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Computer Folklore, Circa 1984 180

Posted by timothy from the and-counting dept.
savetz writes "The full text of the classic 1984 computer book Digital Deli, The Comprehensive, User-Lovable Menu of Computer Lore, Culture, Lifestyles and Fancy, is now on the Web. (Autstralian mirror) A wonderful look at technology culture in the golden age of the microcomputer. 20 other old computer books are at the site, too."
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Computer Folklore, Circa 1984 More

Computer Folklore, Circa 1984

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  • Other books. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by saintlupus ( 227599 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @06:23PM (#7589678)
    De Re Atari.

    Holy shit.

    That was one of the first "serious" computer books I ever got -- I won a copy as a door prize at an Atari user's group meeting when I was about 12 years old. By the time I was done figuring out what all that crap in the back of Compute's Gazette was doing, my copy of DRA was so dog eared and broken spined that it couldn't sit flat on my desk.

    Good memories. Glad to see it's still around somewhere.

    --saint

    • Correction. (Score:2, Informative)

      by saintlupus ( 227599 )
      By the time I was done figuring out what all that crap in the back of Compute's Gazette was doing

      I meant Analog and Antic of course, not Compute's Gazette. Sorry, I had a C64 before I got my Atari 400 at a garage sale.

      Not that it matters, but I figured I'd try to head off the hordes of whiny nitpickers pointing out that Gazette was all Commodore code.

      --saint
      • Have you ever heard of the Spectrum ZX? (i think its ZX, maybe its Z80, i dunno) That was the first computer I ever had. My friend had a C64 and I can remember playing Gauntlet for hours. Now I have Gauntlet on my iPAQ. My how things have changed. *sigh*
        • Speccie was ZX. Z80 was a CPU used in just about everything in the early 80s... along with the 6809, then the 68000.

        • Re:Correction. (Score:3, Informative)

          by ksp ( 203038 )
          Sinclair Research first created the ZX80, then the ZX81 and then the ZX Spectrum. I believe they were all created around the Zilog Z80 processor (as were other home computers such as the Jupiter Ace which used Forth instead of BASIC !).

          The ZX80 used a Z80 CPU clone running at 3.5 MHz and was delivered with 1KB or RAM, expandable up to 16KB.
          ZX Spectrum featured 16KB of RAM (upgradable to 48K) and color display.

          See http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Systems / Sinclair

          • Re:Correction. (Score:3, Informative)

            by EricTheRed ( 5613 )
            Yes, they were all Z80 based (the first processor I wrote Assembly for).

            The Jupiter Ace was a Sinclair ZX81 clone (the major difference was a white not black case), and having Forth instead of Basic as interesting. It's still a machine I'm trying to get my hands on for the collection I have of 80's computer history.

            As for the Spectrum, there was a very good book called "The Complete Spectrum Dissassembly" where someone dissassembled the entire rom. Priceless when programming on that machine as you could u
        • Manic Miner [lovely.net](and other spectrum games online)
    • I was in my mother's attic over Thanksgiving, and came across my box of Atari 400 stuff. Yep, among the books was De Re Atari. That book changed my life: before, I was just doggedly typing in BASIC programs from magazines; after, I was inventing programs, hand-coding machine language DATA statements, PEEKing and POKEing all sorts of funky effects onto my TV screen. I wrote an arcade game to play with my brother (and rigged my "fire" button to help me cheat to win). I did player-missile graphics. I watc

  • Full Book Text Online (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SalsaFrontier ( 717084 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @06:24PM (#7589687)
    I love how many books are becoming available in their entirety online. It gives an open-source advocate a warm fuzzy feeling.

  • Heh, Xerox (Score:5, Funny)

    by SirDaShadow ( 603846 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @06:27PM (#7589702)
    "X" is for Xerox: the word processor's friend. Even though your computer printer will gladly produce 340 copies of your 430-page report, it could have a coronary at the end. If you use a slow daisy wheel printer (one page every few minutes), this might take over two hundred days to print nonstop. A special benefit for dot matrix users is that xeroxing makes the dots fill in nicely to look more like letter-quality hard copy.

    Wow. One page every few minutes. And users complain because their laser printer takes 20-30 seconds to warm up...

