I have always been interested in computers. I remember visiting my cousin Marc in Ohio in the late 1970s where he had a bright, gleaming Radio Shack TRS-80. I mean, could the computing worlds get ANY better? Here was a computer on a table…CRAZY!
My Mom was a teacher during this time and would bring home on weekends the even better Commodore PET computer. To load in programs into the Personal Electronic Transactor (PET) you just popped in a cassette tape into the special tape drive, hit a few buttons, crossed your fingers and played your program. Usually it was Space Invaders because that was all the rage.
Once our family scrapped together $1,500 or so, we purchased our own PET computer and dual 5 1/4″ floppy drive. No longer would we have to wait 15 or 20 minutes for a game to load. This disc drive blasted through the process in a mere two to five minutes. Heaven!
Then we got a modem so we could connect to other computers or “bulletin boards”. Think of this like a crappy version of the Internet.
The modem was about 2 feet by 1 foot and connected to the computer by an external cable. Here is how it would work: dial the number of the computer or “bulletin board” you wanted to connect to on your rotary dial phone; once you hear the distinctive modem noises place the handset of the phone into these suction cup like holes on the modem – be sure to put the listening end and talking end in the right cups; hit a few buttons and viola! – you are reading green text on a small, bright screen.
I LOVED have the computer at home because I could finish Grade 11 computer assignments in a weekend whereas my classmates would have to share the few computers we had in the class. This way a simple project took weeks. Again, I finished in two days which gave me lots of time to get into trouble or get rejected by girls in the class.
Really though, it was these early years that gave me an appreciation for the power of the computer and allowed me to set up my first profitable “novelty based” computer business while in High School. More on that another time.
And BTW – my Dad still has our original PET Computer in the basement of the house. More on his hoarding in an upcoming piece as well.
My first computer was a Commodore 64, with two 1541 floppy drives. I remember some friends with Pet, Vic-20, and C64 computers who only had tape drives, and your comment about the loading speed reminded me of these times.
It seems computers work so quickly these days that when you want to show off a new game to a friend, this little gap of quality time is missed because the load times are so much faster now — I remember having some pretty good conversations while waiting with a friend for the games to load (from tape or floppy).
As a Commodore Pet owner, I’m sure you remember the Bowling game that was written in BASIC. I’m amazed that people are still making software for the Commodore 64 (mostly run on good emulators like Vice, I suspect, although there are a few folks who still have fully functioning original hardware and find that these games run just fine).
Thanks for igniting my old memories. This was a wonderful article.