In the big inning there was the typewriter and gelatin transfer mimeo. In that era Judy and I were the leaders of a square dance group called the “Sage Hoppers.” I produced the monthly news letter on “spirit transfer stencils” and a tray of transfer gelatin. Believe it or not, the product is still out there. I Googled it and was directed to a tattoo supply company. The product is used to transfer designs to the skin to guide the creation of the tattoo.
Next came the ham radio and QSL cards for spreading the words. I sold my ham radio intending to buy a better one but instead purchased a CompuColor II computer based on the intel 8080A CPU and 32 kilobytes of memory. With a 300 baud modem we could have posted notes on the popular bulletin boards of the day but that was not exciting to us. Glen and I were both learning to program in Basic and Assembly languages. We were computer geeks with a capital ‘G.’
This all happened long before Al Gore ‘invented’ the world wide web and before anyone coined the term “blog.” These family legends are the stories of my youth and younger adult life experiences that I would have blogged had I the opportunity. Here is my first story:
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gary@dinsmore-enterprises.com
This first story is about the CompuColor II computer purchased in about 1979. Ironically it cost about the same as the new laptop Lenovo 510 I purchased this year.
We had ourselves a CompuColor users club. The group included an eclectic assortment of members. One was ‘Phil-I-can-read-any-floppy,’ and another was ‘Larry-the-hardware-guy.’ One of our first group inventions was the ‘flippy-floppy.’ The five and a quarter inch floppy disks were a significant expense and they only held 53 kilobytes. By nipping a notch in the opposite edge of the jacket you could use both sides of the disk.
Everyone was busy creating programs in Basic and we would exchange programs at our monthly meetings. That is where ‘Phil-I-can-read-any-floppy’ achieved his popularity because often a floppy written on one machine wouldn’t read on another machine. Phil had dual drives and on one of them he loosened the stepper motor adjusting clamp. By fine tuning the stepper motor he could read the offending floppy and then write it back to a different floppy. If the new floppy wouldn’t read on another person’s machine he would then adjust to their standard and write another floppy that they could read.
At one meeting ‘Larry-the-hardware-guy’ came with a circuit diagram and instructions for a memory expansion board. Within a couple weeks I had purchased the required memory chips and hand wire wrapped the circuit to create my own 16 kilobyte memory expansion board. It cost $75 for the chips. My current computer has 4 gigabytes of memory. At the price I paid for 16 kilobytes, the memory for this computer would have cost $18,750,000.
For a bit more nostalgia check out this link to Old Computers.com. It almost brings tears to my eyes to read these posts from other old time users.
Glen and I both became hooked on writing programs for the CompuColor II. At one point I was teaching computer classes at the local community college, Portland Community College. I came across a program on the Apple II called Visicalc. It was a very kludgy early spreadsheet program in the lineage of Lotus 123, Symphony and Excel. I actually had the nerve to drive to Belleview Washington and call at the Microsoft offices. I got an audience with one of their managers and tried to talk them into letting me port that program to the CompuColor II. They thought it over for about 15 minutes while I waited and came back with a counter offer. They would sell me the rights to the program for $70,000. Now that was more than my house was worth, but think of it… So close, so very, very close.
I will close now, but before I go I must add one disclaimer. These stories have been told over and over again around the camp fires and in various gunkholes for many years. I will not be held accountable for slight embellishments that may have crept into the stories over the years.
Love from Hillsboro where we are still waiting for the new granddaughter. (but soon)
Gary and Judy