Remembering 1980's Computers and trends

So there was a discussion on Facebook that got me thinking about what I've lived through.

Someone posted a picture of a DEC Rainbow (circa 1982), Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) jump into the desktop/home computer market. The post said "Let's make it cost $10,000, and not be PC Compatible at all. We'll kick IBM's Ass!"

I thought "That's got to be wrong. I don't remember it being that way at all." So I checked a few facts on the Internet, and it turns out that it never cost $10,000, and that it was actually cheaper than an IBM PC with the same options. The Rainbow came standard with 2 floppy drives. The IBM PC cost more with 2 floppy drives.

Also, the Dec Rainbow was a machine that offered 2 CPUs -- a Z-80 and 8088, so that you could run C/PM, or MSDOS. At the time, "PC Compatible" was not seen as important as software compatibility, and OS Compatibility. By running C/PM and MSDOS, the Rainbow was able to be 2 PCs in one, and it also had native VT-100 capability, so it was literally 3 computers at the same time.

What I really started thinking about, though, was the whole decade of the 1980s, and what I experienced as I learned programming and got access to more machines.

In 1980, I was a sophomore at Salem High School, in Salem, Ma. I had failed Computer Programming 101 the year before, but the teacher, a Mr. Dolan, passed me, because he saw that I was really interested in the subject, and had a lot of passion for technology. He knew that I just needed a little more time for the fundamentals to sink in and make the lightbulb go off in my head. It was a good call, because in Summer school, as I re-did Algebra, and kept returning to the computer lab, everything happened. I understood Algebra. I understood it's place in programming. I went over the lessons that I failed the semester before, and I not only did the exercises successfully, I actually accelerated beyond Programming 201, which I was going to take after Summer school was over.

When I took Programming, I met a few friends. Dave, Chris & John. They were the alpha-nerds. They had admin accounts on the minicomputer, and were already programming assembly code. John actually owned a TRS-80 Model III. Then Dave got a TRS-80 Color Computer. I decided, that since I knew him, I should get the same computer, and we would be able to share software. I saved up $400 in paper-route money, and was able to buy the 4K Color Computer. At the time, I really wanted an Atari 800, but I didn't know anyone who had one, and it was almost $1000. That was a lot to someone who just had a paper-route.

Over the next couple of years, I learned all about graphics, made some games, made some music, and graduated high school.

This period between 1980 and 1984 was not the "PC vs. Mac" era. It was a time when everything was up in the air, and there was no real consensus on which computers, software, or Operating systems were the ones that were going to determine the direction of the industry. Not many cared about PC Compatibility, though admittedly, enough large manufacturers did -- but nobody knew if they needed to be hardware compatible or just software compatible with the IBM PC. With an OS like C/PM, for example, it didn't matter what your hardware was, because software written on one C/PM computer would work on nearly all others, because the Operating system was only linked to the Z-80 CPU. Since MS-DOS was based off of C/PM, everyone was thinking that making an MS-DOS compatible computer would be the thing to do, for similar reasons. For a while, this seemed like the case. Compaq made a mostly hardware compatible clone of the IBM PC, which, with a special version of MS-DOS and BASIC, could run most IBM PC programs. Heathkit and Zenith Data Systems also made IBM PC clones of a similar nature.

Then there was the DEC Rainbow, which ran both C/PM and MS-DOS, and was actually cheaper than the IBM PC. Into all of this were computers like the Atari 8-bit line, Commodore's VIC-20 and Commodore 64, TRS-80s, Timex-Sinclair's ZX-81, Coleco's Adam, and many, many more "home computers", which all cost under $1000, and all promised the future. The Timex-Sinclair ZX-81, which was a huge hit in the UK, was only $99. Sadly, it did not sell as well in the USA.

