hpr_transcripts/hpr0870.txt

Episode: 870
Title: HPR0870: Computer Memories
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0870/hpr0870.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 03:49:06

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Hello, this is Delta Ray, again, per hacker for your radio.
I thought this would be a fun time to reminisce a bit and tell, you know, my stories about my
first time doing buying a certain computer or having a certain computer experience or
technological experience and hopefully hearing some of the stories would be able to identify
with some of the stories and reminisce on your own experiences because probably a lot of us all
have the same feelings about technology and, you know, we had our first moments when we touched
a computer in World War I or World of First Piece of Code.
And so I just thought I'd share mine and maybe other people will do the thing.
So I'll start out with one of my earliest memories.
First time I went to a computer conference because it's so early I can't remember exactly which one was first.
There was a computer conference that I remember going to a Chicago that bite magazine had a booth at.
This was around 1980-1981.
It was when I was really young and I only have a very big memory of it.
But I remember the bite magazine booth and it was in Chicago at the McCormick's Center.
My parents and family and I were there just going to museums in Chicago and visiting Chicago.
And we went to this conference there.
Around the same time there was a computer convention in Fort Wayne at the Fort Wayne Coliseum.
It was in like the basement or like an extension of the Coliseum.
They basically had a bunch of tables in, you know, on the floor.
Interestingly enough there was a Kenny Rogers concert going on at the same time.
And I was able to figure out later when approximately that convention was.
I think it was in 1982 because I saw somebody who had a Kenny Rogers World Tour Concert t-shirt from those from 1982.
And it showed that Fort Wayne was on the list at the time.
So, you know, I placed this one approximately 1982.
I believe that I saw an Apple Lisa at this convention because I remember seeing something that was like a Mac.
But if it was 1982 there wouldn't have been a Mac yet.
So I'm guessing that, you know, it was a Lisa environment and computer because I had a mouse and a desktop.
And I'm pretty sure it wasn't 1984 yet.
So there was also like Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0 or at least something that looked like Flight Simulator.
But it was just with monochrome graphics. That was an interesting one to think back to.
They also had, you know, all the controllers at the time track balls were popular then.
Light pens are being displayed. That was interesting.
The first personal computer we had at home was a TRS 80 model 3.
I think that's what it was called. It was the mini one. It wasn't like the Coco computer or the one that people often call trash 80.
It was like a smaller model with like chip click keyboard type keys.
I think that's what people call them.
We got it with the RAM expansion at the back and we had to hook it up to the tape recorder.
My brother actually got it as a Christmas gift from my grandmother.
And we, you know, made, I think we had a chest program for something and that was awesome.
In fact then, we didn't seem to really do that much with it.
I remember, you know, typing in a program on the book that just made it print out numbers from one to infinity or however long it could run until you had to shut off to go to sleep.
The first program I, my elementary school was actually pretty, he was involved in computers pretty early on.
It was elementary school that was mostly for farm children in a small town called Leesburg, Indiana.
Leesburg Elementary School. But Leesburg catered to a people who lived around a lake and a lot of middle class kids lived around this lake.
So it was a school that was kind of special in that regard.
We, you know, it was a school that seemed like it might not have a good budget or might not have good teachers or something.
But amazingly, in 1981, it was a school that had a computer in every classroom.
And it was a school that had a computer lab and even dedicated time to like once a week or twice a week to having kids going down to this computer lab
and playing games and doing printing program or paint program or sound program or something, you know, probably to the whole of the teachers that were watching there always.
Like, oh my gosh, these kids are going to break this stuff.
But it was pretty amazing when I think back about it when I talked to people of the same age group around that time that didn't have that kind of experience when they were younger and didn't have school, you know, didn't go to schools that had some of computers.
So it was really quite an amazing school in that regard.
And, you know, we played Oregon Trail. I remember it was first grade on the Apple too. That's about all I can think of that we played from then.
And in second grade, we had a Tari 400 or 800 in the rooms and we each got a chance to write a computer program.
A computer program that just like would play sounds and stuff.
And this was 1982. I had just watched the movie Tron, you know, I was like six years old, just watched the movie Tron. I thought it was amazing.
My parents took me to see it. Well, I probably made them take me to see it about five times at the drive-in.
