If you’re as old as dirt, you’ll find this fascinating

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As a certified ancient journo who watched the original Windows – OS/2 – Excel – 1-2-3 fight, I found this Twitter thread to be most enlightening: http
[See the full post at: If you’re as old as dirt, you’ll find this fascinating]

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Myst, geekdom, Canadian Tech, Microfix, Noel Carboni, John in Mtl, SueW, lurks about, wdburt1, Elly

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I was taking micro-economics with its input-output analysis at about that time. After drawing many graphs of money flows it seemed logical that they could be mapped into those new-fangled litte PCs.

40+ years later, still doing it altho staying away from the hidden traps of spreadsheets.

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Hi Woody,

I may be more ancient than you. I wrote/programmed articles and tutorials (Lotus 123) for UpTime Magazine. This was a 5 1/4″ floppy based magazine – the first of it’s kind. It was sold in bookstores and some big box outlets. Voted best software of the year once by PC World.

I still have a copy of VisiCalc somewhere around here – my 1st useful PC tool. Then DOS based Word (Esc -> Transfer -> Save). Learned to use Edlin to set up hard drives (addressing/interrupts, etc), build machines, and became a beta tester for Ashton Tate (dBase), Compaq, Seagate, and some high end controller guys (e.g. DPT) before contracting with the Feds (DARPA, Commerce, SBA – programmer/DBM). I used to do trade shows jointly with Compaq.

The old days … I used to drive one of the VPs at Ashton-Tate crazy because I would constantly break their latest dBase copy protection schemes.

I don’t think I ever had the pleasure of meeting Dan Bricklin. Did you?

– Carl – (Greenville)

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I never met Dan – or many of the other luminaries of the era — although I did meet Gates and Ballmer and a few others. McAfee is the one I remember most.

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I remember being a student at Uni in the late ’70s, and using VisiCalc on an Apple II, fascinated by it but wondering what this new spreadsheet software could be used for.

Now I love Excel and use it for all sorts of things, budgets, diet planning, share portfolio management, shopping lists, …

Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

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Back then, the Pony Express was still blazing new trails in the Wild Wild West! VisiCalc, dBase and Edlin. I thought that I had completely forgotten about those old programs. I reckon that you old fossils might recall Sideways or The Last Byte? How about SuperStorPRO2X which had an incredibly stupid inherent flaw which could cause the user to lose all of their compressed files on a hard drive? How about Central Point Software’s antivirus program which was marketed as “The last antivirus program you will ever need”? I think that Central Point’s advertising claim wasn’t entirely accurate! Thanks for the trip down memory lane.

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Myst, Karlston

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Whomever wrote Edlin must have been an inspired Unix user. We with our outrageously fancy full screen editors… 🙂

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I can remember loading a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet remotely over a dial-up modem (don’t remember the baud) on a Leading Edge with a 4.7 8088 and a monochrome monitor (green text on black). From the time is started loading, I could go eat dinner before it showed up on the screen.

Let’s not talk about how old dirt is!

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WildBill, Myst, SueW

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For the younger or any people here… The DOS 8086 executable file image for VisiCalc is small. To get all such functions in a tiny file it too had to have been written in (translated?) to 8086/8088 assembly language. Equally interesting are the PC bootable floppy games that were being created for and ported to the IBM PC.

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Ok, I guess I qualify, I was working in PL/1 on IBM 360 when I got my hands on one of the first Radio Shack Model 1’s with a cassette deck for storage! Remember Electric Pencil?

I wrote my own word processor (similar to Waterloo Script) using the builtin basic.

I was over the moon, being in accounting at the time, when I got my hands on a copy of Visi-Calc!

Personally, I always preferred Super-Calc to 123 and WordPerfect to Word.

Want to have some fun? Find an old 300 baud telephone modem and tell someone under 30 that you attach your telephone to get on line and watch the wheels turn with that blank look on their face.

😎

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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WildBill, Myst, KevinG3, BobbyB

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RetiredGeek wrote:

…Want to have some fun? Find an old 300 baud telephone modem and tell someone under 30 that you attach your telephone to get on line and watch the wheels turn with that blank look on their face. 🙂

How about doing that while using an acoustic coupler for added effect??  🙂

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WildBill

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Bob,

That’s what I was talking about. I don’t think there was such a thing as a direct connect modem in 1979. 😎

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

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My first computer was a TI99/4A with a cassette deck for storage.

Do I qualify for membership? 😉

 

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As somewhat indicated above in my reply to @RetiredGeek , my first computer was a Tandy 102 laptop with a 300 baud modem and an acoustic coupler to get online with the likes of CompuServe, Delphi, GE’s Genie, and the like. IIRC, one other online service was called The Source, or something similar.

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Hey. I also had a TI99/4A.

But I also had a Victrola.