Between 1980 and 1984, I collected software for, and tried out many of the computers that were popping up everywhere. The IBM PC, Apple 2, and TRS-80 were still probably the top 3 lines of computers in businesses everywhere, and in schools, and apart from the obvious charm and games of Apple's graphics, nobody could tell which of the three (or indeed of all the others, as well) would be the go-to system that absolutely everyone who wanted a computer needed to have. Being too poor to afford a PC, an Apple, or a TRS-80 Model 3, I knew it would be a while before I could go with the flow when the flow happened. It simply hadn't happened yet. Even as I started attending Salem State University (it was just a college back then), the proliferation of TRS-80s, Rainbows, and IBM computers showed no sign of where things were going. They did have a lot of really antiquated Lear Siegler terminals hooked up to the Regents Computer network, but other departments had DEC minicomputers like my high school did, and they had the new VT220 terminals, which were faster and had more features than the VT52 and VT100 terminals which I used there.

Then, around my second year of College, in 1985, while I was a computer lab monitor, earning extra money in addition to my paper route, I met a guy who was the computer repair tech hired by my boss at the college. He'd come in and fix TRS-80 model 3 and 4 computers, and occasionally, monitors on some of the PC clones. While talking about computer stuff with him, he asked if I was considering building a PC or Apple clone. This was a new concept to me. I admit I wasn't really a big computer magazine reader, but that might not have helped. The PC and Apple clones were in the tiny ads found in many popular computer and electronics magazines of the time. He tipped me off that for a PC clone, I just needed to have a power supply, motherboard, graphics card, and floppy controller. So I did some research, and before long, I was looking for customers to sell computers to (I still couldn't afford my own). My first customer ended up being one of my computer programming professors, Dr. Lam. Dr. Lam was one of my favorite professors there, because he had a good sense of humor, and though he had a very thick accent, which led to misunderstandings, that was all incorporated into his humor and charm. If you misunderstood him, he'd likely realize it and make a joke of it, and before long, you sort of got him. I had him purchase the parts for his computer, and he called me over to come assemble them for him. Everything worked. $100 made! I had a few more customers, and was soon making my own computer -- just 2 floppy drives and a CGA card, which I hooked up to a tiny Sony studio monitor that I got from the trash. It had a CGA connector, and I easily found a cable for it.

Many things happened, but it was still just 1985/86, and where the market was going we still didn't know. Though the Macintosh arrived, and I had a PC and TRS-80 Color computer, and an Apple II clone, there were still so many computers on the market that IBM PC Compatible was just a bonus. Starting in 1984, there was news of a lawsuit filed by Apple Computer against Franklin Systems. Franklin's Ace 1000 computer was found to be in violation of Apple's Copyright, and as a result, all Apple II clones were pulled off of the market. However, IBM lost it's fight to protect the PC from clones. Here is what happened:

Phoenix and AMI were making BIOSes for various computers with hardware similar to the IBM PC, to allow them to have hardware and software compatibility with it. They did the smart thing, and did not try to reverse engineer or copy any part of IBM's BIOS. As a result, they were not sued, and clone manufacturers, for a small fee, could let Phoenix custom-make a BIOS for them. Between 1984 and 1986, a dozen or more PC Clone manufacturers got started, including Dell and Gateway 2000. It was at that time that I dropped out of Salem State College and looked for my first job building PC Clones. Even at this juncture, with Microsoft Windows on the market, then off the market when Apple sued them for it, it was still unclear. The Commodore Amiga and Atari ST were just released, and they looked sharp. PC, Apple 2 and Mac graphics simply didn't compare to the Amiga or Atari ST. But in 1986, the VGA card came out, and suddenly, the PC became as good a game machine as the others. Soon, the Sound Blaster card would become available, and the PC would dominate both sound and graphics. It wasn't until around 1986-87 that the PC clone truly became the big winner of the computer race. Though Amigas and Atari ST's were still around, they would go extinct by the late 90's.

I also remember companies that I worked for, many of which are long gone. Cambridge-based Unitech, Comp-USA, Interleaf Publishing. Lots of PCs were built. Lots of Macs were upgraded and repaired.