6:20am – UA Flight # 77 – Seat 11c

Destination: Dallas by way of Denver

Note One – I have discovered I can’t write a short blog entry. I am the Stephen King of bloggers - in length only, not style, creativity or quality.

Note Two – I started this blog on the said flight, I finished it 1 day later in the airport waiting for a flight to Oklahoma City.

Connecting through Denver made me thing back to when I used to live here. I actually lived out in the burbs in Littleton, Co - the home of Columbine High School. I went to school there in 1979 and that is where I really discovered computers.

A friend of mine (okay….let me confess….a guy I played Dungeons and Dragons with) had some computer stuff at home. I think it was actually his fathers but *I* got to touch it so it didn’t matter. If I remember correctly, he used to make D&D player sheets on the computer and print them out. They were (in retrospect) horribly formatted, dot matrix print-outs that weren’t the nice 8.5 x 11 sheets we have today. These were the giant daisy-wheel print outs that had the perforated edges and tops that always seemed to rip into the part of the paper that was important when you tried to separate them.

At the time they were the best player sheets on the planet.

This same guy also introduced me to the computer lab (more like a computer closet) at Columbine. A magical place where there existed an old Hazeltine machine with it’s glowing, yellow-green phosphorous screen, and a couple of other machines that I don’t remember the names of. He got me in that computer lab, my eyes glazed over, and here I am today – blogging at 35,000 feet (and wrapping up in Terminal B at DFW).

The Hazeltine, while more “advanced”,  was not my favorite machine in the lab closet. There were two other, much less modern machines as well. They were teletype machines that had large paper rolls in them – no screens. Everything you typed on the extremely loud keyboards was echoed to paper in typewriter fashion. They also had modems attached to them. Not the single board, internal, mini–modems of today. These were monstrous, external, acoustic coupler modems. There were two of these behemoths – one for each teletype – and each also had their own rotary dial telephone sitting next to it. It seemed like it took a full minute to dial a 7 digit number on these things. A decade if the number had a couple of 9’s in it. My friend showed me how to start the teletype, dial the mainframe phone number, listen for the other end to screech back (I always thought of it as a phone chicken), and then place the phone into the giant rubber cups. A few minutes later the teletype would spit out a bunch of stuff that indicated it was ready to accept commands, and then……joy of joys…..I had access to Star Trek and Wumpus.

I was hooked.

I loved playing Star Trek and Wumpus on those old machines. There was certain level of excitement in waiting for the slow teletype to spit out the new x/y graph of where you had moved your ship to. The anticipation of waiting to see if a Klingon ship, denoted by the letter “K” in our version, would get printed out on the paper and give me something to attack. Or, I would make a move and then have to wait another 30 seconds for that move to be printed out. Another move, another 30 seconds. Another move, another 30 seconds……damn……warped into a star.

Same thing with Wumpus. Type “N” to move north, wait 30 seconds for the machine to print out that I had exits to the S and W. Move West, wait 30 seconds to be told I had exits to the E, W, and N.

Uh oh……I hear a Wumpus.

Shoot an arrow W, wait 30 seconds, find out the arrow bounced back and killed me.

Good Times…….Good Times.

These machines were old. Not just 1979 old, but early 70’s old. Possibly even the 60’s old. There were much more modern machines I had access to in that day. The TRS-80 at the local Radio Shack (more on that later). If the family made a day trip to the mall I had access to Space Invaders, a cycle jump game where the motorcycle criss-crossed the screen top to bottom until on the last pass you had to jump over barrels or cars and attempt to land on the opposite ramp (I never did well at that game) and of course…..PONG. There were other cool games too but I can’t remember all of them. Compared to the teletypes I played Wumpus on, Space invaders was Star Wars like futuristic. I was pretty darn good at Space invaders…..figured out to shoot X number of times, wait, shoot the ship, get the big bonus, shoot a few invaders, wait, shoot the ship, get the big bonus, repeat, repeat, repeat. As fun as it was pumping quarters (and a single quarter per game, mind you!) into the arcade games, the teletypes had an appeal the arcade games lacked…..

Programmability.

Not only could I access the mainframe to play games, but the teletypes also had a means of accessing a programming environment which, as far as I can remember, was BASIC. I was able to write simple programs to make the teletype print what I wanted it to on the screen. I wrote a very simple program that let you ask questions and it would offer replies. It only had maybe 5 replies and everything you typed in, it considered a question…..

User – HELLO?

Computer – HELLO!

User – WHO ARE YOU?

Computer – HOW ARE YOU TODAY?

User – I AM FINE. WHO ARE YOU?

Computer – HELLO!

User – I ASKED WHO YOU ARE. ARE YOU STUPID?

Computer – HOW IS THE WEATHER?

User – YOU SUCK!

Computer – HELLO!

I never was a good programmer…….