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WildBill

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My first computer was an Apple IIe with AppleWorks. Wrote an MS thesis on it using a daisy wheel printer. To number the pages correctly, I had to print the pages with the numbers in the corner than reprint the pages with the text. The dictionary was a book on the desk. I predate MS-DOS and because I did not use an MS OS until W98 never learned it, fact that surprised people.

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Great story, thanks Woody.

Lotus123 was very flexible, even early versions. At an ore mine I worked at the engineers were transferring mine planning programs written in Fortran from a Data General Nova to a Sun Workstation. In the interim. an engineer setup a Lotus spreadsheet for some of the planning programs, since running a PC was more convenient than scheduling time on the DG, while the Sun Fortran wasn’t complete. He had it all on one sheet, with little isolated patches of tables/macros all linked to each other for updating when values changed. As an early version with no Auditor, there was no way to verify the logic of the tangle. The engineer placed few comments either (I pestered him about that), so the next person would have no clue. I’ve used spreadsheets since the 1980s and this was the most confusing application I’ve ever run into. I’m not sure if it worked out for him as I left the mine before he had much time running it all. He was a smart man so I don’t ridicule this at all, it was just an example of programming that suites only the person who designs it. Not an uncommon thing either.

In a different application a surveyor friend who worked for Gov Highways Dept then on contract for himself, designed a whole surveyor traverse solving suite using Lotus123, with input request tables showing none of the backend calcs to the user with a very clear, clean interface. It was completely transparent to the user as being a spreadsheet and looked like any off the shelf program. The opposite of the previous application, at least to the user. Although again I never checked the logic to see really how effective it was. He sold it back to Highways so it must have worked fine.

When I eventually worked for Gov, while the rest of the worker bees were suffering with a DECMate (ugh!), I had my 286PC running Lotus and WordPerfect and occasionally Ashton-Tate dBase. The Lotus123 was for all my client results, calcs and graphing necessary for the job. Great program!

It’s worth noting as an aside, that mines have a lot of capital to work with. Our engineers were running 3d volume calcs in Fortran on the DG for stripping calculations using 3d blocks not average end area 20 years before other disciplines were and I’d run into people later in my career saying oh look at the fancy, high tech 3d volume calc program we just bought, you’ll need lots of time to learn how to use it. Lol. And of course they’d never learn how to use it properly because they didn’t work on the programming for it and understand the math. Something to be said for the old days when you had to apply math and hands-on programming.

Headsup The Register has an article about the passing of Bill Godbout.

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I learned to create large spreadsheets (example: origin-destination matrices for freight movements) using 11×17 lined paper and an HP38C calculator, on which I became very fast and accurate.  From a bad experience early on I became good at building cross-checks.

Though I worked alongside others to translate some of these creations to the DOS-based Lotus 1-2-3 in the early 1980s, I didn’t jump into personal computers until 1992, and by then it was with Windows 3.1.  Kapor says that Lotus was late to the game with a Windows version of 1-2-3 and suggests it did not match Excel, but I found it a terrific advance.  Realities that I could only sense previously fully emerged once I learned to build models and test scenarios.  By then I was consulting for some large transportation companies, and my spreadsheets grew to be massive and complex.  I well remember hitting the button to calculate and still finding the computer grinding away when I came back with a cup of coffee.

It does not go too far to say that Lotus 1-2-3 lit up some neural pathways in my brain.  In the tenth grade a standardized national test concluded that I possessed very little math ability, even potentially.  Spreadsheets turned me into a numbers jock.  And I saw the same thing going on everywhere in transportation.  Railroads were early adopters of mainframe computers because they helped get massive complexity under control.  But that was the top-down part.  The personal computer allowed managers to start to think on their own.

Kapor nails it when he observes that Microsoft rapidly built market share by bundling a suite of useful programs together and selling them to corporations, selling to top management.  As an independent serving large (and small) companies, I saw that in action.  It raised the question then, and still does, whether Excel prevailed because it was better or because Microsoft had a smarter commercial strategy.  In the small company I later ran, our accounting department preferred Lotus Approach as easier to use than Access.  But Ami Pro lagged Word, and I shifted to using Word for a couple of years before I abandoned 1-2-3.

At any rate, an interesting read.

 

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My vote went to Lotus 1-2-3 over Excel. The macro language was powerful and allowed building of large menu based spreadsheets that exposed inputs and hid the uninteresting stuff from users (econometric modelling in my case – boring).

My only gripe was the fact that 1-2-3 wrote directly to hardware (for speed). Hardware compatibility became an issue when clones started arriving.

– Carl –

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I happened into a job in ’98 at a transportation lighting company on the East Coast whose owner was married at the hip to Lotus. Amtrak was our best customer and had been for decades. He only gave up using Smart Suite when other companies started begging him to send them files they could open. (apparently Amtrak still could)

🙂

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I can see I’m not the only geezer here ….

