It Was Fifty Years Ago This Month

The personal Computer Revolution started with the introduction of an 8 bit computer with switches for input and blinking lightss for output. The Altair 8800 appeared on the cover of Popular Electronics Magazine in January of 1975. It sold for $395 as a kit and $498 assembled.

I lived on the outskirts of Carbondale, Illinois at the time in a 40ft geodesic dome house. There was snow on the ground when I went to my mailbox by the Round House across the way. When I got the magazine out and saw the cover I ran back to the Dome screaming. My girlfriend and later wife, Sandy, did not at all understand the commotion. I explained it to her. "This changes everything. It is the start of the computer revolution. Every one will have one." Of course she gave me an odd look and a wan smile. I could see what she was thinking. "Computers are for IBM and take up large rooms and requite gangs of people to operate. Me own one? What are the odds?" Currently she has two, a laptop and a handheld (cell phone). Both more capable than the 1975 IBM top of the line by a factor of at least ten thousand.

I moved to Chicago in late spring of that year. After some struggles getting work and getting settled (I stayed with some friends of Dr. Nilda - who I knew from Carbondale - Suki and Jim on Sheffield and Dickens, sleeping on their couch in the living room), I got a place to live. The place was The St. Nicholas Theater on Halsted Street. They were just getting started and had to rent out what would later become their office space to make ends meet. They picked me. Their first show was going to be David Mamet's "American Buffalo". I regularly saw David and the rest of the cast and crew including Bill Macy. We had regular smoke sessions and I would expound on the coming computer revolution. I messianically believed in what I was doing and I'm sure David picked up on it. Years later I saw Bill on the street in Chicago and he told me that I was the inspiration for David's Play 'The Water Engine" about an inventor who gets knocked off to protect corporate interests. The reality was that the computer revolution depended on the products of big corporations used in ways they hadn't imagined or at the very least weren't currently at the top of their priority list.

After 6 months at the St. Nicholas, the theater company needed the space for offices and so I needed to move. Me and Sandy moved to 2053 N. Sheffield, practically next door to Suki and Jim, which would be our shop/home for about the next 8 years. I found out about the C.A.C.H.E. Club and started going to meetings where I met my lifelong friend and associate Clyde Philips. He introduced me to the computer language FORTH which I still use to this day. Ted Nelson, a computer visionary, gave frequent talks at different meetings to inspire us all. Around that time I also wrote and got published an article, Faster Erase Times - Kilobaud March 1978, on EPROMs and how to erase them. I sold kits.

When I bought my first computer there were already clones developed and the S-100 bus was becoming a standard. in fact it did become an IEEE standard a few years later. I bought an IMSAI which had Flip switches and a resonant transformer power supply for better voltage regulation than a normal line voltage transformer. That reduced the stress on the linear voltage regulator typical of the power supplies of the day. The LM7805 was king. All kinds of boards were becoming available as kits, but there was something missing.

I was walking down the street in Chicago in the summer of 1977 and the thought came to me, there is no good S-100 I/O Board, I had better design one. I probably started work that day. Intel had a very nice and very popular manual for its 8080 family of chips. There were three I/O chips I was interested in. A serial port/UART, the 8251. A counter timer chip, the 8253. And a parallel port chip with three 8 bit ports, the 8255. There was also 1K of RAM and up to 4K of EPROM. It turns out the 8251 did not have a software reset, meaning you had to tie up parallel port resources to make it work in a system. I never used it on another board, ever. But all this is hindsight. I learned all this while using the board in my system. So when Randy/Ward said they had a problem with the 8251 I was ready with a fix. I went over to where they kept the BBS prototype and showed them where to make the cuts and jumpers for the fix. I think they had everything up and running about a week or two after that. On Feb. 16, 1978 the BBS went live. I did not have a modem at the time and it wasn't until I got a modem a month later that I first logged in. The modem was a slow acoustic modem. My first log in was probably at 300 baud. I just wanted to check the connection. I didn't use it much the first few years it was up but got more involved when BBS networks started forming and discussions of politics started. I had a long distance telephone bill of $100 a month to keep up with the conversations I wanted to be involved with. Mostly National Politics and the Drug War.

That is how it all began for me and here we are fifty years later and the machines are not only talking to each other, they are now talking back at us.









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