    • Re:Heh, Xerox (Score:3, Insightful)

      by whiteranger99x ( 235024 )
      Wow. One page every few minutes. And users complain because their laser printer takes 20-30 seconds to warm up...

      I know what you mean and when you think about it, aren't there times that we still think "God, can't this thing go any faster?!", knowing full well that had we used said device (eg. printers, modems, CPUs, storage, etc) say 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago, we would be waiting a LOT longer than we do now.

      It's a matter of perception, much like watching a boiling pot.

    • Re:Heh, Xerox (Score:4, Funny)

      by SmackCrackandPot ( 641205 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @07:59PM (#7590101)
      Wow. One page every few minutes. And users complain because their laser printer takes 20-30 seconds to warm up...

      Back in the 80's, when all we had was the Atari dot matrix printer, our neighbors once asked about the strange noise they kept hearing in the early evenings and on the weekends (we lived in terraced housing). Every time a listing or screen dump was printed out, they thought we were using some kind of machine to strip the wallpaper off the walls.
    • Wow, I remember when my Dad's office got two new dot matrix printers waaaay back... they were promptly installed into a large box with some sound-proofing because they were so loud. =)

  • Another website is here... (Score:3, Informative)

    by dagg ( 153577 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @06:28PM (#7589706) Journal
    The Digital Deli Online [digitaldeliftp.com]

  • Wonderful stuff (Score:5, Interesting)

    by heironymouscoward ( 683461 ) <heironymouscowar ... m ['oo.' in gap]> on Saturday November 29, 2003 @06:29PM (#7589709) Journal
    Love it: this book was published on the same year I graduated in CompSci and went into business as a programmer.

    Especially cool, the retro views on technology, I found. Yoda back strikes.

    Like the one on computer safety [atariarchives.org]. I mean, how many people actually take a break every 30 minutes to avoid damaging their eyes?
    • I suspect that taking a break every 30 minutes would seem a lot more reasonable back then, when monitors were hardly as ergonomic as they are now.

      You think a 60Hz vertical refresh is bad? I'm sure that would've been luxurious 20 years ago.
    • Drink lots of water. That's what I do. That forces me to take a toilet break every 45 or so minutes thus ensuring that I get to stretch by taking a walk to the toilet AND my eyes get a rest.

    • Computers probably do cause birth defects (Score:4, Funny)

      by Julian Morrison ( 5575 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @09:58PM (#7590533)
      ...it's just that the heaviest users are all virgins, so nobody's had an opportunity to notice.

    • Like the one on computer safety. I mean, how many people actually take a break every 30 minutes to avoid damaging their eyes?

      More like every 30 days

    • Like the one on computer safety. I mean, how many people actually take a break every 30 minutes to avoid damaging their eyes?

      Not as many as then, I suspect.
      You have to remember that there is quite a difference between staring at an old-green on black, updating at 50 Hz and a modern monitor with a 72+ Hz refresh rate, and much lower levels of non-visible radiation emissions.

      I certainly remember my first 70 Hz monitor.. it felt so soothing to the eyes in comparison!

  • Textfiles (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Doomrat ( 615771 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @06:29PM (#7589713) Homepage
    http://textfiles.com/ [textfiles.com] is another fantastic, wonderful resource and window into computer-ages long gone. Check out the top 100 - especially the Captain Midnight [textfiles.com] story. My kids will be getting this read to them before bedtime some day.
    • Thanks for the linkage...nice story!
      I think I'll be off to bed now! :-)

    • Why?
      Someguy pushed a button and sent a signal because his business was failing do to a short cited business decsion.
      Isn't like he had to go from house to house in the dead of night to wake people and warn them that the oppress invaders were here.

      • Re:Textfiles (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Doomrat ( 615771 )

        Yeah, a bit like that story where some guy went to a mountain and threw a ring in some fire.

        Sometimes the best part of a story is in the telling, you unimaginative sod.

  • magazines (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tobes ( 302057 ) * <tobypadilla@gmail.cTEAom minus caffeine> on Saturday November 29, 2003 @06:34PM (#7589733) Homepage
    I miss all of the old computer magazines. Nothing like having BASIC embedded in your articles. I think Compute was my all time favorite.
    • Oh yes. I remember spending hours typing in the programs in the back of those magazines just to play some cheesy game.

