My first computer experiences where through printer/terminals to mainframe computers. A Multics system at Rome Labs that we got access to as members of the local Explorer Post; and a DEC-10 running TOPS-20 at Syracuse University. The common language on both was UCI Common LISP 2.0 – and LISP may have permanently warped my programming brain.
It was years before I had a personal computer; though others had TI-99/4A, Coleco Adam, Apple II, Atari 400, and Commodore 64 machines. I even dabbled extensively with a friend’s TI and another’s Commodore – but neither could afford even the tape drives… so all programs had to be keyed in each time we powered the machine on; and BASIC is pure crap compared to LISP – so I was frustrated in the extreme… One of the more interesting was a DEC Rainbow 100 that could boot either MS-DOS or CPM and had several programming languages. David, the friend with the DEC, even had a floppy drive! So I refused to buy my own computer long after I could afford one until one effectively simulated the mainframe time-sharing servers I was used to.
I contemplated one of the first 386 machines in 1986/1987… BYTE magazine built it up with so much hype… but the OS still sucked. I ended up buying myself an Amiga 500 after playing with a friend’s Amiga 1000 extensively and discovering the first personal computer with preemptive multi-tasking. The filesystem security sucked, and there was no concept of protected memory nor different users; but I could run multiple programs and effectively communicate between then with an RPC stack entirely written in C – and that was amazing at the time. Later the RPC calls got replaced with A-Rexx for inter-process communication (same language as Rexx on IBM mainframes). Games were plentiful for the Amiga, but TCP/IP networking and ethernet were very expensive; so it was years before I was able to do client/server coding over anything other than SLIP lines. I continued to use my Amiga (500 became a 3000 then a 3000T with ethernet card and 1/4″ tape backups) daily for nearly all tasks until Mac OS X was stable with 10.1.
| With the advent of OS X, my PowerMac Cube (which I’d owned and not really touched for a year) suddenly became very useful with preemptive multitasking, MACH micro-kernal, BSD based OS and UNIX command line. |  |
Perhaps I am too stubborn, and should not have held out for the Amiga… I wonder how my life would have been different if I’d owned an Apple II or C64 with a floppy drive and learned more programming languages earlier. Like Sandro, I have a soft-spot for underdog/alternative systems. I was spoiled with multi-tasking, multiple sprites, rich multi-media graphics and sound; but only after getting a solid text only server core. Standards compliance remains very important to me so that the kind of computer does not matter.
This post was inspired by Sandro‘s story about his TI-99/4A. Thanks Sandro! I am also slowly cleaning out my computer storage room/lab and re-conditioning some old machines or recycling the stuff that is not useful anymore.
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