Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons."

-Popular Mechanics, March 1949

“640K ought to be enough for anybody.”

-Bill Gates, 1981

I know that I’m a geek: Not a hip, funky clothes wearing, small glasses wearing, latte sipping geek. A geek. A guy who takes things apart for the sake of taking it apart, and builds programs that are already built just to completely understand their inner workings. I don’t argue it. I thought that I had a period where I was a nerd, which lasted until age 14 or so, then I became a jock type guy, then an angry drunk type guy, then a geek.

A friend, who has a memory like a steel trap, indirectly pointed out that my geekiosity extends further back than I am prepared to recall.

He pointed out something that I had completely forgotten about. When I was in high school and had my IBM PS/1 286 (a marvel of computing power at the time), I got it to dial into the computer at his house and set up a peer to peer BBS style chat. We lived within a mile, and the phone would’ve been much faster and easier, but not nearly as difficult to use. But then, the difficulty of use was the draw.

That brought up memories of logging on to Prodigy internet service when the “internet” was essentially a series of text based bulletin boards. There were no graphics, everything was in yellow and black, and if a post got a reply within a couple of days, you were the king of the internet. But we never called it the internet. We called it “Prodigy” or dialing into BBS’s.

Back then, I used to download lists containing page after page of BBS’s in my town and the surrounding area. If the number wasn’t a toll call, then my parents weren’t going to get mad, and I figured that I could call them. I would dial in, see what the thing was about, see if I could log in, and either cross it off the list or give it a check mark to lookup later.

Most of it ended up being useless, but there was one time that I thought that I had stumbled into a government BBS, by making up an ID/password. Once I got in, I got really scared, and shut the thing down and crept away expecting the FBI to bust in. God knows what the BBS actually was. It was probably nothing, but it scared the crap out of me.

That was what is considered “war dialing” today. Back then I wasn’t too sophisticated, and didn’t know how to make the PC dial on its own and log the results. I left that up to Matthew Broderick. All I knew was BASIC. And BASIC was rather useless unless you wanted to print “Hello, dork!” in a myriad of patterns and colors, or write ZORK games. I remember my cousin being able to make an 8 bit balloon sprite move around the screen, and we thought that he was a computing god. Today, I guarantee that you would be unimpressed, but back then, when compared to my Commodore 64, a 286 with 8k of RAM was a marvel. When compared to the Vic-20, it was incredible. When compared to the Timex Sinclair, it made me weep geeky tears of joy.

Yes, for a short period, I had a Timex Sinclair. It was the same computer that powered the Apollo missions, and it allowed me to play frogger on a black and white TV. That’s about all that it was good for, as it was 8 inches square and had 3 functions to every key. Maybe NASA knew how to run that thing, but I was useless on it.

And technology was growing by leaps and bounds. When I got a tape drive for the C-64, I thought that I was a king. I could back up my crappy “hello, dork!” programs (and later listen to the noise on a tape player), and program the biggest version of a ZORK! based game that the world had ever seen. Zork games were text based, and responded to typing. You typically would travel around, and find stuff. It went something like:

You are in a room. What do you want to do?
Go left
You can’t go that way
Go right
You can’t go that way
Go back
The Door is locked
Go north.
You are in another room.
Bite me.
I don’t know how to ‘bite me’
You suck
I don’t know how to ‘you suck’

I mapped out an entire Zork game on paper, and I was slowly getting it written in BASIC, but I lost interest in the poject before finishing because of one technological change: the receipt of a 5 1/4 in floppy drive. It was a mere foot long, and nearly 12 pounds, I thought that there was no way that it could get any better. It was a marvel of computing power. With the addition of that drive, I felt as if I had a full NASA lab in my house. I was no longer bound by the cartridge style games offered by the 64. Psst. No. I was free to play games on floppy!

And where would I get these graphical games? Where? Buy? Uh, I was 14. I had a crappy paper route, and the people paid me in pennies, and liked to go on vacation and stiff me. Download? The modem was screaming at 1400 baud. Where then? Copying. By 14, my friends and I had several software cracking programs that would defeat copy protection on the games, and we traded them at will. We had no idea that we were pirates. We just thought that we were clever.

Before that, I think I went outside and got shoved around a lot. And I thought that I only got geeky after the age of 22. I guess that I was a nerd, then a geek, and maybe someday I’ll actually be as cool as I thought that I had already been.

Posted in Geeky