      100 POKE 10,25

      CHECKSUM 2A
      • Even better was when the code was hex instead of BASIC. Oh, the hours of fun entering those unreadable programs! (This is at least partly sarcastic, heh.) My favorites were Compute and Compute's Gazette, and Ahoy. Yeah, I was a Commodore kid.

  • The Secret Guide to Computers (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jvschwarz ( 92288 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @06:40PM (#7589755)
    The Secret Guide to Computers by Russ Walter was my personal old computer book favorite, I remember checking it out of the library, it had tons of great info about all different kinds of computers. Great writing sytle, kept your attention and was funny! I recall he had his home phone number in it too...

    I wonder if it's still published... off to Google!

    • Its not an old one, but I like Charles Petzold's book, Code: the Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software. There's a great example about dolphins learning (binary) math on their flippers. I WISH I'd had it back when.

  • Introduction to Networking (QUE) (Score:5, Funny)

    by Lobo_Louie ( 545789 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @06:46PM (#7589783)
    I have an old (~1994?) Introduction to Networking (QUE) text in which it says TCP/IP is a standard that will more or less fade because the DOD insists that future protocols comply with GOSIP (Government OSI Profile). Nice call QUE!

  • 1984 has all the new tech (Score:5, Insightful)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @06:47PM (#7589789)
    1984 is not that old, the Mac and IBM PC were already out, for heaven's sake! 1984 is long after real classics like the Kim-1 [commodore.ca], Sinclair ZX80 [wikipedia.org], and Apple II [apple2history.org] appeared. The real golden age of microcomputing was when you could fit the entire OS, basic interpreter and maybe a game or two into 8 K of RAM. Back then, a budding nerd could easily understand what every single chip and instruction did.

    Real men use PEEK, POKE, and GOTO!
    • Back then, a budding nerd could easily understand what every single chip and instruction did.

      Back then? I've started wire-wrapping a V20 (8088+) from scratch just to get that warm fuzzy total-control feeling again. Maybe once I get the hard drive and Ethernet going, I'll put it on the net and let it get slashdotted .. or maybe I won't destroy it right away.

      It's going to have an LED front panel! W00HOO!

      • hard disk? CPM-86 with a MFM / RLL drive? or do they have drivers for newer disks?
        • A 250M IDE drive. You can hang one off of a few parallel ports like this one [pjrc.com] although I'll be using the V20's block I/O and the 8255's handshake mode. Drivers? I'm doing this from scratch : Hardware, drivers, kernal, maybe a compiler... (I will probably cheat and use an existing IP stack. No sense being completely crazy. :^)

          I have a hardware/low-level jones, and it's been years since I've had a fix.

          • wow - that will make for a few years of work. Been 20 years since I've done wirewrap & breadboarding, with 6800 and Z80. Lately have been thinking of real circuit-building again and have been learning hardware description and simulation langauges. Been looking at all these FPGA popping up, might burn my own CPU someday....
    • Real men use PEEK, POKE, and GOTO!

      They still do! They just employ it on other people as opposed to computers and chips ;)

    • Re:1984 has all the new tech (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Basehart ( 633304 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @07:39PM (#7590021)
      Talking of 1984, and Mac, I was in a Bank Of America in downtown Seattle this morning and the customer service booth had a Macintosh Plus as its main console. I remarked on how cool it was to be using such a classic computer in such a modern banking environment to which the employee said "nah, we'll be getting rid of these old things next month".

      I asked if a new Mac would be replacing the old Mac they've been using every day for the past fifteen years, alas no. A Dell will be there for the next fifteen years, not a Mac.
      • You know, I saw the same thing at BofA branch on Capitol Hill (Seattle). Macintosh SE's, circa 1988. But they were actually using the Mac's only as terminal emulators -- the screen was filled with a TN3270 or something similar. No vintage Mac graphical banking program, I'm afraid.
      • I have trouble believing a dell will last 15 years. I give it 5.. max.

        Says alot about reliability doesnt it. Once lasted 15 years, now lasts 15 months..

