My Life with Computers

Computers have changed over the years, mainly for the better. The sleek, speedy MacBook I now enjoy is light years ahead of the IBM Thinkpad that I had prior to the Dell that died about a year ago. (Come to think of it, the MacBook is light years ahead of the Dell.)

I got to thinking the other day about my very first computer. I’m talking about the unit I got when I first went to Moody. The backstory: I had gotten a bit spoiled when I came home from the Navy; I had used Dad’s computer for various homework assignments, and LMC had a computer lab. So when I arrived at Moody and discovered that these things called typewriters were still in play, I panicked. One of the worst kept secrets in the world is that I can use a word processor such as Pages or MS Word with speed and grace, but I can’t type well enough to make a difference, even on an IBM Selectric 2.

Now, we didn’t have the TRS-80 Level 2 that Dad got while I was in high school. That unit had been replaced, and really, would not have helped me much at all. PC’s were king, and still pretty expensive. However, Dad found a neat little unit for me. The Epson PX-8, otherwise known as the Geneva, graced my desk for the three years I was in Chicago. I also had the TF-20 hard drive, the additional battery wedge/Ram upgrade, a Seikosha dot-matrix printer, and a modem that would connect me to Compuserve, at a rate of $6/hour. In essence, it was “the whole ball of wax.” Dad got it for me through the DAK catalog, and it was a lifesaver.

The Geneva, right out of the box.

The Geneva’s OS was a little something called CP/M, instead of DOS. The programs that came with it were on chips you installed as needed (WordStar, Portable Calc, and Portable Scheduler), and the memory was pretty limited, but I had something very few people did on my floor: A functional computer setup that allowed me to type and print from my room. Nice in those Chicago winters, let me tell you! And while I couldn’t type fast enough to take notes, I could do assignments quickly (and neatly, I might add) enough. Add a few dust covers and a printer stand from Egghead Software--when it was a brick and mortar store at the time--and I was in business.

Once I graduated and returned home, it wasn’t long before I got married, and we got a new/used computer from Dad, and another while I was in Seminary. In fact, the next truly “new” computer we had for our own use wasn’t acquired until 2000, when I was looking for work and using this “internet” thing to assist me. We got an HP workhorse desktop that survived some five years, and was replaced by another HP desktop that I ended up selling to by Father-In-Law to finance the move to the wireless setup the included by then the Dell and the HP laptop Deena has.

The Epson sat, well loved but unused, in its component boxes until 2004 when we moved. I ended up donating the thing, sadly, but at that time we had something like four computers, two of which were in use--the HP desktop, and the IBM Thinkpad. Someone got a true collectable, and I unloaded a piece of gear that I just couldn’t see holding on to, especially as we were moving out west.

Unlike the DX-150A I replaced, however, I don’t think I’ll be buying another Geneva. Some things are better left as pleasant memories.

Enough for now.

Moving day has come...

My blog, take two.

You’ll notice that this blog starts on October 2, 2009.

That’s not entirely true. It actually started January 11, 2008 over on (what was then) Yahoo 360.

But times change, and Yahoo 360 has morphed into some sort of social networking site. And while I like being social, what I really wanted was a place to write about what I thought. I know it’s hard to believe, but I have been accused of being slightly opinionated from time to time. (You have been duly warned.)

Plus, since it became some sort of social networking site, a number of readers have complained that they can’t read the Heaping Pile o’ Blog without first signing out of Yahoo. They also made it more labor intensive to write on the thing.

In short, it was becoming a pain in the lower half of my anatomy. (I’ll let you choose whatever part you wish.)

That’s why I moved here to Blogspot. Nice, neat, simple, and I can actually use some HTML to liven it up a bit. I know just enough HTML to be dangerous, having done a little website building in my time. I can add pictures, such as one of my Man-Cat, for example.

