I’m not sure I can listen to things, I mean really listen, without doodling. It’s been like that as long as I can remember; my notebooks from school, from elementary through college, were about 75% drawings of cars and taillights and robots and spacecraft and noses and birds and hot dogs, often with legs, and so on, with about 20% actual notes and 5% food/beverage/undisclosed stains. I still work this way today.
Of course, thanks to the way the modern world works, I’m actually less likely to have pen and paper with me when I’m in a meeting or whatever to allow for doodling. Sometimes I have my iPad, sometimes not. Sometimes I have stranger doodling tools, which is what happened today, and is pictured above.
What you’re looking at there is a doodle of a Volkswagen Beetle I did – clumsily, with a joystick, hardly the ideal drawing tool – during an Autopian traffic meeting, on a machine that was arguably IBM’s biggest failure: the PCjr.
Do you know about the PCjr? It was IBM’s attempt to infiltrate the home computer market as opposed to the business market they were already dominating. They needed something cheaper and friendlier than their workhorse IBM PC, something that would compete with the Apple IIs and Commodore 64s of the world.
And it was an Edsel-level failure.
The machine IBM came up with was based on the same 4.77 MHz 8088 cpu of the PC, but in a smaller, plastic case, without the PC’s expansion slots, less memory, and a whole host of other cost-saving measures, including a wireless “chiclet” keyboard with hard plastic button-keys that nobody liked.
People hated that keyboard so much that even though the machine was only built for a little over a year, between March 1984 and May 1985, they actually came out with a more typewriter-like keyboard to replace the chiclet one.
IBM’s ad campaign for the PCjr was massive, and used a licensed version of Charlie Chaplain’s Tramp character, but it always kind of creeped me out, in that way that mimes can creep me out. I mean, look:
Yikes, right?
Here’s a later commercial, showing the better keyboard:
The PCjr also used these weird proprietary ports that absolutely nothing else used, which drove everybody nuts, and while it was mostly IBM PC compatible, it didn’t really have the resources to run the most important software, which was frustrating.
But it wasn’t all bad: the Junior had a real three-voice sound chip instead of just the PC’s simple beeper, and – important for my doodling fetish – had some better graphics modes than the PC’s CGA graphics system could offer.
One of these modes was a 160×200 pixel screen with full 16 color palette – a nice step up from the weird 4-color palettes CGA offered. This was the mode I used for my simple doodling program, resulting in that very disturbed-looking Beetle up there.
I wrote this little BASIC drawing program the other night to get familiar with the BASIC used by the PCjr (which is stored on a cartridge), since I’m investigating other platforms to make member birthday randomly-generated cars and whatnot, since I figured it may be fun to branch out from my go-to Apple IIs.
If you’re curious, here’s the simple program:
It’s pretty crude: I set the screen mode, activate the joystick button reading, set some variables, read the X and Y joystick axes, which I then check to see what direction the stick is getting pushed and adjust the X and Y coordinates accordingly, and then draw a line from the current point to the next point set by the joystick.
One button cycles through the 16 colors, the other clears the screen. That’s about it! It’s not exactly Photoshop. But, that’s what makes it fun – the crudeness and the limitations.
The joystick is a really terrible tool for this, but again, that’s part of the fun: use a bad tool on a notorious failure of a machine to make a crude picture of a car! What more would you want?
The limitations of the controls force a certain strange, angular-yet-ragged look to drawings, and I kind of like the peculiar result.
I don’t know why I like this stuff so much, but I do. And I appreciate that you let me bore you with this stuff. I’m still not sure I can make a randomized car generator like I did on the Apple II, but I may be able to, and I think I could get some interesting and colorful results if I’m smart, which is a pretty colossal if.
Now nobody tell David I was doodling during the traffic meeting. I was listening, honest!
I am grateful that I successfully completely ignored computers until my first one could be a 486 running Windows my senior year of college. I made it through my first three years of college with an IBM Selectric and the computer lab the last two years.
Kind of ran with computers once I got one though, given what I do for a living these days (and for the past 30 years).
