The way of the computer [1]

In those days personal computers were a rarety. Those were the days of the ZX-81 and I was a boy of around 12-13. I had just finished the MAVO and was going to the MTS. In the library I found a book about BASIC and used it to gain a theoretical knowledge about how computers work and how the BASIC language worked. This gave me a headstart in school. My logical way of thinking, I think, was largely seeded during that summer holiday.

Several years later I purchased my first computer: a Sony HitBit 75 MSX homecomputer. With it I furthered my knowledge of BASIC programming and some Assembler and C on the side. It allowed me to understand the nature of bugs, how they develop and how to prevent them. I developed a modular method of writing programs. By adding short pieces of code and then debugging them, it allowed me to deliver almost bugfree code everytime an application was finished. This ofcourse annoyed my (older) colleagues, who kept reminding me that it was absolutely impossible to write a bugfree program everytime their code fell over or when I pointed an error out by saying: "What's that for?"

Ofcourse, I'm no genius and I've had my share of embarrasing moments.

The MSX era was one where programs were saved to cassette-tape. I wonder if there are kids around of about 18 that are aware of that piece of equipment. It's all USB-sticks and terabyte harddiscs nowadays. And you have no idea where the data is going. If you take a disk or a stick apart. Can you point out the part where this program or that is stored? I bet not. But in those day I could tell you on which cassette a particular program was and exactly where on the tape, too. And if a program was loading, you could hear the actual bits flowing into the computer! Imagine that. Wonderful!

Remember the 8" floppy disc, 5 1/4" floppies and eventually the 3 1/2" that stuck around until not so very long ago. They're still used, occasionally. I've handled a PDP-11/44 harddisk. In those days the storage capacity was at about 10MB for a single-layer disk with a diameter of (I'm guessing) about 40cm.

The point to this post I was going to make has eluded me for the moment. I'll come back to it when "it" comes back to me.