Sometimes it’s worth taking a little look at where we’ve been so we can appreciate where we are. We may feel that the present support for the T/S computers is nothing less than abysmal. While this maybe true by modern standards, just a short look back can show us how quickly we forget and perhaps, how spoiled we’ve become.
Having been involved with personal computers for about years, I’ve been privileged to see the field evolve, first hand. I’ve been able to work with many of the old gadgets that have come along, over the years. In other cases, I’ve been at least been able to see the items, or talk to those who’ve used them. The vast changes we’ve had are absolutely breathtaking.
This will not be a comprehensive history of home computing. There’s not enough space (or reader interest) for it. We’ll just cover a few highlights to give a feel for computing in the past. Note that I’ve tried to make this as accurate as possible, verifying my facts and figures wherever I could. Still, some parts are done entirely from memory and a “verbal bug” or two may creep in. If so, please forgive me.
What computers were available 12 years ago? They might have been more aptly called “computer trainers”. You might answer an ad in an electronics magazine, send hundreds of dollars, and get a bag of parts. These would be assembled into a little gadget that you “programmed” by flipping some switches. The output would be some little lights. Some of these items actually contained an obsolete 4004 or 8008 microprocessor.
Your program was machine code which you entered in binary form. There was no cassette interface, as there wasn’t enough memory to make it necessary. Some early enthusiasts bought and learned from these, others felt them too limiting and avoided them.
The next alternative was to design and build your own computer. Since commercial support was unheard of, you didn’t have to be compatiable with anything. Some didn’t even use microprocessors. The then “top-of-the-line” chip, Intel’s 8080A then cost about $180 apiece. Others were difficult to use and still quite costly. So some home designed computers included a custom CPU built from TTL chips. Instruction sets were crude and limited, but they were fanastic toys. (My own first machine had an average instruction length of 18 BITS, which were read one at a time, out of about four thousand bits of core memory. I was real proud of it; it almost worked properly.)
A third alternative was possible. If you wanted to spend a thousand bucks or so, you could buy a commercial trainer for a particular microprocessor. These were intended for electronics firms that wanted to develop their own microprocessor based products, and were priced to match what such firms could afford to pay. Home users who could afford (or even obtain) these, were rare and much envied.
On or about 1975, however, several significant things happened. First, one of Intel’s competitors started selling 8080 microprocessors for only $30 each. Now, they were cheap enough for the masses. Also, a company named MITS packaged the 8080 in a large box with a huge power supply, 4K of RAM, and lots of slots for expansion cards. This box was the ALTAIR 8800. For about $500, you could get a “bare bones” ALTAIR in kit form. For another couple hundred, you could get it assembled and tested (and it was worth it, I’m told).
The existence of expansion cards brought some interesting results. Some companies didn’t want to make entire computers, but were glad to build cards that would plug into the ALTAIR. Others that did market their own computers used the ALTAIR’s internal bus, so that they’d be compatible with all the available plug-in cards. The first home computer standard was born. It turned out to be both an unwanted baby and one of the ugliest offspring ever seen! the S-100 bus.
You see, MITS never tried to produce a standard; they just wanted an easy way to connect several of their circuit boards together. The 8080 microprocessor produces some very weird signals that were intended to be “sorted out” by a seperate system controller chip. This chip would “hide” the weird signals, and present us with saner, easier-to-use ones. Unfortunately, this chip wasn’t available when the ALTAIR was designed, and all the “flakey stuff” was put right on the bus. When the system controller chip became available, it really couldn’t be included.
Also, this “convenient” way of wiring several boards together made a signal layout that was very inconvenient for later designers. All of this gave rise to speculation that, if you locked 20 monkeys in a room with an 8080 pinout, they’d only take 10 minutes to design the S-100 bus. The home computer field was burdened with this “thing” for years; traces still remain.
The bare-bones ALTAIR was programmed in binary by flipping switches on the front panel. The only output was LED’s. In this way, it resembled its predecessors, a bit. The difference is, it was a bit prettier, a lot more expandable, and a whole lot more expensive.
What could you plug into a S-100 type computer? Memory for one thing. A mere two hundred bucks would get you a 4K memory card. Disk drives? No problem. It was about $400 for the interface and $500 for each drive. Rather use cassette? The cassette interface cost only $175, and was SLOW. Other add-ons , ald include keyboards (the ALTAIR ordinarily had none), an interface for a TV or monitor, or analog or digital I/O. In 1977, a full 64K RAM board could be had for $3900. The expandability of this thing was only limited by the depth of your pocketbook!