One time our station wagon broke down at the drive-in event. So I named my program Tron, you know, I stood in front of the class and kind of shamelessly said, I call it Tron.
And it, you know, played some bleep-ditty bloops and sounds that didn't sound anything like the theme for the movie.
But that's okay. I mean, it introduced us to some of the concepts programming.
That was back when you had, you know, use line numbers for your programs. So we would say, like, go to 10 and so on.
And that was a lot of fun. And it was a memory that stuck with me.
Probably the next big memory is getting a Commodore 128 at Target at the Scottsdale Mall in Northern Indiana.
I remember almost everything about that day, you know, going into Target, looking at the different boxes of computers and that we need a 1541 disk drive.
And we need a, you know, I can't remember the model number of the modern.
No, 1080, no, yeah, 1084 modern, I think, and buying all that, bringing it home, trying to find a place to put it.
Amazingly enough, this was 1986. And amazingly enough, the power strip that we bought that day, I still am using today in 2010.
It's under my desk in my office at Susille. And it is, the switch on it is slightly cracked.
And I think it might end up dying a little bit here. I might have to give up on it.
But it stainless steel construction lasted for 24 years. And it's been hooked up to almost all my computers that are around.
It's called the strip. It has a big wave on it just says the strip, you know, like it's a Broadway show or something.
So that, you know, we bought a power strip that day that I had no idea it was going to go on and touch all these computers that I had bought after that.
You know, my dad probably wouldn't have ever thought that something that you, you end up buying like that, end up going on and on, who knows how much longer all end up using it.
Power strips, you know, able to last probably 50 years or something if they're constructed well. So, you know, we bring it home and clear off my dad's drafting table, my dad's a mechanical engineer.
So we had a drafting table at home. And we decided to use that, flatten that out and turn into a computer table and bought a, what was it called?
So, what was it called? Star, Dimatrix printer for it and had to hook it up through a kind of a wacky interface in the back that just had a, kind of like a twisted pair of table, I think, going to it from the Commodore 128's expansion interface or something in the back.
And so it's so cool to have the computer prying out the Dimatrix printer going back and forth.
It's one of the things, those sounds that you can't get out of your head, you know, you'll, whenever you're here when you immediately know what it is, like a sound of your modem connecting to your ISP or something like that.
Unlike a lot of people, you know, looking back, a lot of people who bought Commodore computers ended up copying the games from their friends and stuff.
I did that maybe a little bit, but for the most part, we bought more software than we did. I feel fortunate that I had a, kind of a well off family, my dad owned a business that did well.
And so we could just go in and buy games.
So that probably, you know, early on, that makes me feel like some of the, you know, the feeling that people have around stuff like copy that floppy and copyright protection and infringement, stuff like that, is they feel that it's, you know, the government restricting us and telling us what we can do and stuff like that.
But I can kind of see it from the other perspective that, you know, the programmers need to get paid and everything.
At the same time, I do agree that they use shady tactics and they do stuff that are questionable, you know, at least from the software publisher side that's really annoying.
But I can't say I blame them at the same time. So I can kind of see it from both angles.
So, you know, that was mostly a game machine. We probably only use the, the 128 side a little bit, just to maybe test out some of its features.
We actually, the one way it had the ability to go into what was called the CP Flash M mode, which I had no idea at the time what that was, you know, my dad kind of knew what it was and he had a friend who came over and knew what it was.
They were trying to teach me some of the CP Flash M commands. And I was just like, oh, okay, whatever, you know, this is, this is wrong. I just want to play games or something on this.
Having no idea that later I'd be like a, you know, this big, unique system and it would have actually been interesting to remember what those CP Flash M commands were that we were running and stuff.
I would have been interested in that. But, you know, when you're a 10-year-old kid, you have different priorities.
The next major computer purchase I remember was getting my Amiga.
That was quite a turning point in my computer learning experience, I'd say, you know, I'm sure everybody has a computer that they can remember getting that was like, this is the beginning of the rest of my life or something.
This was the computer that changed the way I think about computers forever. And for me, that was the Amiga that I got for my birthday in 1990.
An Amiga 2000. I had been, you know, asking my parents about it, you know, for, I don't know, several months. A friend of mine had an Amiga 500 and was telling me about it.
I was the guy who was a real nerd about stuff, you know, about computer stuff. And I was collecting all the brochures, going to the stores and talking to salesmen and trying to figure out, you know, what was it that I wanted to get and stuff.
