The A – Z Challenge; G: A Brief History Of Me And Computing

(Instead of doing a differently named subject based on the letter for the day, I’m using the letters of the alphabet as hierarchical headings only.)

Herb’s Blog, Herbdate 23803 – 1242

My Dear and Much Loved Audience, Fans, Friends, Fiends, Foes, and Futurists,

Here’s the haps:

I have been fascinated by computers, how they work, and how codes operate them for a very long time. It started in my Army days in the late 80s working in the shop office and creating ad hoc reports for the shop officer and shop NCOIC. Seeing what would happen if I changed a symbol here or added something there in the code and then saving the reports to a 5.25-inch floppy diskette that was hand-carried to headquarters. Those disks were able to hold a whopping 360 kilobytes of information. The computer was backed up each week to a tape that was a little larger than an eight-track. It was a Unix system if memory serves me correctly.

In the 90s, working for the big-name insurance company in the supply department I was given access to the Supply and Logistics mainframe in the home office. In the mid-90s, we were issued new personal computers that could both access the mainframe and a strange new world called the Internet. We were greatly restricted on its use and, apparently, there was a lot of arguing at the top about whether it was even necessary. These computers used a Graphical User Interface (GUI) in a system called OS2. To buy a computer was out of the question for me in those days as the cost could easily run into the thousands. But when the company quickly outgrew those computers they sold them off to the employees at a very low price. It looked something like this:

Except it didn’t look exactly like that. Fairly similar in appearance but Windows 98 had not come out yet and the computers had no operating systems on them at all. Fortunately, my son was as interested in all this as I was and spent $200 of his own money on the newly released Windows 95. It came (As I remember) on 15 specially formatted 3.5-inch disks. And you couldn’t buy the cheaper, upgrade version because there was no system to upgrade. So to install the operating system from scratch, you booted from the first disk and then inserted each of the next 14. The whole process took a couple of hours if all went well.

It also had some games like, Solitaire, Freecell, and Minesweeper that I can remember off the top of my head. We later found a disk called “Best of Entertainment” that cost around $20 at the time, which had 13 more games. Ski Free, Chip’s Challenge, Pipe Dream, Jezzball, Rodent’s Revenge, and others made the computer a fun toy.

To get on the Internet you had the dial-up modem to try to connect to your internet provider. It made those screechy, robotic noises that you can still hear if you accidentally call a fax machine. And we only had one phone line, as well.

But how did it all work? How did Internet Explorer (the only browser that existed until Netscape Navigator came along.) bring web pages from around the world to my screen? Could I make web pages? Then I saw a book about writing HTML. I think it was a “Teach Yourself VISUALLY” book. That set the hook in my jaw. Maybe because writing in codes made me feel like a kid playing Napolean Solo or Maxwell Smart (My favorite spy characters. Very different from each other but I liked them and thought they were great for different reasons.) or something.

Well, that was almost thirty years ago and a lot of things have changed since back then and I don’t know if anybody really had any idea of what was to come. I did work with a guy in the mid-nineties who told me he still kicks himself to this day (that day? Well, if he’s still around, to this day, too, I’m sure) because in 1975 he’d had a chance to buy stock in a little startup company called Micro-Soft and didn’t do it. He said he thought at the time, “Computers? Software? Who’s gonna want a computer in their house? What would they do with it?”

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