothing no blinking lights dead.
So the manager decided to have Jerome trouble shoot the computer. He installed it in his attic. He quickly find out that at least half or more for his fellow department guys could not solder. Lots of cold solder joints so every night after work Jerome spent the evening resoldering every board.
When I arrived, he had finished the resoldering and was in the process of debugging. It was so exciting! There was no such thing as persistent memory. There as a row of switches on the front panel. First you entered the command via the switches in hexadecimal and hit DEPOSIT . Then flipped the switches for the address in memory you want it to load to. After doing this 10 to 15 times, you would hit “run”. If you did it correctly, The floppy drive would come alive and read the boot program and the screen would start showing a blinking curser.
As soon as a Jerome had the computer up and running, he would call me so I could type in a program. I decided to type in a BASIC program called “Guess a number between 1 and 100” because it was very short. It used a random number generator to generate a number. Then the program asked uses to type in their guessed number and the program answered telling the user if they were too high or low.
So when Jerome called, I would 6 houses down only to be greeted by him with a sad face tell me the computer had crashed. I would follow him up to the attic and watch him troubleshoot. That’s how I learned hardware.
It was winter and it was bloody cold in the attic since there was no heat. The house had a tile roof and you could see lots of spaces between tiles.
This went on for several months him calling me telling me the computer was up but by the time I got there it had crashed.
My wife became of this experience was dead set against me building my own computer.
I was very excited when I heard about the West Coast Computer Faire to be held in San Francisco in April 1977.
Phyllis and I attended and saw a Commodore PET. I immediately started typing in BASIC program. I was wowed! It had a screen, keyboard, and tape recorder all in one. They asked me if I would like to have more hands on time. They had set up a room in a near by hotel with 8 computers. Phyllis and I went over and spent another hour programming. Being completely sold, we immediately ordered it for $800.
I could have bought an Apple II or Radio Shack TRS-80, but they came in three pieces, CPU, keyboard and tape drive where as the PET was one unit.
Almost buying an Apple I
Steve offering a completed mother board
Building an ISAM
Buy my first computer
West Coast computer Faire
Visical
Lotus 123
IBM Stories
To write IBM PC DOS manual
Host Data Base View
Visual SQL builder
Air Force Stories
Mother and the Navy
Germany
Firing a Minute Man Missle down the western test range
Almost an engineer on MOL project
Vintage computer Fairs
IBM Adventure Game
Pen Based Computers - Apple Newton, Handspring and Palm
once upon a time