  • Fire in the Valley (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jonathan ( 5011 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @06:50PM (#7589809) Homepage
    1984 was also the year that the first edition of "Fire in the Valley" came out. "Fire in the Valley" was the the most popular history of the personal computer in the '80s. What was amusing in retrospect was that in 1984 we thought the history of personal computers was basically over -- personal computers had gone from labs and the garages of hobbyists to the homes and offices of "normal" people. Looking backward, of course, 1984 seems almost as remote as the introduction of the Altair in 1975.

  • "Net Speak" (Score:5, Funny)

    by penguinboy ( 35085 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @06:52PM (#7589820)

    Reading through this article, I spotted this bit:

    "Whenever there's a lull in the conversation, some fool Atari owner invariably throws out the telecommunications equivalent of "What's your sign?":

    WHAT R U ALL USING?

    Interesting to see that while parents today complain about their kids using incomprehensible speech in IM, their generatation was doing it 20 years ago (and it was just as looked-down on then).

    • We were doing that back in 1972. Of course, we were using ASR-33 Teletypes and didn't have any lower case or keyboard rollover. We had it rough...

    • Re:"Net Speak" (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The page he is referring to is located here [atariarchives.org]

  • Oh, so that's what happened (Score:5, Informative)

    by ch-chuck ( 9622 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @07:01PM (#7589867) Homepage
    one mystery cleared up: I had always wondered how Byte Magazine, started by Wayne Green, ended up as his (ex) wife's property:

    Because he was in the middle of an IRS audit and did not wish to have his new venture involved, Wayne registered the magazine in his wife's name. As it turned out, this was a serious error. No one except those involved will ever know just what happened, but when the smoke cleared Wayne still had 73 magazine and his ex-wife, now married to a German gentleman, had Byte, with Carl Helmers as the editor.

    doh!

    • Re:Oh, so that's what happened (Score:4, Informative)

      by AndroidCat ( 229562 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @07:08PM (#7589893) Homepage
      It got stranger than that. Wayne Green was then going to start a magazine called Kilobyte. Byte, to block him, ran a really bad comic called Kilobyte and trademarked it.

      So Wayne Green started Kilobaud instead, and Byte dropped the comic right afterwards.

    • Re:Oh, so that's what happened (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      With all due respect, Wayne Green [waynegreen.com] is one fucked up dude. Yes, that is the URL to the website of *the* Wayne Green.. the guy who started Byte magazine. The last I looked he was promoting collodal silver as a cure all for whatever ails you. A total whacko. Zen zen kurutteru.

  • Whoa... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29, 2003 @07:03PM (#7589875)
    And with the introduction of Apple's next generation of easy-to-use 32-bit computers in the Lisa/ Macintosh series, the Apple culture seems destined to grow and flourish.

    I guess there was a time apple wasn't doomed.
  • The day local subscribers are offered digital phones is not far off. With divestiture, the offspring of AT&T can feel the hot breath of competition on their necks for the first time. These AT&T orphans will be offering a whole gamut of new products and services-lest someone else do it first.

    Answering the phone could become a major decision as you struggle to remember whose number is showing on the display and whether this person is owed any money.

    Not that there will be any real reason to leave the house. With the right peripherals, shopping will be no problem. Merchants will be able to fax their catalogs over the phone. And you'll be able to use the phone to make the bank transfers to pay for the stuff. Indeed, whole appliance factories could be rigged to "build on order."

  • The advanced user guide to the BBC micro (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Space cowboy ( 13680 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @07:18PM (#7589939) Journal
    ... was my favourite. A *really* well designed OS on a 1MHz machine, with the basic having simple interfaces to the OS routines and the built-in assembler. Absolutely fantastic machine for its day, and this book laid it all bare.

    [grin] I remember using that and the network guide to load up *SAY across the network ont remote computers at college :-) Students (who really weren't that computer-savvy back then) would freak out if their computer started to "talk" to them...

    Simon.

    • The Beeb ran at 2 MHz. Or to be precise, we can go to the very book you cite, page 494:

      A 2 MHz clock is applied to the CPU, but this can be stretched into a 1 MHz clock when slow peripherals such as the 6522s are being accessed.

      I agree that the book is excellent. When I first got it, I read it from cover to cover on a long coach journey. "Ooh look, if I grab that vector I can extend the VDU driver capabilities!"