These machines normally had no internal ROM. In order to get the cassette interface to work, you had to “toggle in” a 20 byte machine code bootstrap program everytime you powered the machine up. You might then LOAD in BASIC, for example, provided you paid the hundred bucks or so to buy (!!) it.
Perhaps it was the BASICs for these machines that gave the first warning that software priracy would someday be a great problem. Most “old timers” will never forget the letter in one computer magazine by a seller of BASIC. The gentleman thanked the many people who wrote and complimented him on how well the BASIC interpreter worked. He then pointed out that he’d checked his customer list (the product was sold by direct mail, only) and found that only a small fraction of those who wrote had actually BOUGHT the product. He then warned the rest that they’d better pay up.
Unfortunately, the piracy problem hasn’t gotten any better.
Home users were were fairly trusting in those days. Many people had no qualms about sending hundreds of dollars to a total stranger to buy a product sight unseen. This innocence vanished after a series if ads appeared in a major magazine, advertising a bunch of non-existent products that the advertiser had no intention of delivering. (He never paid for the ads, either.) Despite some very wild claims that were even inconsistent with the photographs for his “product”, the guy managed to take in a fair bit of cash before he vanished. I don’t know if he was ever caught.
Those who got the proper word-of-mouth information could have purchased their very own Apple 1 computer, hand built by Steve Wozniak, himself. Although, this was really intended to be the “guts” of a terminal, it could be used as a stand alone computer. For $700, you got the assembled, tested circuit board and that was it. You attached your own transformer, keyboard, and monitor. The board had room for a full 8K of RAM, which you programmed, with machine code. The board also had a single expansion slot, into which you could plug a cassette interface, if you chose to buy one. Sounds great, eh?
In 1976, a big step was taken towards affordable home computing with the KIM-1. For $250 you got an assembled, tested, (and very static sensitive) circuit board. It required multiple power supply votages, which you had to provide yourself. The board had 1K of RAM, and a small ROM program that controlled a hex keypad and some 7 segment LED displays (your input and output). If you could spring seven or eight hundred bucks for a surplus teletype, it could run that, too. You programmed it in machine code only, but the price was going down!
In 1977, we saw the introduction of the Apple II. It came with an 8K ROM with INTERGER (!) BASIC, a cassette interface about as fast as the TS2068, and graphics and text capabilities only slightly better than a TS2068 in the 32 column mode. It had almost no software available for it. With 48K of RAM, you could get one for $2,638.
To be sure, the Apple II was designed to be expanable and its original design has been greatly improved. It truly deserves all the success it’s enjoyed. But don’t forget that people back then paid a huge sum for a machine with little support and capabilities about comparable to the TS2068. Also, don’t forget that all the prices mentioned so far should be double to get a comparable 1986 dollar amount.
Back in 1979, I read about this British kook named Sinclair who claimed he could make a computer that hooked to an ordinary TV set, had a alphanumeric keyboard, and BASIC built in, so you didn’t have to pay extra for it,…all for about $200! This sounded like a show stopper, but still highly unlikely, considering the price to performance ratio of the KIM-1. (How was I to know that Clive was so smart?)
Well, of course Clive Sinclair made good on his promise, and his later machines have enriched our lives even as we’ve enriched his pockets. We’ve seen the rise in the popularity of his machines, and now we’re seeing them decline. As the personal computer field has grown and changed in the past, it will continue in the future. It won’t be long before our TS2068s will look just as outrageous as the old MITS ALTAIR looks to us today. And as the support for our machines continues to decline, we’ll feel a sense of loss. Yet the old time users had so much less. Our machines are far cheaper, far >LM=80,LL=64 easier to use, far more powerful, have far more enthusiasts, and have far more commercial support than they could have ever hoped for. They made out O.K.
So will we.
There’s nothing wrong with change, or looking to the future. For quite some time, I’ve owned an IBM PC, with which I do most of my serious work. Still, my happiest time is spent tinkering with my TS2068. Perhaps it’s because we still have a core of interested and interesting users who know how to have fun with the machine. But perhaps it’s because I still view the TS2068 with a sense of awe, when I realize how much power there is in such a small, inexpensive package, and how far we’ve come to achieve it.