I did write a nice little practical joke version of it though. There were different people that would check the lab in the mornings. If I knew who that person was I program a little “good morning program”  and leave it “running” on the machine over night. When the victim arrived in the morning and pressed any key on the teletype….

Computer - “GOOD MORNING! YOU LOOK WELL TODAY, MRS. JOHNSON! I LIKE THE OUTFIT YOU PICKED TODAY!”.

I would try to get there early to see the response and most of the time it was a look of amazement and then a tinge of what might be construed as unease. Back in those days, human computer interaction was still associated with HAL from the movie “2001”. It creeped some people out. There would be a quick realization it was a prank of sorts which ended when the victim lifted the phone from the coupler. In one case, much to my delight, it resulted in a look of true ear and the machine getting unplugged from the wall.

Good Times……

Even with all that fun to be had, my absolute favorite thing about the old teletypes was the paper tape puncher/reader they had. Whatever you programmed on the mainframe you could have sent to the puncher/reader and it would punch holes in the one inch wide, yellow tape to represent the code. I liked it as much for all the confetti dots it created which were devilishly difficult to remove from heavily sprayed hair…..or so I heard (whistle…) (I was in 9th grade……gimme a break!). I think my most creative version of my human/computer interaction program required a couple hundred feet of paper tape to store. It took what seemed like eons for it to create the tape. It took the same amount of time to read it back in and transmit back to the mainframe. But it was a record of what I created.

Good Times…..

A few months later, my family moved to Edgewood, MD and I lost access to a computer of any kind (except for playing Asteroids, Pac Man, Space Invaders et al, and of course…..my Atari 2600) until my 11th grade year. By this time it was 1981, Disco was (thankfully!) dying, AC/DC, Pink Floyd, and the Cars were my fave music, and the Rubik’s Cube Craze was in full swing. My school (Edgewood HS) had a computer lab and I managed to get into a Computer Math class. They had a gigantic machine – I have no idea what it was – but it was the old switch and button type with the punch cards.

I never played with it. Why?

Because my first day in the lab I saw someone playing “Adventure” on an Apple ][. I was a Dungeons and Dragons player and this was like heaven for me. Best of all, it was a computer that could be purchased for use at home AND it had <drum roll please> a color screen! And not just a color screen but <drum roll please> 16 colors! (I didn’t know until after I started working at Microsoft some 13 years later that it was a Microsoft game…..thank you Uncle Bill).

I begged my father for an Apple ][. But with myself and 3 brothers, it just wasn’t happening. So I spent as much time as I could during and after school playing Adventure, learning DOS and BASIC. I wrote a dating program (didn’t work for me), a more advanced computer/human interaction program, and my crowning achievement, an application that simulated working a Rubik’s Cube. That simulator was slower than a TSA security checkpoint at LAX, but it worked (in color!) and gave me a reason to be in the lab……

All good things have to come to an end though. My family moved again, this time to Arlington, TX. I had copied all of my programs to floppy and convinced my teacher to let me take them with me. Those 5¼ floppies were expensive back in 1982 so it was awesome cool of him to let me take them.

Upon arriving to my senior year at James Bowie High School, Arlington, Tx, graduating class of nineteen hundred and eighty-three, I discovered there were more than just Hazeltines, teletypes and monstrous punchcard spewing COBOL machines in the world. I knew this already, but really didn’t have much interest in the TRS-80 (it just didn’t look cool) or the Commodore PET (a PET computer?!?!?!). But that is exactly what we ended up with. The new school had the Commodores, which were actually an annoying step backward in my opinion. My Apple floppies were worthless in them not just because they weren’t compatible, but because they didn’t have floppies. These things had cassette tapes for data storage. Ugh. But I adapted for the one year I was at the school. BASIC was still basic with a few changes, and I started doing some machine language programming and playing with PEEKs and POKEs. I learned that machine language was much faster than BASIC and could be more powerful if you could figure things out.

This great about the middle of my senior year because I managed to get my hands on an Apple //+. The processor was similar (6502) and I started doing some machine language programming on it and subscribed to some Apple related computer mags. They had some cool machine language entry programs that check-summed your line entries so you could see if you made a mistake. That made things simpler but I didn’t learn a lot form them because they didn’t explain what I was typing. I stagnated a little until….

I discovered it had a modem in it. And not just any modem, but an Apple Cat. For the first time in almost 4 years that I could dial into another machine again. Only now, I could dial into a BBS. One that was run on an Apple. One that other Apple Users also dialed into and shared information with each other. The world opened up for me……

Good Times……

<to be continued>

Pseudo Epilogue – The guys I played Dungeons and Dragons with in Littleton, Co – Eric Geisking, Greg “Gonzo” Gonzalez and a non-player, Eric Watts – drop me a line sometime if you stumble upon this. It would be great to hear from you. (I will update the other names when I get home and have a chance to look at my yearbook…..many moons have passed and I have had a few beers since 1979…)