      I've always felt that the BBC micro architecture was the most elegant and powerful to a

      • I knew someone would pick me up over that - I realised once I'd written it, but /. doesn't allow edits :-(

        Simon.
      • Oh, yes! A wonderful book - concise, well-arranged, technical but manageable, and packed with the highest density of usable and vital information in any book I've ever seen. I got it for Christmas. It was a good Christmas holiday!

        But then, the book is no less than the machine deserved. Amazingly well-designed, with a breadth of imagination and planning that was orders of magnitude beyond other micros. Mine became the centre of a music system, with a synthesiser module, keyboard, an analogue joystick

    • The BBC micro had a 2 MHz 6502, making it faster than most of its competitors.

  • Bill Gates' article (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JohnGrahamCumming ( 684871 ) * <slashdot@ j g c . o rg> on Saturday November 29, 2003 @07:19PM (#7589941) Homepage Journal
    The book contains a short piece by Bill Gates (here: http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/soft.php) and reproduced below. It's an interesting read because I still hear him talk about similar themes even today.

    ------------------

    Today's software is too hard. Usually designed to work well for any and all potential buyers, a few years and hundreds of hours of interaction later a software package will still interface with you exactly as it did at the time of purchase. Your special use may make some uncommon program command the one most often employed, but you'll have to punch any number of extra keys every time you invoke it. Today's software fails to remold itself to express a history of use, and this can lead to incredible inefficiency.
    There are programs that allow the advanced user to adjust default values, which are those responses the programmer decided would be most typical for users of a specific application when the software was first booted up. There are also programs that can store a series of often invoked keystrokes and can tell the machine to take the sequence you've named and perform it again. These keyboard macros, the most trivial form of softer software, force you to go through a special set of operations to enter and record changes to the program.
    Why shouldn't software automatically adapt to your needs, e.g., learn from experience to change the interpretation of a command, when this is done on a human level all the time? In-human-to-human communication, we adapt our terminology and our method of understanding to our previous history of interaction with each individual. There's no reason computer software should not be as flexible.
    "Softer software" is the term I invented to avoid using the poorly understood term "artificial intelligence." In fact, it is a form of artificial intelligence, though not like speech recognition or the expert data base systems that are based on specific algorithms and do not really learn dynamically. Softer software is capable of getting better and better because it has advanced pattern recognition capabilities and can change its performance accordingly.
    In general, making software softer requires storing information about a user's history of program commands and analyzing its patterns. This is a form of learning, since the software can build expectations of what the user may do later. Individual characteristics of users, what they're good at and what they're not good at, can be used to establish a reasonably unique dialogue with the computer.
    A data management program, for example, could recognize that you always query its files by employee name rather than by an individual's address or hair color. Taking advantage of this pattern and predicting what will be your most common operations on data, the program could customize its query file structure to put information within easier reach. Or maybe it could learn to be forgiving of your most common keyboard mistakes by ignoring misspellings.
    Software softness becomes very difficult when recognizing semantics rather than specific operations is required. Say you go into a document, move the mouse to bring the cursor to a certain position and make a word boldface, then go to another position and do it again. Instead of storing up the exact positions where this takes place and trying to match them to later entries pixel by pixel, you may want your software to draw the general conclusion that you boldface the first word in a paragraph and to position the cursor appropriately. Matching things, recording and playing them back at the semantic level: this is the hard part of softening software.
    It is possible to say that we have certain types of softness built into software today and that over time we will see a clear progression as programs record a greater number of user events, recognizing more general patterns and building up the dialogue throughout the computer's history. Truly softer software is still some years away, but we are on an evolutionary path where at som
    • And of course, you can see where this line of thought took Microsoft. Clippy. Microsoft Bob. At least the latter got Gates laid.
      ^_^
      • It's also brought "adaptive menus" in MS Office, IE and Windows; the menu options you use a lot are visible, the rest are hidden until you move your mouse to the bottom of the menu, where a double arrow shows that more options are there. So if you save a document a lot but don't print so often, you see "Save..." there when you choose the File menu, but no "Print...". This works sometimes but most of times, doesn't.

