Episode: 691
Title: HPR0691: pre-IBM PC computer history 2
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0691/hpr0691.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 01:00:05

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Got to do it.
Good morning, good afternoon. Good evening. This is Mr. Gadgets. Once again, calling in.
And I thought of something else, and I thought I'd do a little segment that is we're on this
history of computing BPC before PCs, before IBM PCs came in and really changed the landscape,
because really that was two different kind of areas, and unless you lived through it, I'm not sure
you really have quite an understanding of what it was like. I mentioned before in the previous
little episode that I submitted, that there was a S100 bus that was around. It was a 100-pin bus.
Real similar to the kind of thing you're used to now except the pins were a lot bigger,
and the bus was a lot bigger. And these S100 bus cards, the physical connectors are way larger
than what you used to today, and it was a kind of a standard for things that came in,
and that was for CPM computers. The CPM operating system was pretty much the only quote-unquote
real operating system that was around in these days, and mostly that would be run on an S100
bus computer. So there was kind of a standard. It kind of worked between different manufacturers
and all those kinds of things, but not so much. There was electrical standard, at least,
that kind of worked. So most of the time, if you had an S100 bus board, you could plug it in,
you could work electrically, but of course there were no drivers for it, so you probably would have
to rewrite the drivers for the board. So it was still a catch-it-catch-can kind of thing,
but it did allow expansion kinds of boards to exist, and all those types of things.
Those are a little bit more expensive, but we're really more kind of business computers,
and I never had enough scratch for that. But what I did, as I mentioned before,
is that Ohio Scientific Computer. Now I mentioned that I got a job working full-time in computers,
and working for the local Ohio Scientific dealer, and he solved these larger-scale kind of Ohio
Scientific machines into several businesses as far away as the Ames Iowa, which is quite far
from the Cam City area. I'm not sure how that deal ever got in, where he got connected up with
a guy from Ames, but various places around the Cam City area, and it ran a version of Microsoft
Basic, and pretty much everything. It ran a version of Microsoft Basic, and in these days,
Microsoft's only product, so it was like a basic machine, and it was a little bit different
on every single machine you found it on. There were slight differences, kind of how many to do
with input output and things like that. Those machines, of course, had come up in the world,
and you actually had disks. So we saw the beginning of floppy disks, and we had five or
a quarter of floppy disks. We're pretty common on home machines and things like that. There were
also eight-inch floppy disks machines that were out there, and so the big Ohio Scientific had floppy
disks, and they had eight-inch floppy disks, in fact, on the larger scale one, and these were
rack-mount kind of systems. So you'd have a full, four and a half foot tall rack-mount box that would
come with the car almost just ran up front of me. They would have a dual eight-inch floppy disk,
because that was a default, and that was a larger capacity disk. We were not talking much of a
capacity here in the old floppy disk days, and the five and a quarters. We had one customer that
he had sold the precursor to, before he got this Ohio Scientific dealership, he had sold some kind
of, I can't remember the name of these machines, but they had their own little kind of bus and five
and a quarter-inch drives and things like that, and I can't even remember what the name of those were,
but he had sold those to a local lawyer. It was actually the guy who did his legal work, and for a
while we shared offices in a little office, we took this lawyer-owned, and that was an interesting
one because those were hard sector five and a quarter-inch floppy disks. So there was actually a
hole in the floppy disk for every single sector. Now the way floppy disks worked was there was a
hole there, and usually they were soft sector floppy disks, which meant that there was one hole,
and it would, of course, spin around. It was towards the center, the spindle side, and there was
a little optical reader that would see the hole go by, and then it could soft sector from that point
on because it knew how fast the disk was a spin. Well, the hard sector disk had a hole for each
and every sector, and this had the extra advantage of you could actually flip that disk over,
and use both sides of the disk. You didn't have to do anything to it. You just flip the disk over,
