Kitz Forum
Chat => Tech Chat => Topic started by: kitz on December 08, 2017, 11:59:58 PM
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From BBC archives.
- 1985 Micro Live reviewing the Commodore Amiga.
https://www.facebook.com/BBCArchive/videos/494338554272513/
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"Why?" was my rhetorical response, whilst "talking" to the various Unix systems to which I had access in those days. :D
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My first experience of using a mouse was on the Xerox Documenter in the late 80's (don't forget Xerox Parc invented wimp).
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I was an Atari user in those days, and I clearly remember those feelings of envy when the Amiga came out. Its graphical capabilities were quite amazing for its time. Those were exciting times.
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my Atari 520stfm was the biz.. Especially when we bought something called a modem ?? ::)
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I remember spending a small fortune on a 5 MB hard disk and the necessary interfaces.
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I knew that mice were going to be important when they began to nibble my card-decks and paper-tape spools.
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We had an Amiga 1200 which was our youngest son's PC and I used it sometimes to work from home using a dial up modem and a 3270 emulator (an IBM screen for the uninitiated) ;) I then got an Amiga 3000 which was later upgraded to an Amiga 4000. I found that these machines wiped the floor with the IBM type PCs of the time. I also ran a MAC emulator on the 4000 which ran extremely well. Eventually though I did move to an IBM type PC but not until around 2000 as the support for the Amiga platform had dried up by then. A real shame as it was way in advance of anything else at the time.
Stuart
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Hi
I still have windows 2, which uses a mouse
Many thanks
John
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"Why?" was my rhetorical response, whilst "talking" to the various Unix systems to which I had access in those days. :D
I felt the same, when first encountering mice and windows. You could do things so much faster with a keyboard and command line!
1985 ... I'd just found my way from the university's mainframe to the department's new BSD Unix micros, which were amazingly powerful. And came with unlimited use (unlike the mainframe). But more amazing were the 4 "odd" terminals in the mainframe terminal room that connected to the X.25 PAD (packet assembler/disassembler) instead. They let you across the fledgling JANet ... there was a whole world out there! Which got a lot of use on the Essex MUD machine :-[
A mouse and a window, a mere desktop, just couldn't compete :D
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. . . the X.25 PAD (packet assembler/disassembler) instead. They let you across the fledgling JANet ... there was a whole world out there! Which got a lot of use on the Essex MUD machine :-[
Thinking back to those days, I seem to remember somebody finding the telephone numbers for a bank of dial-up modems at UCL. So a local telephone call to UCL, then a side-step to one of their X.25 PADs and out onto Janet. :D
And, yes, I distinctly remember the Essex MUD. ;D
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Were they ever called mice?
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If you used computers before mice & modems came along, and you haven't watched 'Halt and Catch Fire' yet, I'd highly recommend that you do. (I think it's only on Amazon Prime Video.)
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Just to show my age one of the first computers I worked on as an engineer was an IBM 1401 although by then the System/360 had appeared so well before the PCs appeared in 1966 :cool:
Stuart
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Ah yes, that was ‘85.
I remember visiting Telehouse in Docklands about 10 years later, late 1990s, a whole building dedicated to data comms and the internet, and thinking how much had changed.
Thing is, despite that big change in a decade from mid 80s, after nearly another 20 years, nothing more seems to have changed much. We still book holidays using a mouse, just as people did in the 1990s. Schoolkids ( and their teachers, and the BBC) still delude themselves that a mouse can be used for code writing, just as in the 1990s, only difference is it is now called ‘coding’.
Yes, the internet has got faster, screens are flat, and I can now tap on a tablet LCD instead of clicking a mouse reflected on a big old CRT. But that's all a bit cosmetic, did real evolution in Operating systems maybe stop 20-30 years ago?
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Wasn’t there a time in the recent past when code writing was called programming?
You seems to have forgotten voice input
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In the environment I worked, low level OS developers, often working in assembler, were known as ‘code writers’. The term ‘programmers’ tended to refer to higher levels languages, and application writers.
That was back as long ago as late 1970s. May just have been a local habit though?