About the URL: Cpromptpoke is an old Applesoft command. Way back when, in those days where you actually programmed a computer, I learned a lot of programming in BASIC. (We all did, as kids.) There were programming languages called COBOL, PASCAL, and FORTRAN, but BASIC was what we learned first.

Then came the home PC revolution.

All you kids out there, who are are so used to having everything computerized, have I got a news flash for you: It wasn’t always this way! Instead of going online to play games or talk, we actually went outside to play and/or talk. Sometimes to talk, we used a little something called a telephone. It hung on a wall or sat on a table, was connected to the wall by a wire, and didn’t take pictures or have fancy ringtones. It used a bell to get our attention, and you dialed a number by using...a dial. When we did get to play a video game, it was a little something called Pong.

And once the Atari 2600 came out, we could play Missile Command and Space Invaders. Pac Man was a big deal. There was something called IntelliVision, Nintendo was a huge advance, and TRS-80’s, Commodore 64’s, (with a whole 64 KB of memory...not GB, not MB, but KB as in Kilobyte) and Apple I’s were on the landscape. We were lucky if we had a disk drive; most of us backed things up with tape. You know...a cassette tape. And in those days, you programmed a computer. Not just load a new program onto the hard drive. You wrote and debugged the program yourself.

Then came the Apple II. This was a great improvement over those Commodore 64’s and Apple I’s. (For some odd reason, I still have a soft spot for the TRS-80, tape drives and all.)

Applesoft was what I learned by taking a college course in PC on an Apple II of some extraction. It was designed to set memory location address to x. (You programming geeks might recognize the command better as C:\Poke addr,x.)

What is a blog, but one’s memories online? Hence, Cpromptpoke. A place to send my online memories.

Enough for now.

(Posted 10/3/09)

On Sorting Through Stuff

This last week I spent at my boyhood home, sorting through a bunch of stuff that represents a lot of Mom’s life. (Mom is fine, so no worries there.) There was stuff in the upstairs attic, garage rafters, and the back of the shed (and no, 99.97 percent of it wasn’t mine). It’s my Dad’s stuff, mostly, some of it Mom’s, a little each of both my sisters, and oddly enough, some stuff from the missus that she didn’t even know was up there. It was quite a lot--we filled 10 yards of a 20 yard dumpster, and the Salvation Army wound up filling what appeared to be a quarter of a truckload. Not bad for three days work.

A bit o’ ancient history: way back when I was in high school, back in the early 1980’s, I was called by several names (most of which are unprintable; I’d like to keep this blog somewhat family friendly). One of those was “Packrat.” I earned that because I carried a backpack to all my classes. In those days, you could and nobody cared. Nowadays, they search them for things. My, how times have changed...but, I digress. I carried my ‘pack because my locker was smack in the middle of “D” wing (D1214, to be precise), and I knew I couldn’t get to it, into and out of it, and to my classes on time. You just can’t stretch five minutes into eight, no matter how good you are.

The fact I collected all manner of junk...excuse me, really cool stuff...was a secondary issue. Or, so I thought.

So, why bring up ancient history? Because of what was unearthed.

Thongs like old magazines. Stuff from Blue Devils (Yes, all three of us kids were in the Concord Blue Devils. My two sisters were both in the “A” Corps, and I was in both Cadets (now “C” corps) and “B” Corps) and the CVHS marching band. More old magazines. Office stuff from what appears to be Dad’s last five offices. Computer stuff that dates backs to our first few home computers. (I found some tapes from the TRS-80 we had when I was still called Packrat, as well as a template for planning programs, plus about two years of 80Micro. If you had a TRS-80, you know what that is.) Even more old magazines. Stuff that was from my Mom’s mother. And her Aunt. And her Cousin. Stuff my one sister created in college. (Both my sisters are disgustingly artistically talented.) Effects from when I was in Y-Indian guides. (Told you this stuff was old!) Styrofoam that fit monitors long gone. Foam peanuts. Newspapers that discuss Kennedy’s assassination AND the 1976 US Bicentennial. Yet more old magazines. Engineering books, and a fair number of them.