you could write to both sides of the disk. And in fact, I remember that this lawyer, he
was a little small-scale kind of a lawyer who wasn't any big gigantic firm, and one of his things
was he did a newsletter for one of the larger-scale, upper, you know, cross-kind of executive
developments here in town, had a newsletter for their Homes Association, and he actually had
gotten the, he would publish the newsletter for the Homes Association, and in the process then
here, he would spend about two or three days a month just sitting there with that two disk floppy
system putting out this newsletter, and he had, of course, the mailing list, but it was on a
series of floppy disks. So one floppy disk, right, has whatever the operating system was that,
you know, whatever you can call the operating system, this was on, it wasn't on CPM, it was on some
other kind of a little thing, and so it was running the basic program that was basically, you know,
the operating system was bring up basic, right, and he had this, hey, it was generating,
and had a nice little, you know, word processor to it, and he could mail merge and put in these
addresses, so that's how he put out the newsletter, and he had to spend, as I say, at least a couple
of days, pretty about solid eight hours a day, just sitting there, taking that floppy disk,
putting it in, it had read everything on the first side, and then he'd take it out, flip it over,
and read all the addresses off the second side, and he had it hooked up to a big, like one of
these typewriter style printers, it was literally had a typewriter ball on it, it wasn't a selector,
but it was kind of like a selector mechanism, so it was like typing out these things, and it looked
just like a type, you know, letter, that would go out to the, I mean, he flipped those disks,
and he just constantly flipped the disks, he was a constant problem because he smoked all the time,
and that went very good for the machine, so we had to go in and clean up the stuff, you know,
from the smoke residue, keep its operation going, the big eight-inch floppy disk I was talking about
on the Ohio Scientific's, my boss found out that they came free with double-sided disks, because
you could do double-sided disks on the saw sectors, but you had to have a disk drive that could be
able to flip it over and use both sides, and he found out that he had done that, he waited the one
customer and said, well, how much did you pay me if you could use both sides, you just could just
just the single side, and like I said, oh man, I paid like 100 dollars for that upgrade, so they
didn't even went over and said some magic words and waited his hands over, he didn't take the money,
of course, but anyway, this system also with the big rack mount on the Ohio Scientific was a great
built-in system because it had an eight-inch high rack mountable hard drive, now hard drives
were really hard to come by at this time, I mean hard drives were really, really expensive,
and hard drives on these micro computers were almost unheard of, and this hard drive, like I said,
is that eight inches in the rack mount, and it fit in the rack mount right underneath the CPU,
was a 20-meg hard drive, which was, oh my lord, that was amazing, that's capacity, 20 megs,
and it's a full rack mount size, and eight inches tall, okay, and that's what it took for a 20-meg hard
drive, and the other thing about this machine was it was multi-user, now it didn't have a multi-user
operating system like Udix or anything like that, and keep in mind, there's still an eight-bit
processor, now these computers are also interesting because the processor wars were happening
back then, and nobody knew who was going to win, the 80, who was competing on the 100-boss kind of
side, and some other machines, and 6502, which was what the apples used, right, and things like that,
and so that was the other camp, kind of, there were several things like the TM that I mentioned
before, and it was a 6500 processor, and the 6502 in the apple, and then there was, and by then
it was early apple twos, I guess we were talking about, and then there was a 6800, like this 6809,
that eventually I had with my color computer, well these machines had a 6800 operating, 6800
based system, Ohio Scientific had 6800 based processors, and their Microsoft basic random 6800
you know processor mode, eight-bit processors, all three of them, right, so this board had all three
processors, because theoretically see your computer would not be, would not be extinct when some
of you won the processor wars, they never did do anything with the 80 or the 6502 that was on
there, but they were technically there, and so we could have switched out, I think a dip switch or
something, could have switched it to use the other processor, and it was an eight-bit processor,
but it had multi-user, and it actually had three memory boards, you could run three terminals,