        I'm not sure if it jumbles up the menu options as well, putting the most used ones at the top
        • It doesn't re-order the menu options BTW.

          Adaptive menus are an interesting thing, probably the biggest complaint that I would have is that their memory of what to show is too short. I would estimate that around 1/3 of the time, I'm having to tell it to show me the rest of the commands on the menu. Whereas I would prefer that to be only 1/10th or 1/20th of the time.

          A bigger beef that I have with Windows 2000/XP interface-style is that they've removed underlines from menus and dialogs (unless you hold d
          • Actually, you can also change Windows so that the shortcut key ("Keyboard Navigation indicators") is always shown. In Windows 2000 this option can be found in Display Properties, Effects. In WinXP it's Display Properties - Appearance - Effects. Here's a page [theeldergeek.com] that shows how to find this menu item in WinXP, see the UI-51 figure.
        • So much of the interaction with the menus becomes automatic, muscle memory, that when the adaptive menus are enabled I think it slowes me down.
  • ...for those good old days when computers weren't trendy, just good fun.

  • Old Computer Books (Score:4, Informative)

    by Usquebaugh ( 230216 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @07:23PM (#7589966)
    Jesus, I stated on a ZX-81 and went to work in '85.

    I still have the first computer book I ever bought. Electronic Data Processing by Glyn Emery Pitman. Published in 1968.

    Anybody who thinks computers are cool technology should dig up this book or one like it. They had everything back then, we've been treading water for 30+ years.
    • IBM 1130. Punched cards. 1971.

      What a stupid instruction set. Life didn't get good until I'd worked past PDP-8's and got onto PDP-11's
      and it's been all downhill since then.

      Segments are for worms. BALR this, bitch.
      • IBM 360/20 in 1970, language was RPG.

        Huge leap in 1971 to an IBM System 3/Model 10, one if the first mid-range computers, still RPGII, but used the 98-hole square punch cards with the round holes (still have a couple of cartons of these).

        Then HP3000, IBM 8100, PC's, lots of languages...

        What a ride !
    • The book that turned me on to computers at age 12 was "Programming the IBM 1620 - the Hands on Approach". I checked it out of the library 4 or 5 times to study it.

      I started actually programming a year later with Z-80 assembler on a TRS-80 model 1. Never did like or write any BASIC.

      First programming for pay: as a "summer student" was coding in Fortran under NOS on a cluster of Cyber 875 & 175, I think about 1983.

      The only thing really new & cool since then is being able to own a computer or six, b

  • Interesting passage on Piracy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bogie ( 31020 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @07:24PM (#7589968) Journal
    He sure was dead on about the future. Quote Below:

    They call us pirates and worse. They lock up their programs behind hardware and software schemes. They set the minions of the law upon us. And still we flourish by our wiles.
    Ahoy, ye microlubbers: to pirate a program is not to steal, but to liberate knowledge. We don't take money or goods from anyone; we merely free up information. Most of us don't profit from our buccaneering activities; instead, we share the wealth with our fellow computer users.
    The software moguls have only themselves to blame for our cracking open the bars to their programs. If they didn't charge a king's ransom for disks that cost a pittance to duplicate, there would be little incentive for us to practice our skills. There would be no need for them to protect their programs if software were no more expensive than what you and I can afford to pay.
    We are no longer in the Dark Ages of personal software, when so few people used computers that program development costs had to be defrayed by high unit prices. Now so many microcomputers are in use that a program should cost no more than a lightweight paperback novel. Instead, we are paying illuminated manuscript prices.
    Maybe someday the software publishers will understand how they're killing off the golden goose. But until that time, be warned: there will be many a pirate's flag on the software horizon.

    JOLLY ROGER

    • Interesting thoughts on the future (Score:5, Interesting)

      by SmackCrackandPot ( 641205 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @08:33PM (#7590224)
      Here's another prediction for the future that came true:

      From Computer Animation Primer (published 1984) [atariarchives.org]:
      By David Fox and Mitchell Waite

      Some of today's most sophisticated special effects utilize shading techniques. The use of transparency, surface detail, shadows, texture and reflections are more of an art than a science. Although it is difficult to imagine how these techniques will one day be simplified, it is almost certain that they will. Perhaps LSI chips (large scale integration -- the technique used to make microprocessors) will be developed that apply shading algorithms to user-generated scenes.