Now, to be fair, I have my own share of junk in storage. (George Carlin was right--Dad had some real junk, but I have some really cool stuff.) Roughly forty percent of my library is in small-sized cedar tubs. I have several boxes of stuff that frankly needs sorting and either pitching, donating, or putting aside until I can file it, use it, or put it on a wall. The vast majority of the LEGO, Star Trek items, and a lot of my Barbershop stuff is also in tubs. More back issues of Discipleship Journal, The Harmonizer, Animerica Magazine (and Animerica Plus as well), and Star Trek: The Magazine than is possibly safe to admit to. (Plus some old Manga, in issue form.) So you know I come by this honestly, and it seems to have come from from my Great-Grandmother, through Grandfather Crandall, to Dad...and thus, to me.

The biggest difference, however, is that I have already gotten rid of a lot of stuff. (Don’t believe me? Ask the missus.) And, as I have time (probably in the waiting times for each of my dissertation components) I am going to have go through and get rid of more of it. It’s not that it’s junk (although some of it is).

It’s because I don’t want the missus to have to sort through it all later on.

Enough for now.

(Posted 6/8/09)

What’s In A Name…

As it turns out, Shakespeare was right.

People ask me why I consider myself an electrogeek, instead of a technogeek. It’s a bit of a long story, so I’ll make it easy for you.

There are two primary differences. A Technogeek usually refers to those who are usually into computers, or digital gadgets generally. That’s cool, and I like looking at all the new toys that come out that we all want to have. The fastest computer, the best and coolest programs, the flashiest cell phones, etc.

An Electrogeek, however, is far more interested in what makes all those toys work. All the chips, resistors, lasers, and so forth that comprise the toys and make them work. We’re also more interested in making them that much better.

For most people, if a flashdrive casing breaks, they’ll put it together long enough to get their stuff of it and on to a new one. Not me—I look at the guts of the thing, marvel at how it was done, then glue the case shut, wrap some electrician’s tape around it…and keep on using it. It still works, and unless you look at it closely, you’d never know it had broken.

Now you’re catching on. The other principal difference is that Electrogeeks fix their toys if something goes wrong. Soldering irons, electrical tape and multimeters are the most used essentials of our toolkits.

I come by these traits honestly. Dad’s an Electrical Engineer; he was always fixing or tweaking something or other out in the shop. We had one of the first computers in our neighborhood; a TRS-80 level 2 (which was a Model 1, with a whopping 12KB of ROM instead of the standard level I 4KB ROM) that was…ummm, modified, shall we say…a bit, by the time Dad got done.

One of my favorite “toys” as a kid was the Science Fair 100 in 1 electronics kit. I built everything I could with it, then started to build things with it (and some spare parts) that I wasn’t supposed to build. Then I raided some of the parts off of it for other projects. (And I’m paying dearly for that now, as I recently bought a second one off Ebay for the vintage parts to fix my kit up again.) I blew the relay out—no mean feat— and had to replace both transistors and a few resistors. (Don’t ask what I was trying to build. You really don’t want to know.)

Why pay some guy to hook up a speaker to the stereo setup in the bedroom? 10’ of 18 gauge speaker wire and the speaker, 15 minutes of my time, and there it is. Wasn’t the first time I’ve hooked up speakers—and won’t be the last, either.

10 years ago, when digital batteries weren’t as good as they are now, I built a battery trap to drain the last bit of juice out of them, so they’d last longer and hold a charge better. (I don’t need to use it now, though—the rechargeables are so much better then they were—but I still have it.)

I could go on, with things like the Realistic DX-150A shortwave radio I had in high school that got better reception than some better, modern units of the day. (I recently reacquired one of those as well, to add to the digital shortwave I currently own.) And before you ask—the first thing I did was take it apart, clean it, and adjust it. Dad would have done the same thing, I’m sure.

Anyway—thanks for asking.

Enough for now.

(posted 3/5/08)