How the IBM PC changed my life

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ISSUE 21.48 • 2024-11-25 COMMENTARY By Will Fastie In my computing career, two seminal events stand out. A few months ago, I gave a presentation at my
[See the full post at: How the IBM PC changed my life]

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I started at work in 1968 working with NCR 315 / NCR 315 RMC.
4 big tape drives and 4 CRAM drives. Programing in NEAT (National Electronic Autocoding Technique) and punch cards.
Size of program – 4K, so programs were written using overlays code.

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jburk07, Myst, Will Fastie

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I had a similar experience.  I got my start on an IBM Keypunch 026 in the Air Force while stationed in the Philippines 1967-1968.  Later in west Texas I got the opportunity to learn to run the NCR PCAM computer to process my Medical Supply work.  This lead me to go to college after my discharge in 1970 to get a degree in the new curriculum Computer Science and Accounting at my college.  As controller for a small savings bank I got my experience programming the IBM System 3 / 15D and then we bought the IBM PC and Lotus 123.  I was hooked and convinced my wife that we needed one to advance my career.  Since then I’ve owned countless PCs and continued to code for a number of organizations.  But that 1st IBM 5150 PC with two 5 1/4″ floppy drives was the catalyst for a long career in IT.

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Your comment about the IBM PC arriving with the BASIC language stirred a memory. Around that time I subscribed to several magazines, including BYTE. I remember seeing an advertisement for an Apple computer – Lisa or Macintosh I forget which – and I remember carefully re-re-re-reading the ad looking for the languages supported. (I was a language and translator developer in my early days) – and could not find what languages it supported.

Odd!??!!!

This was my first exposure to a computer that was meant to be USED rather than PROGRAMMED!
Thanks for the memories, Chris

Unless you're in a hurry, just wait.

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Wow, talk about flashbacks…
From punchcard computing IBM 360/65 at Iowa State, I found myself as a USMC Captain with an IBM Series/1 in 1979, which I dug into with a vengeance (EDX/EDL anyone?)  Hired by AEtna in 1985 into a skunkworks unit that ported insurance applications to the Series/1, and then onto the IBM/PC, based on demos I helped build. We sold the package (application software, system unit, two displays/keyboards, one printer, and a blazing 2400 baud bisync modem for arounf $10,000 to our 100 biggest producers (AEtna works with independent agents, so they had to sell them on the investment, and thereby capture more business.)

This changed my life from a wanna-be airline pilot (I flew attack aircraft in the Corps) to the start of a high-tech consulting career with Humana, IBM, MCI SystemHouse, Fair Isaac Corp and many failed start-ups too numerous to mention. Many of my career advancements came from ads in ComputerWorld and Byte.

I still maintain expertise in OO/php, SQL/MySQL and run Joomla sites for non-profits in my twilight years…

Thanks, Will, for all the memories…

Fred

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An excellently written article for that day or ANY day, for that matter! I missed it then, but I greatly enjoyed reading it today in your newsletter. Thank you for sharing it again!

Unfortunately, when the IBM PC came out, I was already pretty invested in the Apple II with its 4K of RAM, a Sony color TV,  and a Panasonic cassette recorder.

Not until my employer, Uncle Sam, purchased a few KayPros and later –  Zenith 248’s was I able to dive into the real world of IBM style personal computing.

Not to be forgotten, though, were the famous “wannabe” marketing claims – “IBM PC compatible & supports Microsoft Flight Simulator”.

Today, I still run the latest version of Microsoft Flight Simulator on a PC made by Lenovo – the company who IBM eventually and sadly sold all of their PC rights to.

Much has happened since your visit to Boca Raton!

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Will Fastie

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Will,

If you were at Ft. Lee did you ever see The Blockhouse? Inside it were two SAGE computers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Automatic_Ground_Environment)that controlled all the airspace from Atlantic City to Texas, although normally from Florida all the way to the Texas/Mexico border was controlled from a unit at Tyndall AFB.

The whole second floor had two computers that ran on vacuum tubes. If the air conditioning failed we had four minutes to get out or die of asphyxiation.

I worked in Ops so was very infrequently on the 2nd floor. But the technology was amazing for that time in history.

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I worked at the IBM Research Lab when the PC came out. And I wanted one just as Will did. So I proposed a project to develop a program to provide remote access over a telephone modem to the lab computers. And I got my machine to take home!

We did get remote access working, which was a very early taste of the work at home phenomenon.

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Enjoyed reading about your challenges and sucesses! Interesting read . . . congratulations!

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Will Fastie

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John18 wrote:

If you were at Ft. Lee did you ever see The Blockhouse?

I’m not familiar. But I’m sure if I’d known about it, I would not have been allowed within a klick.