  • Wow...articles by Stan Veit! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jejones ( 115979 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @07:27PM (#7589980) Journal
    Mr. Veit was the original editor of Computer Shopper, which in the age before the Web was widespread was a moderately thick newsprint tabloid which covered a wonderful variety of computer hardware and software. By the time it was sucked up into the infamous Ziff-Davis machine, the PClone had largely won, but the Shopper still had several columnists in a "Classic Computers" section. Z-D put an end to that, making it a PClone-only rag that, while it was still useful for finding good deals and even, for a while, ran columns by Mr. Veit, had lost its soul.

    CS grew fat--I think I've saved one of the astonishingly heavy issues from the era of its maximum thickness--but the Web is finally killing it off, as it is now a vastly better and more up-to-date source of deals and prices than a dead-tree magazine can possibly be. The stray pontificators that write for it suffer from the same lag problems, and one is better off reading hardware sites, tech-related blogs, and sites like Slashdot. (Goodness knows that "The Hard Edge" suffers from the terminal self-indulgence that Strunk and White decry and that crowds out space that the column should devote to useful information.) CS is now a pale shadow of its former deforesting self, and I wonder how much time it has left as a dead-tree magazine.

  • Early Computer Simplicity made for more fun (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Cryofan ( 194126 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @07:39PM (#7590027) Journal
    The computers and the software were simply, it seems. And that simplicity made for more fun.

  • What's the olderst computer you still have? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wolfdvh ( 700954 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @08:28PM (#7590199)
    My first computer was a tan case Osborne 1. It was about half the price of an IBM and much more capable.

    I still have it and the original loose leaf owners manual. It isn't 'stock' since in addition to the Osborne approved upgrades, I added a 8088 daughter board with a meg of memory to run MS DOS 2.0 programs. The 8088 and DOS were worthless but the 1 meg of RAM used as a RAM disk made it faster than DOS machines until 8Mhz AT clase machines came out with a 286 processor.

    I should go out to the garage and fetch it. I have not booted it up in a long time. It is responsible for starting me in my present occupation.

    • The oldest is a Research Machines Z80 (Blue/White cased cassette based version not the black floppy based one) dating to 1979.

      However it wasn't my first (only bought it in 94) - that was the TI-99/4A back in 1981 which was a 16bit machine! I then went down to a ZX81 as I could do more with that.

      Still I wished I had the knowledge then as there was a hardware hack for the TI as it's graphics chip had a video in pin and you could (in theory) mod it to act as a genlock and overlay graphics over video (which w
  • I used to have a funny book called "Micromania" which was a satire on use of computers.

    The best bits were the "laws" like: Whatever reason you give for buying a computer, you'll end up playing games on it.

    I'd love to get a copy of the book as I lost mine.

  • spock cover (Score:4, Informative)

    by kalinh ( 167661 ) on Saturday November 29, 2003 @08:52PM (#7590285) Homepage

    This image [atariarchives.org] alone is worth the visit to the site. Interesting background too:

    In any event, the original Best of CC had Mr. Spock on the cover. However, a few years later when we needed more books, Paramount was getting nasty about the use of Star Trek characters without a proper license. Initially we were under their radar screen, but we would have had to pay them mucho $$$ for the larger press run of the reprint book, so we needed another cover. The cover illustration I used had been used on an issue of the magazine (can't remember which issue) but the printer had mixed up two of the color negatives (cyan and magenta), so it looked a bit strange. Needless to say, the artist was rather unhappy with the outcome as was I, so I decided to use the same illustration, this time with the correct colors, on the cover of the book.

    It's been a long time since computer books were so underground that they could publish with copyrighted images on the front covers. Actually, it's been a long time since underground publications period could get away with this.

  • Wow, what an annoying format (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Anybody have a copy of this in a better format? I'd like to print it out so I don't have to read it on-line, but it looks like someone typed in the whole book and converted it to HTML (in about 8 billion chapters). What a HUGE pain in the ass, and extremely un-accessable to people.

    Anybody got this in PDF or OpenOffice format?
  • i have this burided somewhere in a pile of pulp and ink, but it would be great (especially given the subject matter and nelson's foresight) to have this in digital form...