Ah, yes – Central Point utilities. I loved the backup program. Sideways was pretty impressive. I had completely forgotten about Super-Calc.

Leading Edge … How about Zenith, Delta Gold? Acoustic couplers – Wargames anyone?

My house is like a museum. Still have a daisy wheel printer and 300 baud modem kicking around somewhere. How many of you still have a US Robotics Courier V.42? Remember the spectacularly huge 40mb Connor Peripherals 1/2 height drive? Remember what you paid for a full height 150mb Seagate ST when they first hit the scene? And the 1/2 inch rubber shocks they were mounted on?

How about setting up ESDI drives – addresses, low level, high level formatting? We don’t need no stinkin’ plug and play. Steve Gibson’s Spinrite?

– Carl –

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Since we’re writing about the “good ole days” how about VP Planner? A 1-2-3 knockoff that was affordable for home users. Used it to create my own tax returns among other things. Used to run it on DrDOS (as a CS grad from Naval Postgrad School in Monterey, I had a certain affection for Digital Research and Prof Kildall.)

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Wow, such history here! Great.  My favourite program in the 80’s was Ashton Tate’s dBase. Incredible what you could create with this thing.  Even better was when Nantucket came around and made Clipper, the dBase compiler.  Ah the good ‘ole days of pioneering IT !

Today I was looking around for reviews for a product I wanted and got sidelined into watching some YouTube stuff and found this little gem:

Brand NEW IBM PC AT + Model M! Unboxing & Setup

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLy_jEbuY-U

this guy found a reseller on Ebay in 2017 that had a whole warehouse of these brand new IBM AT’s, fresh from the factory…  built in the 80’s, and is creaming his pants as he opens the boxes and checks out the contents, then plugs it in and turns it on after 30 years and… it works flawlessly !  He sure has a very nice pristine condition piece of history now.

I still have a new AT motherboard in its antistatic bag, kept it with the idea to some day frame it & put it up for display.  I wish I had kept the old keyboards I had for the AT, they were the best ever built – lived the tactile feedback and the subtle “clickety-click” the keys made.

 

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Clicky keyboards still have a sizeable fan base.  I got hooked on the size, heft, and programmability of Gateway’s AnyKey keyboard in the early 1990s.  It’s not a clicky keyboard, but a well-made rubber dome switch type.  I have several in storage, all made circa 1993.  They all have PS/2 connectors except one, which was made with an AT connector and needs a PS/2 adapter.

My impression is that PCs sold for home or small business use went through a phase when PS/2 vanished and USB was being touted as the replacement.  I had two HP desktop computers made in 2011 where the motherboard didn’t even permit the addition of a PS/2 port.  In 2013 I bought two Asus PCs sold for business use partly because they came with PS/2 ports, and by 2016 it was easy to find such machines (I found two at HP).

The notion that USB would replace PS/2 was another example of tech hype masking what in reality was simply an attempt to cut costs.  Gamers, especially, considered PS/2 more reliable and responsive, and it is my impression that they played a large role in bringing back PS/2.  Writers liked PS/2 keyboards because they would accept a burst of multiple keystrokes (“N-key rollover”).  A PS/2 keyboard did not have to compete with other USB devices for space in the pipeline.  Using one with a USB adapter, as I was forced to do with the 2011 HP machines, was a trial and error process of finding an adapter that wouldn’t stutter or take off on its own flights of fancy.

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USB is still the only option on most small form factor systems.  PS/2 is definitely gaining ground again, although as a gamer and coder I still mostly use USB.  As long as you don’t have a low-end USB keyboard, most mid-end mechanical, gaming, or macro-based keyboards all do N-key rollover just fine.  Likewise most still prefer USB mouse over PS/2.

As long as you have the cores, there’s no lag in USB.  Plus most new PS/2 compatible keyboards are still USB anyways.

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Meh. The advent of PCs marked the era when discipline was lost. Before that, when computers filled a whole floor of a building and came with a staff of support personnel, and programs were crafted on punch cards, quality meant something.

Bonus question: Who can answer, from experience, why that diagonal red line was drawn across the top edges? 😉

I knew dirt when it was just a big rock.

-Noel

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In case the rubber band broke.?.?

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Yes. Or you dropped the box. It turns out order of the lines of code in a program is important! 🙂

-Noel

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WildBill

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I remember using punch cards where we made a diagonal stripe mark across a deck of cards so that if the cards ever got out of order, which alas happened occasionally, it was obvious as the stripe would be “out of alignment”. Crude perhaps, but effective. I do not doubt that other uses were found.

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My father spent over $5,000 (in 1979 dollars) on a high-end Apple ][+ system with 48KB RAM and Applesoft floating point BASIC in ROM (a Microsoft product).

