Silicon Nostalgia

John Harrison, Pastor of the United Methodist Churches of Sheldon, Bronaugh, and Moundville, Missouri and author of Learning to Float writes in response to my blogging about a site about the KayPro computer:

I bought my first computer in 1984, a Kaypro 4-84, back when we thought 64K was a heckuva lot of RAM, and who needed hard drives, anyway? That machine did quite a bit of work for me as a managing editor for a financial newspaper, and then it got me through three years of seminary. Even as low-powered as they were, they were workhorse machines for word processing and spread-sheeting. Although I have gone through five computers since then, I still have that eighteen-year-old machine with me.

I gave mine up when I got my first IBM PC (actually a Zenith … such an early model that there were hand-soldered wires on the motherboard to correct some recently-discovered bugs). I typed my wife’s dissertation on the KayPro, wrote an endless series of articles and columns and papers, and learned how computers worked. One of the great things about the KayPro (caution: Old Timer story about to commence) was that they were simple enough, in both their hardware and software, for a beginner to figure out. Assembly language for the Z80 chip wasn’t all that arcane, whereas you need a doctoral degree, an oscilloscope and a miner’s hat to figure out how to program one of the modern Intel chips. And you could get a map of the KayPro motherboard, neatly labeled, from MicroCornucopia and actually understand the electronics — sort of like tracing routes on a map of the NYC subway system. Ah, for the good old days when I had to trim a vowel from the help screen for a file manager I’d written in order to keep it under 4K.

On the other hand, I love my 1.7gH PC with the ludicrous 512MB of RAM it needs to run well. I still watch the graphics of games like Castle Wolfenstein, Ghost Recon and Serious Sam in awe. Rather than having one or two “terminate and stay resident” programs in the background, I routinely have 10-15 apps open on my desktop at a time. And it makes me giddy to think that even our best machines are banging rocks together compared to what’s to come. Give me more!

Categories: Uncategorized dw