So I remember asking my friend, Tommy Teal, I said, how many megahertz is your Amiga and him not knowing what the heck I was talking about, you know, he just had the Amiga probably a game machine or something.
He said, yeah, it would megahertz if I threw my Amiga at you.
Eventually I was able to get my dad to buy me an Amiga. It may have had something to do with the fact that I actually put a subliminal message in an audio tape and played it while he was sleeping.
So who knows, but tactics you have when you're 13 or 14, I guess. Yeah, I was 14. Well, I was 13 when I did that, but, you know, I got on my 14th birthday.
We went up to CanX computer Express. I'm from Warsaw, Indiana, up in the northern part of Indiana. It's a small town. And we would either go to Fort Wayne or to South Bend for shopping.
It could kind of take our pick, depending on which place we thought might have what we want, which is kind of nice. You know, it was kind of a neat town in that regard.
You were within a driving distance of several cities that you could quickly get to without too much hassle.
So, you know, if we want to go to Fort Wayne, we could go to computer corner, which is this musky, smokey, filled computer store that had a mismatch of like Zenith data systems, computers, as well as Amiga systems, IBM systems.
It was a pseudo business sales center and also did computer repair and stuff. And I was, I don't know, that place always kind of gave me the creeps a little bit, although that a nice Amiga display.
But it was always, it always seems like it was still to smoke and stuff. Probably all of you've been into a computer store like that, especially from the 80s and early 90s that was like that.
We ended up going to a 10x computer express, which was off Lincoln Highway in, in, in, uh, Mr. Walker, which is South Bend area. 10x computer express actually had a mail order catalog that reached out to the rest of the world.
And probably several people, you know, who are Commodore users are familiar with them a bit. They had like stories of different Commodore users and stuff and had a really nice catalog, but the actual headquarters for it was in Mr. Walker and we could actually drive to it.
So they had a small showroom. At the time it was out of an old garage, like a mechanics garage or storage garage. Later they moved to a better storefront that was off grape road closer to one of the malls.
But this time we went in, you know, I had already done quite a bit of research on Amiga and decided that, you know, I really wanted one and convinced my parents to give me one.
I ended up having a, you know, my dad's in talking to salesman and he's not sure whether he wants to buy one for me or not, where it's going to be, you know, too much money.
And so I go out to the car and get my mom and get her to come in like, hey, can you know, push him over the edge so that you go ahead and buy it. And, you know, sure enough, she comes in and just says, match words. Well, we might as well get one. And so we got one.
And pretty soon we discovered what kind of word we were getting into the world of expensive computer stuff, you know, it's not just enough to have an Amiga.
I mean, you know, it was some degree, but pretty soon my dad was getting excited about it and he wanted to buy like a hard drive, a scuddy hard drive of all things, which I didn't even know what a hard drive was at that time, which, you know, not knowing what that acronym meant.
We're like scuddy. That doesn't sound very good. We get a hard drive following week for it for like a thousand bucks. You know, we had to spend a thousand bucks for the hard drive controller and a 46 megabyte hard drive, which was kind of sizable at the time.
That same year in the one of the larger issues of computer shopper, you know, used to be this big magazine that wouldn't fit on your bookshelf.
One of the larger issues of computer shopper actually advertised a IBM four gigabyte hard drive in 1990, 20,000 dollars, you know, four gigabytes, 20,000 bucks.
That was, I think I even had to call to find out the price. It was, you know, they still always had these pages, pages of stuff and they would take, they'd be like, oh, this is $50 or $100.
For this one call, you know, it's like, oh, I must be really expensive if you have to call. And probably they just wanted you to, you know, they didn't want to advertise the price because the prices were going down so fast that by the time it came to print, it would be much lower.
So I wonder how many other people, you know, other kids are like calling and saying, hey, what's the price of this?
Not really intending to buy it just wanting to know. I used to make a spreadsheet, you know, of like the ultimate computer system.
And I would keep the prices up to date, you know, something so I'd call these places. They probably got really tired of, you know, me calling as a kid.
They'd be like, hey, how much is the X509? It's got to be hard drive with 16 kilobytes of cash. And they're like, oh, no, this kid again wanting to know the price of something that's not going to buy.