Add-on hardware included:
– 16KB RAM expansion board
– Apple integer BASIC firmware expansion board
– dual 5.25 inch floppies with interface card and Apple DOS on floppy
– 80-column video adapter with upper/lower case text display
– three 3-channel music synthesizer boards (allowing for 9-voice stereo)
– real-time clock with on-board battery
– 7-slot I/O expansion bay
– 4 game paddle knobs
– 2 game joysticks
– RF video modulator unit for simultaneous monochrome and color viewing
– 10-inch professional grade white-phosphor monochrome monitor
– 13-inch color television
– Okidata tractor-feed dot matrix impact printer
– Four-color ribbon near letter quality dot matrix impact printer
– Hayes 1200 baud direct-connect modem. I think it cost $900. At a blazing 120 bytes per second full-duplex, it saved lots of interstate long distance dial-up dollars.

I spent many online hours reading forums and chatting on The Source (Only at night time and weekend calling rates.)

The summer after ninth grade, I went through the Applesoft BASIC Tutorial and learned how to write my own apps. Also learned to use VisiCalc, play Sargon chess, and fly an early Flight Simulator. Played a bit of Break Out too, before Dung Beetles came out.

When I was a senior in high school, the school district bought a couple of Apple IIs. The math teacher said she would teach a computer course only if I agreed to register as a teacher’s assistant during the course so I could show her how to operate it.

Try to explain these things to kids today, who think an AUX input is a technological advance.

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woody wrote:

I never met Dan – or many of the other luminaries of the era — although I did meet Gates and Ballmer and a few others. McAfee is the one I remember most.

quite right!

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Noel Carboni wrote:

Meh. The advent of PCs marked the era when discipline was lost. Before that, when computers filled a whole floor of a building and came with a staff of support personnel, and programs were crafted on punch cards, quality meant something. Bonus question: Who can answer, from experience, why that diagonal red line was drawn across the top edges? I knew dirt when it was just a big rock. -Noel

I did my SPSS rechearches with these ponsecards, “good old days”, at my uni-computer-center this band ment that it was read twice before the precious computer-calculation-time started to run. Faults costed dearly, oh dear.    🙂

* _ ... _ *

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Faults costing dearly has not gone out of fashion. :/

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This thing may be older than most of us. A 5 megabyte disk drive which was invented on January 1, 1956:

 

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I wonder what the spin speed was on that bad boy?

And the data transfer rate? 😀

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This is the IBM 305 RAMAC. It had 50 platters which spun at 1200 rpm. Technically, the storage capacity was 5 million characters (7-bit, not 8-bit). An interesting short article about it is here:

https://www.pcworld.com/article/127104/article.html

 

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That probably stored less than the content of this web page alone.

Who’d have imagined through refinement it could lead to this:

10 million megabytes

-Noel

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And paper data tapes came after punchcards as below:

Used for various CNC machines..this takes me back.
If dropped, were an absolute nightmare to reel back on the spool and
the paper was relatively easy to tear whilst doing this manually!

If debian is good enough for NASA...

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WildBill, Myst

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Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.

GaryK

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WildBill

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Does using an IBM computer with punch cards and Fortran IV (with a $10,000 a month lease) make me a dirty old man?

In the early days of the IBM PC I used a software program called pfsFile. Was told by the company that it could be put on a hard disk. So I bought a 20 megabyte hard disk for my PC (from a guy named Mike Dell of PC Limited) to upgrade my computer to be a match for IBM’s “new” 10 megabyte hard disk version of their PC. Could not put pfsFile on the hard disk… turns out that the company had “copy protected” the program and it could be only put on a 10 megabyte disk because that was what IBM sold.

= Ax Kramer

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WildBill

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An early ’80s bookkeeping application for the Apple II came with copy protection in the form of a physical dongle with DIP pins that had to be carefully plugged into the game port.

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WildBill

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anonymous wrote:

Faults costing dearly has not gone out of fashion. :/

hahahha

* _ ... _ *

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KevinG3

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Like several of us here, when I was born, dirt was clean.

I can’t say I was an early Lotus adopter, but I did know Mitch at Yale through their radio station, WYBC-FM when he was Music, then Program Director.

Mitch was the guy who occupied the inner office and made the big decisions, even then.

I later became Chief Engineer but by then Mitch was gone…on to bigger and better….

Kevin

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Might be a young whippersnapper but I found all these posts interesting.  The minicomputer era was always an interest of mine back in college.  The closest experience I have to all of this is building a PDP-8 from PLAs, a breadboard, and copper wire in one of my hardware courses.

One of the most frustrating experiences was using the wire wrapping tool.  I think we only got our system to 80% compatibility.

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KevinG3

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