3/7/05
A Recollection of My First
Computer
My interest in owning a personal computer had its roots in the courses I took at
Lehigh University
. I had the good fortune to learn Pascal, as my first computer language, from a
kind professor named Samuel Gulden.
I was working as an engineer full time but decided to enroll at Lehigh taking one
or two courses a semester. I happened to take a one credit course that introduced
me to the wonders of computing and held the answer to my frustration with calculation.
The second program Professor Gulden asked us to write had to find the real roots
of a seventh degree equation. I loved it. Then he introduced us to recursion and
asked for a program to find the real roots of a fourth degree equation. I cheated
and found a fourth degree equation that HAD real roots and used it as my input.
Never mind I was hooked on algorithms.
It was 1975 and the end of a fascinating project that I had worked on for five years.
An unsatisfying ending, due to the recession, left me with a full head of steam
for working in the unknown and problem solving. I was a charter subscriber to BYTE
magazine (September 1975) and attended the Trenton Computer/Ham fest and the first
computer shows at the Shelborne Hotel in
Atlantic City
. By 1977 I was ready to buy. Through a mutual friend at Lehigh, I met Craig Payne who had
an equal interest in owning a computer. He had an Altair and was looking at what
was next. He recommended the Technical Design Labs, Xitan computer. It was the first
box using the new Z-80 CPU. It was also a local company from
Princeton, New Jersey
, which meant easy service to me since I was living just across the river in
Perkiomenville, Pa.
I bought one when they were first ramping up and impatiently hounded them at their
offices until I got mine. Craig and I put it together in a day or so. He did most
of the soldering and all of the handshaking. We used a Texas Instruments portable
terminal as a keyboard and printer and you had to bootstrap the CP/M operating system
from a Sony tape recorder that I bought from Craig with the volume set just so. The monitor was a Setchell Carlson 12”
black and white.
I was absolutely in awe of the power this computer gave me. I programmed it incessantly
first using an interpreted Basic and then moving on to a compiled Basic. The tape
recorder was stolen from my car in
New York City
so I replaced it with two of the first 5 ¼” single sided, single density floppy
drives from North Star. I also received
a keyboard from my wife, Ruthie, for my birthday (ala Craig) which allowed me to
build a small desk in my study for the keyboard, a stand for the monitor and put
the box and noisy printer in the closet with the stereo (and close the doors). The
stage was set for my best effort to justify my purchase. I had convinced my wife
that I should spend 25% of my annual salary for this computer in order to program
the pricing routines for the company I worked for. Never mind that it was unasked
for, that my current position was an outside technical salesman (with a five state
territory), and I had never written anything but classroom assignments for the few
computer courses I attended.
I worked every Monday and Friday on
filling up the space on the computer with the program to price fine
non-ferrous dimensional tubing. The range was enormous with twenty two alloys, sizes
from 3” outside diameter X .625”
wall thickness down to 0.010” OD X 0.001” wall in almost any combination.
I also had length, weight, temper and tolerances as parameters with many tables
for assigning charges that had to be accessed. I had to “chain” three programs together
in order to accomplish; order entry, calculation, and printed output within the
64K RAM that was the 2 MHz computer’s scratch pad. Both floppy drives were filled
to their 77K capacity as well. When I showed it to the former Vice President of
Sales, he was speechless and shook my hand. It was not a complete success for I
had not won over the MIS Director who had claimed it couldn’t be done. He was running
an IBM shop, which was about to get worse with a Sperry system that had a bad Basic
platform. We were unsuccessful in porting
the program to this mini computer. They rented my PC until they changed back to
an IBM that could do the job.
That didn’t matter to me and I embarked on the next great program, which was to
perform the engineering steps to produce tubing. As a redraw mill, Precision Tube
Company purchased large tubes and drew them down to the customer’s specification.
This required an understanding of the metal used, the dimensional constrictions
of tube drawing and the efficiency of the process; weight, length and degree of
difficulty. I managed to convince management
to let me hire a computer science student for the summer to help with the task and
Bill James worked with me for two summers. In that time we managed to create a program
that would work the multi-step calculation of tube drawing forwards and backwards,
making little tubes from big tubes or vice versa. I had discovered a paper on factory
automation that set me to thinking about the next step with the tools already developed.
I presented a paper suggesting that I could model the entire tube mill and integrate
the drawing program into a description of all the machines available to make an
optimum product mix with the current orders. This was too much for management and
the proposal died without comment. That was the end for me and I didn’t last much
longer at the company, jumping ship to join the Johnson Atelier, Technical Institute
of Sculpture as an apprentice. That is a whole other story and the Xitan entered
into it briefly when I won a grant to use to build a fountain
that would respond to light and sound. I managed (with Craig’s help) to drive a
solenoid from a parallel port with a program but the wind was let out of my sails
when my oldest son sent me a flyer for a product that already did what I had set
out to do.
I taught my two step sons, Brett and Keith, ages 10 and 12 ,
how to program and they produced a humorous program they called ,”HinkleHonk”.
It was an interactive program that gave unexpected answers or comments. We also
played Star Trek which was a crude program that had to be keyed in the first time
before running. I showed the boys how to give themselves unlimited energy to kill
the Klingons.
Lunar Lander was another favorite that we tinkered with extensively.
The Xitan collected dust a while in the
attic and the basement until I donated it to the Computer History Museum. I rarely turned it on during the 80’s, with the exception of a grant I received
from the Johnson Atelier, awarded for the proposal to make a computer driven fountain.
I started building computers again when I studied the programming languages: "C"
and "C++". I built a network for my
home with six PC computers.
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