I was there for most of 1970 and mustered out to return to school in January 1971.

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Great memories of all kinds.  Couple things, When I went to college 1965 no calculators, but by graduation 1969 the Commodore came out!  I bought one for about $200 but memory fades when you are 78! The computer at school was in a large room 40’x40′ or so, and all inputs were by IBM cards, and we had to program the Quadratic equation. The specs of our first family computer:
Apple IIe 06-1983 $2000 Desktop like the IBM Apple II E 64KB added+128KB Memory 0.1MB Ram 5MHz 12 inch CRT Green Screen Appleworks Software.
If memory correct I had two 5 inch disks for input.  Our printer was 06-1983 Family $750 Epson Dot Matrix.
We were in heaven with this fabulous setup.
Thanks again for all the Great Memories.
Fun times.
Mod edit: Removal of excess HTML coding

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Will Fastie

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Wow, two great, back-to-back articles. Enjoyed the trip down memory lane (and learned a few things in the process!)

My first computer was the Tandy 1000 acquired circa 1987 for the staggering sum of $2500. Included monitor, modem (300 baud I think) and dot matrix printer. Imagine what computing power $2500 would buy me today!

Thanks for the great read!

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Will Fastie

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Boy, are you old. I cut my teeth on the IBM 360/65 at PSU in 1969. Taught computer programming on a an IBM 1130. First online system (self-taught) was the IBM 34. Later migrated into the IBM 38 and AS400. Got my first PC in early 1990’s a Swan. Bought Swan’s until they went out of business. Now use Dells.

Article brought back a flood of memories — good and bad. Mostly, good since I am now retired 17 years as application development supervisor. Oh! I am 77 and still developing small applications using Excel/Word for a booster club.

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Thom Kupchisnky wrote:

Boy, are you old.

Matter of opinion.

Thom Kupchisnky wrote:

I am 77

Aha! The pot calling the kettle black. I’m a young buck by comparison, with 36 days to go before I turn 77.

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My Dad is 96, you guys are young.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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SueW, TechTango

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My sister still has her 8088 up in storage.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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jburk07, cybercrone

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What a trip this was! So many memories.

While I was a die-hard Trash-80 fan (too poor for an IBM), my brother just about worshipped IBM, continually said their OS was the best by far and just raged at their mishandling (in his view) of the business that let MS take over as popular choice for a while with Apple later catching up.

Thank you for the great memories and the smiles.

"She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined.
She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot."
--Mark Twain

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One can read (and download) the entire Creative Computing Magazine (December 1981) here:   https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing-1981-12/mode/2up

The way-back machine for sure!

My first exposure to computers was a high school field trip in 1964 to the NORAD/SAGE site at McCord Airforce base outside Tacoma, WA. It was all tubes and magnetic core memory – in a huge warehouse of a room. I remember the guide telling us where the phrase “computer bug” originated – actual living bugs getting in the works (apocryphal?). He also mentioned that they had full-time employees who’s job it was to find and change out defective or out-of-spec tubes! I was absolutely fascinated.

Then in 1965 I learned Fortran IV programming via punch cards at Washington State University. Next I was playing around with my brother’s Apple II (Wizardy to be honest!) in the 70’s while salivating over DYI computer kits that I couldn’t afford at the time. Once the IBM PC was readily available in 1982 and I could afford one, I had no hesitation – like a kid in a candy store. On to DOS, Windows, Lotus 1-2-3, Basic, dBase IV, and onward to being in charge of a Unix mini at our company. Haven’t stopped geeking since.

Thanks, Will.

 

Win10 Pro x64 22H2, Win10 Home 22H2, Linux Mint + a cat with 'tortitude'.

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McCord was the 25th Air Division and it had the same blockhouse as the 20th Air Division at Ft. Lee had.  I now live 6 miles from Luke AFB and that was where the 26th AD was located.  That blockhouse is still standing and it is their CBPO and other admin things.

This is what a blockhouse looked like.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Automatic_Ground_Environment

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Susan Bradley wrote:

My sister still has her 8088 up in storage.

Mine is sitting on a shelf behind me, and in the closet is a box of spare parts, including its two original full-height 360K floppy drives and — not one, but two — spare 20MB Seagate ST-225 hard drives!

I replaced the two full-height floppies with one half-height 1.2M 5.25″ floppy, one half-height 1.44M 3.5″ floppy, and a half-height 20MB ST-225 hard drive. Over the years I salvaged two ST-225’s (and a bunch of RAM chips) from dead PCs to have on hand in case my ST-225 ever died … but that drive was built like a tank and 40 years later still soldiers on without complaint.

 

 

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Somebody gave me an old IBM XT and it powered up last time I tried it. Sitting in my garage.