  • I coulda had a hardcopy. (Score:3, Funny)

    by RenaissanceGeek ( 668842 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [grebmloh.ssor]> on Saturday November 29, 2003 @10:13PM (#7590590)
    I was just at a local library book sale and saw a copy of this.

    It was a paperback, so it would've been $0.10.

    And I didn't pick it up, because my arms were already kind of full, and it wouln't have fit into the stack very well. (that, and I thought that it looked kind of useless.)

    If only i had known that this was HISTORY that I was looking at (and not 10-year-old cruft),I would have surely bought it.

    *ARRGH*!!
  • "I predict that within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them" - Professor Frink
  • Wow! Haven't seen--or thought about--one of those in years. That's the almost-as-good-as-a-PC that got me through college. I was hot s*** with my 256k RAM, dual floppies, and green monochrome monitor.

    I remember ditching the bundled Valdocs program (spreadsheet + word processor), since it only ran on the Epson and I couldn't use it on the university's lab PCs. Switched to having (WordStar|WordPerfect|SuperCalc) in one 5.25" drive, and my data disk in the other, and toting the disks around campus.

    Come to

  • I have this book, in print. It's one of my favorites. I go to sleep reading it all the time. I'm glad that others get to read this fantastic classic.

  • 1984 Memory Requirements (Score:3, Interesting)

    by theonetruekeebler ( 60888 ) on Sunday November 30, 2003 @07:13AM (#7591954) Homepage Journal
    From one of cited books [atariarchives.org]:
    The longer programs, especially THE CITADEL OF PERSHU and CHATEAU GAILLARD, take up a fair amount of memory: almost 20K for the first, and close to 25K for the second. If memory is in short supply on your system, see Chapter 19 for some hints on how to "compress" the amount of memory the programs require.
    If more programmers today realized what can be done in that amount of memory, or better yet had to spend a few months programming in such an environment before being allowed to touch a "real" computer, I'm thinking we would have far more stable and efficient software today.

    As an aside, it was interesting to see the introduction to this book making note of the variants of BASIC out there, and how to adapt the programs to each one. I was an Atari bigot back then (at the righteous age of 12), and remember ignoring articles that primarily targeted other, inferior, machines.

  • Some great looks forward: (Score:5, Interesting)

    by theonetruekeebler ( 60888 ) on Sunday November 30, 2003 @07:25AM (#7591973) Homepage Journal
    It amazes me how thoroughly 1984's personal computer futurists missed the idea of an internet. From one of the articles [atariarchives.org]:
    • When it comes time to list the century's great orphaned ideas, the computerized checkbook will rank with the lava lamp. I can't remember the last time I wrote a physical check to pay a bill.
    • "Family budget spreadsheet" programs exist because somewhere along the line software makers got confused between "the American family" and "the limited partnership." Quicken. Quicken Quicken Quicken.
    • Next we come to the computerized electronic calendar...If I relied only on what I could put in an electronic address book, my personal relationships, would fall apart. The other problem, of course, is that electronic address books don't fit in your pocket. Not only did he miss the PDA, he cited the reason he missed the PDA.
    • A subset of this silliness [on-line chatting] involves phone-line news services... At the average rate of $25 per hour, you can order up in just a few hours the equivalent of a year's subscription to the New York Times, which gives you grocery coupons and stuff with which to line bird cages. Hoo boy. I pay about $50/month for good DSL and read the news from five different sources every day, cross check two or three different weather reports, and waste unlimited amounts of time here. This guy didn't just miss the Internet, he missed BBSes.

    I'm wondering which of today's slammed-on technology waves will actually take hold ten years from now. If I could figure it out, I'd be rich enough to pay somebody to waste time here for me.

    • It amazes me how thoroughly 1984's personal computer futurists missed the idea of an internet.

      They didn't. An excellent book published in the UK during the early 80's was Anthony Hyman's "The Coming of the Chip". This book was published at the time when integrated circuits were becoming large enough to contain entire processors on a single chip. The book was split into 12 chapters, each of which dealt with different aspects of the revolution:

      1. Introduction: The coming of the chip (Flat screens replac

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