also one of these machines, okay, so it was all terminals, it was all RST32, input output to a
regular TTY terminal, green screen, actually these were gray, so it was a little easier on the
eyes, and so you could have three users, all of that to this machine, all using the one hard drive,
and the way they got this multi-user to work in this, you've only got 64k of memory, right,
you got 65,000, whatever, 232, 300, whatever, bytes, because it's an eight-bit machine,
it could only address that much memory, so the way they did multi-user is, as I said, there is a
memory card for each terminal, so there are three memory cards in there, and the highest eight
kilobits was where the operating system essentially resided, so that's where it loaded into the high
a K, that's where the Microsoft basic was running, and the switching between these, and then it
multiplexed between the three boards for the lower 48k for each user, so each user had their own
individual 48k memory to run their program in, and then the highest 8k was essentially the
Microsoft basic running, because there was a operating system here, and I wrote programs for this
for several different people, and they were input output statements, and there was no database,
so I had to do my own linked lists, to do databases, and all that kind of stuff, and
all this was based on this bus that was used on these, and this particular bus on the
high outside depicts used a Molex connector. Now, you're familiar with a Molex connector, I know
you are, if you ever unplugged the power from any kind of a drive, you know, the power for a
a floppy drive, or a hard drive, the old style hard drives, before the newer, the latest hard drives
are like this, but older, older shell, ATA hard drives, the power connector, that's a Molex
connector, a little plasticky kind of thing, and it's got pins, and the pins go into holes, right,
that are there on the connector, so that's a Molex connector. Now, imagine a bus, which is a bunch
of those pins, like a hundred of them, about, oh, a foot long, a hundred pins spaced out, and that's
your bus, and then you've got Molex connectors that are on the board that you plug into that bus,
and nothing was gold-plated, so occasionally you would get a call, and your system wasn't running,
and my service call consisted of going into the customer's side, and I didn't even have to
completely unplug the board, I just had to loosen the board and kind of shake it around, and force
whatever little oxidation or something that's happening with these cheap tin Molex connectors,
and I just kind of, just, you know, move the board up and down, and a little bit away to make
sure all the electrocon contacts were good again, and then the system would come up. God never intended
a computer to use a Molex connector as a bus, I can tell you that from experience, and so this
was the kind of world we were in, everybody inventing their own systems, using different processors,
I still to this day own a Model 100, which was really the first laptop, pretty much. There was
an episode out at about the same time, but the Model 100 was probably the most popular of these,
and it has a eight line by 40 character display, LCD, runs off of four double A batteries,
has built in Microsoft Basic, had an expansion slot that you can plug in things like a spreadsheet
on the e-prom or word processor dictionary kind of program on the e-prom, and I had one of those
brand new, and I also still own the second one that I bought used a few years back. I still own both
of those, and it's kind of because if the world really, if there's really the end of the world,
as we know it, those are the two computers that I can use to rebuild the stuff, because I can
program in Microsoft Basic, and I can just get a book with, you know, engineering, you know,
calculations that need to be made, and I can write a program still to do those calculations,
do whatever it is, we need to rebuild the world, so there you go. There are also really good
terminals, you know, so I can use them as terminals when I was an amateur radio operator doing,
doing things that needed the RS-232 terminal, have a 300-bottom built-in to them, advanced technology
here, folks advanced, and that had MS-TOS in it. I swear I read, I can never find any references to it,
but this is all pre-internet, so it's probably lost somewhere, but I swear I read in an article
somewhere that Bill Gates, this is back when Bill Gates used to just still program, right? He was
writing all these Microsoft Basic's or adapting them anyway, and he, he in this kind of planning
session that they had for the model 100, he got together and the model 100, and he, I swear to
God, he made a comment in this that it'll run some kind of a ROM-based version of Unix, and this
is what he had in mind now, that's not what it ended up with, right? It ended up with a very good
Microsoft Basic on it, but, you know, this was the way he was thinking back in that time frame,