Re voice recognition, I grant it has advanced to the point of being quite useful. But I think it has a long way to go before we can say it has transformed to world of computing, in the way that GUIs did vs command line input, or in the way that personal workstations suddenly evolved from mainframes office systems.
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wow that is a good video. I'm an Amiga fan boy. A friend catalogues all the Amiga games with emulators on a well known forum.
I think Workbench came out before Windows appeared on the PC.
Edit: I have just done a quick search and Workbench 1.0 came out in October 1985, while Windows 1.0 came out in November 1985.
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https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/index.php?title=Windows:1:COMDEX1983 >:D
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At that period I was working for a branch of Her Majesty's Financial Mafia. Computerization was only nascent there.
The bloke supposed to be the "expert" insisted the plural of mouse was not mice but mouses.
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There has been one big development over that period: software has now become so bloated that you need ever faster PCs just to do the simple tasks at the same speed as you used to do them!
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There has been one big development over that period: software has now become so bloated that you need ever faster PCs just to do the simple tasks at the same speed as you used to do them!
Strongly agree.
Early in my own career, we’d be tasked with writing (say) a comms stack, to be run in a specific hardware environment, eg CPU and memory. Hardware was not negotiable. At the end of the day, if it didn’t run fast enough, or used all memory, we’d failed. Though I don’t think we ever failed, because squeezing out the last ounce of performance, or reducing memory, was the real job satisfaction.
By the end of my career, the attitude had become... write a comms stack, test it, then tell us what we should state for hardware requirements. No real challenge at all. Could maybe even be written using a mouse. :D
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My first computer (a Tangerine Micron) had 1024 bytes of RAM, of which about 450 bytes were available for user programs. The original "operating system" was in a 1024 byte EEPROM. So everything I did on that little machine involved making the best use of every byte, all in machine code of course. Programming was a lot more fun in those days.
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I think the first "mouse" I encountered was the "puck" (pointing device on a graphical tablet) on an ICL PERQ 2 (or maybe 3A) in 1985 or 1986.
The PERQ was an amazing graphics orientated machine. 1 or 2 MB RAM, 34 MB fixed disc. 1280 * 1024 monochrome display. The computing oomph of a mainframe in a man portable (just) box.
My big boss sent me to evaluate one for a few days. He hated me when I reported that while it was amazing, I could not cost justify it. He had fallen in love with it when the salesman brought one along for a quick demonstration. I really liked the program which would read an IDMS (hierarchical database) schema, draw a representation of it (Bachman diagram) which you could then pull in to shape with the puck.
My first personal mouse was attached to an Amstrad PPC. I did not use it much as Windows 2.* was too slow to use. A mouse click would generally be followed by minutes of clunking from the very slow and expensive external hard disk before anything happened. Next personal mouse use was with SCO Open Desktop.
In my world people who designed and wrote code, at any level, were called Programmers. Those poor souls who just turned detailed specifications into code were pejoratively called Coders. Cue the Real Programmer jokes? E.g. http://www.smart-jokes.org/real-programmers.html
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There is an interesting (if perhaps rather long - 2 hours) presentation about the Xerox Alto system here, which has been restored and is being demonstrated by some of the original programmers and developers.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m_GhapEBLQ[/youtube]
Ian
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Thanks, Ian. I've made a note of the URL to the video but at two hours in length . . . it will be 90 minutes longer than I would prefer! ::)
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Thanks Ian. Looks interesting.
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I looked at parts of the two hour video. Among lots of interesting things, the most was Butler Lampson's role in the Bravo editor, with his idea of a table of snippets or pieces. It seems to me a brilliant piece of programming.
Lampson seemed to balance technology and abstraction.
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The Amiga was the most amazing live computer demo I ever saw - in 1985/6. It was like a multi-tasking graphics workstation from 10 years in the future - and the demo I watched included the Sidecar - a PC expansion box that integrated with the Amiga, you could have PC programs running in one screen/window and Amiga programs running on other screens - like a hardware VMware, but in 1985/86. Of course computers are much more powerful today, but I haven't seen anything since that was like looking 10 years into the future.
I'd suggest watching "From Bedrooms to Billions" (can probably locate it on qBitorrent search function if necessary), for the Amiga history - pretty well made documentary.