It doesn't even own a car. It can't even drive yet. Probably after that, as I was talking about just buying computers.
I want to talk about the first time I hacked a computer.
I don't really remember quite the first time I started using a modem. I mean, I vaguely do, but I don't know, for some reason I didn't stick in my memory as well.
I remember borrowing a 150 or 300 modem for my Commodore 128 from a friend of mine and dialing into it. That was interesting.
But for some reason, the 24 hour mod that we bought for the Amiga didn't stick in my mind as well. Although, you know, I remember using it. I just don't remember the first time.
I would call it BBS's. And this guy that I knew in my business class was a freshman high school. He also had an Amiga 500.
And we decided that we were going to start a BBS around. He was like an only child, and I think he was only living with his mom or something at the time.
He had a bit of independence as to what he could do and his mom actually land by a second phone line for his house so that he could run the BBS like 25th of the day.
And one of the, you know, I became like a co-cissop of this BBS back last 15. And we were trying to get up and going. And probably nobody that was dialing into it realized this was run by a couple of 15-year-olds there.
I think we even had some duty pictures upon it. Probably all that was illegal just to be putting up there. We have no idea now.
But it was called Amiga Online. Pretty simple name. And we were really excited about used sky net BBS or something like that. Something that he had bought up the street at some consulting business.
So I started, we started sending emails back and forth on this BBS, you know, little messages to each other. And I would send them off to like other people who were signing in.
And I would sign my name at the end. I would say co-cissop Amiga Online. And Chad, the guy who I ran the, who ran the BBS, he didn't like it that I was like putting signatures in my messages.
Like at the bottom of emails and putting like co-cissop and stuff like that. You know, it's our first drama working together with a group of people and you get a little bit of drama.
And so he actually kicked me off and kicked me out of the BBS because I was playing email signatures. And ironically 10 years later, I wrote a program that made random signatures for emails.
So he kicked me off. But I remember while I still had administrative rights to the BBS, I had gone to his profile page. And the profile pages, if you were an administrator, you could actually see the password for each user, like the clear text password. It didn't encrypt it or anything.
So his password was just DDD, you know, 3Ds. Pretty simple. I can't remember what mine was. I think something like Cinnamon Cats or something. I'll let you look up with Cinnamon Cats words. It's kind of hard to find out about Cinnamon Cats and what the relevance was to the Amiga for that. But I think that was my password or something.
I don't use that anymore. So he kicks me off and he was in ski club. And we started really, you know, not getting along after that. We became like frenemies, you know, or whatever.
And we wouldn't talk to each other. We're like high school enemies or whatever you had back then. And my group of friends and his group of friends didn't hang out anymore.
We did have a couple that were like, you know, bridging the gap and we could see what each other's group was doing. So I found out that he was going on a ski trip one weekend.
And one of my buddies came over to my house and we walked into his BBS with his password. And so I ended up formatting his hard drive.
The BBS system allows you to actually drop down to a shell on the Amiga OS. And I could just type in format HD 0 colon or something like that.
Whatever the syntax was for the Amiga device syntax. I think it was he said HD 0 colon to indicate the hard drive.
So I ended up formatting his hard drive. And I think in his pride, he didn't admit that that's what actually happened to his BBS. He said, all I wanted to shut it off or something like that.
I felt, you know, I mean, it was, it seemed cool at the time and being a teenager, you know, you can get care about how you should do really stupid things.
And that was, that was the only time I've ever really hacked something and did something that was malicious.
And I learned my lesson that it's, you know, it's not nice for the receiving end. And I felt really bad about later.
I ended up cooking up with him on Facebook and apologizing to him for saying that, you know, all that time after that, I felt bad about doing it.
And he, he was okay with it. Actually, he said it was kind of fun, you know, remembering those times and everything.
And he didn't really have too much of a problem with it or anything. I wasn't sure ever how much of a, if it cost him any other issues or, you know, if he lost any important data.
But it wasn't a good thing to do. Well, you know, I thought I'd share that story so you can maybe have some other story that you can relate to it with.
Or if you're a malicious hacker, you might take that to heart and realize that it's not always nice and there's always somebody on the receiving end.
Have your damage, either a salesman that's having to pull their hair out, dealing with the issue that you're reflecting.
So, I'll end there. You know, those are the major ones that I have memory of from my early computing times. See you next time.
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