before IBM came along, and, you know, we'll maybe have another discussion about how BOSS got to be
DOS, but, you know, specialized machines, you know, the whole Trash 80s, the TRS 80s,
were a whole series of those, and I'll talk some more about some of the things that go beyond
just the Model 1 and the Model 2 and the Model 3 of the TRS 80 computers, but, you know,
there was those, there was another group, I mentioned my friend who built his synthesizer,
you know, from a kit, the PAIA synthesizer, well, there was another company that was real popular
here, this was a land, this was an era of kit building, right? Heath Kit, the big kit company,
had its own computers, and there was another company called Southwest Technical Products out of
Oklahoma, and Southwest Technical Products had a computer of its own, that was an 8-bit computer,
I think it was 6,800-based if I remember, and, anyway, they had a bunch of different projects,
some of them were computer-based like this computer, and some other few things about that,
they also had some audio kinds of products and things like that, so there were all these different
things out there, and, you know, there were kits that you could build the computer yourself,
and program it yourself, there were people who were taking drives and adapting them,
so that you could have a disk drive, and it's going to have them to use a computer, you know,
I mean, a tape drive, you know, an audio cassette deck to save your program, and load it in,
which took forever, as those of you who know about the Commodores, and started on those,
you know those, I have a little bit of a connection there, I'm not sure about your Commodores 64,
but if you owned a Commodore Vick computer, and you owned a, you see the Commodore Vick didn't come
with a built-in modem, and you had a modem to do the BDS, right? And so to do any kind of telecommunications
with it, you needed a modem, and the Commodore Vicks in the early 80s did not come with a modem built-in,
the way that the Model 100 did, or some other computers of that ilk, of that time frame,
a lot of them came with built-in modems, modems were expensive, you know, there's another 100
some odd dollars might be adding to it to get a U.S. robotics modem, so having one built in
as a machine was a big plus. Well, the Commodore Vick, the guy who used to run the recording studio
in Kansas City, when he quit the university and needed something to do, he started a company
here in Kansas City that made a cartridge you could plug into the back of the Commodore Vick,
and I don't know if they ever developed one for the 64, but there was a cartridge you could plug
into the back of the Commodore Vick that was a 300 modem, and a lot you just start doing things
online with your Commodore Vick, and I know the guy who started that company, and they were making
quite a bit of money there, making those things about as fast as they could here in Kansas City during
the heyday of the Commodore Vick, and this was a landscape, it was a lot of different companies
all doing different things, and it wasn't really until the IBM PC cable on, so that's why I called it
BPC before PCs, right? It was a Wild West, it was a strange kind of world out here, and if you had
enough money you had an Apple, an Apple 2, right? That was kind of, you know, you had to have
some scratch to be able to afford an Apple 2, and all of us who didn't have that much money,
well we were going to run them to your S80s, color computers, things like that, and everything had
its own individual operating system, or Microsoft basic, but knowing it on one didn't do any good
on the other, you kind of had to relearn the specifics of it, and it was a kind of crazy world,
it's almost amazing that we came out of that as cohesive as we did, but really the IBM PC is
part of what did that, and I'll probably be ready to talk about that sometime next time in my
history of computing series here, but until then, this is Mr. Geddes, I'm going to sign off for
this time around, you can go out there to Mr. Geddes.com and see everything that I'm doing on Mr. Geddes
on Twitter, or Identica, and send me an email if you're enjoying these little walk-down memory
lane, or want me to talk about anything else, because I've been around for all this, so if you've
got any questions on anything, if I remember about it, I'll tell you what I remember about it,
and I experienced it all the way from that very beginning there, and I've been a little
minute constantly full-time ever since, and so send me a note to hacker public radio at
Mr. Geddes.com, or just HPR, at Mr. Geddes.com. We look forward to hearing from you, and talking
to you next time, this is Mr. Geddes, and you be careful out here on this technological
friend here, and I'll be out here till blazing the head of you. Bye now.
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