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jburk07

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Since this topic is about changing lives, let me tell you about how the IBM PC changed my wife’s life.

In 1981 she was working as a “Kelly Girl” — temp workers that get hired out to a company for a day or two, or a few weeks, for mostly menial office tasks like filing and answering telephones.

A young startup company was marketing commercial real estate investment opportunities to the nouveau rich “bros” in nearby Silicon Valley, and to boost their street cred they ditched their traditional accounting department for a smaller staff of Kelly Girls and a bunch of the brand new IBM PCs. Their aim was to keep any Kelly Girl that took to the new-fangled computer and get rid of the recalcitrant, old-school office workers.

She got hired permanently, and as they trained her she became an expert on the PC.

When the growing company spun off some of the staff into a dedicated MIS department, she went into MIS and began to work with programming mainframes.

That set her up for a job with another company, looking to expand and convert their MIS/mainframe system to SAP — and they trained her in SAP programming.

That set her up to join EDS (Electronic Data Systems — in Texas, though she didn’t have to move there) as a SAP consultant, designing MIS systems for Fortune-500 companies.

She was laid off in the tech downturn of 2001, but by then had grown tired of the go-go-go tech environment. (During a 3-month EDS assignment in Tokyo, she was flabbergasted at how many hours the Japanese workers put in every week!)

She decided to take a step back and got attracted to something a bit quirky. She took a job with a software company that needed a French-speaking tech support person for their customer base in Quebec, Canada. That’s the part she really fell in love with — tech support was easy, but getting to speak French while providing tech support … well, that just tickled her to death.

She’s retired now, but if you want an example of how the IBM PC changed lives, that’s her. The IBM PC was the gateway that took a girl with a college degree in Music to the top of the tech world, and a lifetime career in tech.

 

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I built my own $4000 IBM AT compatible shipped by PC Designs, an early Dell competitor, adding an NEC MultiSync monitor and an HP LaserJet II.  This during the time I was program manager for a doomed product that would run on a Honeywell mini computer.  As program manager, I had TWO IBM-compatibles running MS-DOS in my office, connected to various minis.

Before that, I programmed a Burroughs 220 (first course in Algol-58), Univac 1107 (more Algol), GE-225 (assembler and FORTRAN), GE-400 (assembler, COBOL), GE-600/Honeywell 6000, Honeywell 8200, and some mini computer when I worked for a short time for RCA in South Jersey.

Oh, and my degree is in English Literature with 4 semesters each of college level chemistry, physics, math, some grad work in linguistics, Old English and Middle English.

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Great trip to the past. Certainly reminded me of how old I am. First met a computer, I think IBM 360, as a Midshipman at the Naval Academy. Punch cards and I am pretty sure we used Fortran. Any assignment would be run overnight, if you screwed up, another whole day to correct. Before I graduated in 1971 they joined a time-sharing terminal based system from I think Princeton using some form of Basic. We were so happy to be able to work in real, if slow, time. I never worked directly with computers until after I left the Navy but did a lot of typing and printing on a large dedicated word processor with 7″ floppy discs (Xerox?), which I loved (as opposed to using an IBM Selectric typewriter). After leaving the Navy I went to grad school and immediately started looking into personal computers that could do word processing such as Kaypro and other CP/M machines. This was exactly when the IBM PC first appeared and it appealed to me but it was a bit too expensive. I got one of the first IBM compatibles, a dual floppy 128 K Columbia MPC which came with a software bundle called Perfect Writer, Perfect Calc, and Perfect Filer, a simple non-relational database. Also an Epson dot matrix printer. It did have a version of Basic but I did little programming until later (dBase mostly). I learned a lot from that mschine, later added a hard disc on a card and more memory. After graduation I did not use the degree for employment (a story for another day) but used my computer skills and reading of PC mags to land a job in sales in a computer store. Not well compensated but I became the main software troubleshooter (some great stories there) and learned more and moved to a much better position doing computer support in a healthcare provider network company. We had probably the largest PC based appication for processing claims in the country running a Clipper implementation of dBaseIII on a Novell network. Our servers had multiple massive (for the time) hard drives. I supported the night shift and did the backups and ran a kind of roll up program where the daily work on the PCs was posted to the server databases. I was there when we had to handle the year 2000 issues, which is a story on its own. We were eventually bought out by Aetna while working on reprogramming the main application into Informix SQL as the old application was all text based and limited  in some respects. In  2002? Aetna and some other health care insurers were having a hard time and most of us, including me, were laid off. I found other employment but continued to do PC support on my own, still have one customer I met at the computer store what, 40 years ago. He went from Word Perfect and dBaseIII to Word and Access today for his small business. Computing has been a large part of over half my life. I think I might expand this for my kids or as an article.

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