My "wow!" moments in computing

At the risk of dating myself a bit, I’ve been thinking about historical advances in technology that really “wow’d” me.

To my dismay, the first computer we owned was a Texas Instruments 99/4A. I always wanted the more popular Commodore 64, but my dad chose TI. The TI 99/4A was not a wow moment, by any means. Just a reference point. It was a bizarre and arguably cursed platform. It would lock up. Frequently. Despite a fairly powerful CPU, design compromises in the hardware made it notoriously slow. But it was what we had, until…

My first PC was an AT&T 6300. Yes, the phone company. It was actually made by the Italian firm Olivetti. It was mostly IBM compatible, but had some quirks. Although we didn’t buy the “high end” graphics option at the time, it still had a much higher resolution cathode ray tube (CRT) monitor at the time. It maxed out at 640x400 pixels, instead of the more common 640x200. It could only do 640x400 in monochrome, but it looked much better than the standard CGA monitors at the time.

The TI 99/4A was essentially a dead platform from the beginning. In contrast, the AT&T 6300 was mostly IBM-compatible, which opened up a whole world of peripherals. It ran Microsoft DOS, which seemed incredibly powerful compared to the completely proprietary ROM on the TI. It came with a 30 MB (yes, megabytes) hard drive, which was transformative. Floppy disks were now for backups, not primary storage. Data storage on audio cassette tapes was no longer a thing. The AT&T 6300 had a 8086 chip running at, I believe, a blistering 8 MHz. I later swapped the chip with an NEC V30, which was pin compatible and gave a very slight performance boost.

The AT&T 6300 was really the first machine that launched my career. It had a full sized external keyboard, not a tiny-built in keyboard, which was a welcome improvement. It’s the machine I really learned to code on. The TI 99/4A really just had BASIC. For dubious reasons, my dad decided that Turbo Pascal was a “safer” language for me to learn than C, so that’s what I coded in for many years. In reality, Turbo Pascal provided just as much direct access to the hardware, and would even add an inline assembler, so it was not much safer than C. Even after I replaced this computer with another, I used it to run a BBS for years.

My first sound card, a Sound Blaster Pro was another “wow” moment for me. While almost immediately eclipsed by better hardware, it was incredible at the time. While the TI 99/4A had a sound chip, it was pretty underwhelming. The AT&T 6300 was a step backwards, with a horrible piezoelectric speaker that was terrible at making even primitive beeps. The Sound Blaster Pro used the Yamaha YM3812 FM synthesis chip (two of them, actually) which produced sounds like I had never heard from a computer before. Although the tools were exceptionally simple, this was the first platform where I was able to write and play music, explore MIDI keyboards, record and playback wave audio.

The next leap forward for me was the purchase of a 80386 DX motherboard, running at 25 MHz with 4 MB of RAM. I could just barely afford the motherboard. I called it the “towel computer”, because I laid it on top of a towel on a desk and scavenged other peripherals until I could afford a case.

What I remember most about this computer was that it was the first one I had that could run Linux. Early versions of Linux were pretty rough. Documentation was poor, but it could multitask. In the days of dial-up modems, this really changed everything. There were ways to multitask in DOS, but they were all terrible. Not to mention that 640 KB of RAM was most certainly NOT enough for anyone. Being able to use your computer while you downloaded files for hours and hours and hours, really changed everything. Oh, and I would start writing code in proper C in UNIX-like environment.

Back to sound cards, the Sound Blaster AWE32 was another huge leap forward for me. Although I always wanted a Roland Sound Canvas instead, the AWE32 was what I could afford. It freed me from the tinny FM synthesis of the Yamaha chips, which were not aging well. This was also around the time the Commodore Amiga was popular, which I also could not afford… but the AWE32 gave me some fairly realistic synthesis. It also had compact disc (CD) quality recording and playback capabilities. Hard drives were finally getting large enough to do basic digital audio work, which would ultimately be more useful than wave table synthesis.

Somewhere around this time, I was finally able to purchase a VGA card and monitor. It’s hard to explain in modern times just how primitive and limiting computer graphics used to be. For a long time, I could do no better than a palette of sixteen fixed colors… and most of the time it was only four. VGA finally offered more colors, higher resolutions, and the ability to run graphical environments such as Microsoft Windows and X. True graphical environments opened up the world of desktop publishing and music creation that were simply out of reach with lesser hardware.

The last CPU that really “wow’d” me was my first Pentium. This was the original Pentium (80586) running at 60 MHz (and complete with the Pentium FDIV bug). Even though I was pretty late to the Pentium party, it was so much faster than the 80386, it was a leap forward for me. Everything else has just felt incremental. CPUs got faster and faster, and I didn’t have the Pentium for that long. I think it lived for a bit as a Linux firewall, but still made an impression.

For a brief time, I had ISDN. When even the best modems topped out at about 28,800 bits-per-second, ISDN ran at 64,000 or 128,000 bits-per-second. This was the technology that would allow me to experience the very early home Internet. It was several times faster than dial up, at a time when even the tiniest speed increase made a real difference.

I owned a dual Pentium Pro for a while. This was the first machine I ever owned with more than one CPU.

I also owned a very early dual Opteron. While I thought it was cool to be an early adopter, and test early Gentoo Linux builds on a new architecture, I don’t remember it being life changing. I did keep one of the chips, though.