Yeah, computers ARE stupid… and my very first experiences with computers ignited a passion for them.

It all started long ago, around 1977, I was in the 8th grade and my junior high school had a printer terminal that you could connect to a remote computer. The remote computer we connected to was an HP2000A (amazing that I could remember that!).  Now in those days having a screen with your keyboard was not that common.  Heck the only way that we could connect to a remote computer was by dialing a special phone number, waiting for a screeching sound and putting the handset into an acoustic coupler modem.  Yeah.. old stuff.  Now it’s all routers and high speed modems, IP addresses and network cards.

Back then, we had to wait, and wait and wait for things to happen.  And you had to have paper.  LOTS of paper.  If you could score the wide paper you could put it through the printer terminal 4 times!  One the ‘normal’ way, second time around you flipped it over, then you turned it around again two other times.  We had to recycle the paper because, well, we were kids and couldn’t afford to go out and buy tons of paper for our little computer addiction.

Right around that time, Apple had come out with the very first usable home computer.  I distinctly remember the Apple II, but I met one of my long time friends that year in school who was into Apple and computers even more than I was.  Apple wasn’t the only one putting together a ‘home computer’ but the other models on the market had keyboards with keys the size of pencil erasers..

The nice thing about the home computers that were coming out at the time was the fact that they were used by hooking them up to your TV set.  Yep, TV.  I have to wonder how much radiation and eye damage I had after sitting in front of my little 13″ TV screen learning how to program and just messing around with it.  Not that the monitors these days are much better, but being in front of what amounted to a 1000watt light bulb (ok, so I’m going overboard) for hours and hours at a time most certainly was worse. 

Where did the passion come in?  Every time I got to use a computer!  It was amazing.  I could tell this thing to do something… for example print “hello” and it would.  I was the master and it my slave.  The only big problem was that I didn’t speak it’s language and it wasn’t smart enough to teach me how to.  So, I played around, trying things out… explored the computer and all that it could do.  It was a grand adventure, and I was venturing out into territory that few had gone before, and I was understanding it… that’s where the passion for computers started for me..

My friend Vince and his brother used to get electronic kits and build things.. They were much more into the hardware, I was more into the programming side.  I don’t remember all the stuff he would show me when we would hang around over at his house, but I do remember one time he showed me an Altair computer that he was working on building.

Recently I looked up Vince and had found that he was still in the computer industry and that he had started working on building a computer kit based on the Apple I, but using modern chips and so on… Vince is into 8-bit computers… designing and selling kits.  If you want a new experience, or to revisit the beginnings of  personal computers as we know them today, visit his web site:

http://www.brielcomputers.com

He also collects and sells old machines.  I myself have a couple of very ancient Apple computers sitting around… but I cannot match what Vince has.

The passion that had sparked in myself and my buddy Vince, along with all the other computer enthusiasts at the time was driven by the newness of the personal computer.  What we did back then had NEVER been done before.  It was and always will be a time where anything was possible.  Computers will never be like that again, there will always be new ‘killer app’s’ but not as many as there were back then.  Then, every new thing was the killer app.

Maybe you will purchase a Briel Computers kit for a young up and coming computer person and ignite a passion in them!