My Computer Age

[Martin Hash]

The year Man landed on the moon I went to my first computer facility, got to play with the card punch & collator. The next year, 1970, I took my first “Data Processing” class. The 1971, the made-for-TV movie, “Paper Man,” caught my attention because it was about a supposed sentient computer (but I was disappointed when it turned out to be just a cover for a normal murderer). For years after that I sent for all the information about homemade computers in the backs of electronics magazines, and in High School my dream was to get an IMSAI 8080 but they were just too expensive.

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I took the equivalent of a Computer Science minor in college, buying endless numbers of punch cards at 25 cents for a pack of 100 out of a vending machine. (Who got paid to count out 100 cards, put a rubber band around them & stock that old cigarette machine?) To pay for college, I had an after-school engineering job where I designed & drafted electrical designs and got to work on one of the brand-new TRS-80s. My last job there was to write a machine language program that ran a whole water treatment plant on a single-board computer KIM-1, possibly the first ever.

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After completing the Electrical & Electronics Engineer degree, I went to work at Hewlett Packard writing software, and ending up with one of the patents on the “Deskjet” printer. I spent all my free time writing programs on the Commodore VIC20, etching circuit boards that I designed myself to plug into the back of the cheap $149 computer to control a 40 foot camera crane, mostly stepper-motor drivers but also the tracking software for the 16mm Mitchell camera. When the $200 Commodore 64 came out, I immediately bought it, writing my first computer graphics programs, then the ultimate dream computer I'd been waiting for sprung onto the scene: the Commodore Amiga.

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There were two groups of people who bought computers in those days: hobbyists & status-seekers. Hobbyists liked Commodore & Radio Shack because they were by far the best deal, but the status-seekers bought IBM & Apple, even though they couldn't do anything. But even the Amiga had only 500K of memory so I hand-wired a homegrown memory card for another 2M. The schematic I downloaded from Usenet was incorrect, and I spent weeks debugging but eventually I was able to write a my first commercial software program, Animator Apprentice. I only had plans to sell 100 units of my debut software but it turned into a successful business. I also was hooked up with Commodore, writing custom point-of-sale demo software for them to use in their stores.

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I bought a couple more Amiga variants until Commodore went broke then switched to an IBM PC clone back in the day when IBM still made PCs. The whole IBM clone market exploded into Dell, Compact, IBuyPower, and various other cheap but powerful off-brands. As a company I bought all the Macs as they came out but I never personally used one as my primary computer, though I did debug other people's programs on them occasionally.

I took my computers on car vacations, on cruise ships, and even camping. I programmed every day, looked forward to it when I woke up in the morning, put myself to bed in front of the glowing monitor. The wear of the keyboards became familiar & comforting, and all filled me with a sense of nostalgia & regret when I threw out an old computer to make way for the new. My life has been an unbroken chain of computers, never a time without one. My computer was my best friend. (I wonder if other workman feel the same way about their tools?) Even now, hardly a day goes by that I don't do something on my computer: mostly writing because I'll never program again, but investigating things on the Internet is almost as fulfilling. My iPhone serves the craving for knowledge & attachment to the world. Recently, I took my computer & iPhone to Africa & the Middle East for 10 months, then South America for 4 more, writing travel articles for iPhone Life magazine, and finally I'm off with my computer to Asia for many months: 7 continents & 100 countries with my computer by my side.