I’ve learned that doodling is an excellent way to look busy in meetings. (So is writing out a document draft by hand, when you’ve been called into a mandatory meeting that could have easily been a group email but you also have to get an important document out to the customer by 3 PM.)
I lived in student housing (i.e., the dorm) exactly one academic year: 1982-83, my sophomore year. My roommate had a VIC-20 (!). A friend from down the hall borrowed it one afternoon and, like Torch, wrote a very basic, BASIC graphics program for it.
That evening, the three of us were struggling to get it to render the Starship Enterprise and ultimately wound up with a passable profile. The program used the joystick to move the cursor, and the joystick button to either turn pixels on or off, and that was it. The process was very much like drawing on an Etch-a-Sketch, and just as painful. No worries about inadvertently bumping the housing causing all your work to be erased, though.
The next year, I was back at home paying zero rent and having full access to the (free) washing machine. I used some of my precious Lifeguarding money to buy myself my first real computer: a Commodore 64. I acquired piecemeal a floppy drive and dot-matrix printer*, and used a small TV as a monitor. I kept the RF switch on the back of the TV, though, so I could switch between the Commodore and an antenna.
I had a pinball simulator that I played a lot, but that machine got the most miles on it when I was gifted an early word processor—I don’t even remember its name—that didn’t even have as much capability as the chat function I’m typing on right now. But that word processor got me through the rest of my undergrad degree, and got used for lots and lots of Dungeons & Dragons homebrew.
*(And that dot-matrix printer? Yeah, 3×9 matrix of dots and NO going outside the lines! Lower-case P and Q were lifted above the baseline to be able to distinguish the descenders. I took a philosophy course from a Prof who made me bring in a sample of its output so he could judge whether the letters were readable enough, otherwise I’d have to find a (rare, hidden, expensive, or all three) laser printer for my writing assignments. Do you have any idea how many writing assignments there are in an introductory philosophy course!?)
I miss that computer. Not that I’d be using it now but it would have pride of place on my shelf of old computers. Alas, I gave it to an aunt who then gave it to another nephew who probably sold it for drug money. (40 years and I’m still mad about that.)
Jeebus, this post has gotten long. Thank you for letting me ramble nostalgically, though.
Jeff, out.
In the early 80s, I worked as the service manager for a group of Computerland stores in Westchester, New York. We had to fix SO MANY IBM PCjrs… they were notoriously unreliable. I mean like hundreds of PCjrs.
Even more amazing, given how few sold.
Growing up I had a TRS-80 Color Computer and had the Radio Shack version of the joystick pictured. If I remember correctly it was switchable from self-centering to staying in the position you set it.
The fact that you were able to craft something recognizable with that old tech is impressive.
Please keep up the good work and doodling during meetings. With David having an infant we may not want to know what he is doing during those meetings.
Taking a nap is what he’s doing!
Your low effort doodle of a Beetle with a joystick looks exactly like my high effort doodle of a Beetle in Photoshop! You wackos are wonderful!
Thanks for the screen shot of your program. I’ll be transcribing it to punch cards on the weekend.
I had a PCjr, that machine was bizarre. The proprietary side expansion ports were the weirdest. My dad bought the 256mb upgrade expansion, and I couldn’t ever get it to work. The damn expansion needed to be plugged in with a separate transformer. The IR keyboard was terrible, you hold it a bit off and it didn’t work.
But, my brother and I I spent way too much time with the built in bios games and th game Sopwoth, which is another story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sopwith_(video_game)
I read this and immediately thought of the best computer ever.
The Banana Junior 6000.
My uncle had a PCjr with the chiclet keyboard back in the day. It was terrible, but at least it played MS Flight Simulator 2.0.
I don’t doodle during (ugh, boring) online meetings… I read the Autopian!
That’s better, right? (Depending on who you ask…)
How about clicking through some ads during calls? Now that would be helpful to the cause!
My dad worked at IBM when these came out. We had a few to test as kids. I liked our Apple ][+ better since we had more games for it, but getting something new was also fun. We got to play with some secret prototype ‘portable’ PCs too. We got one of the first PS/2 model 70s when they came out. That was a great PC.
One of the ways I won the lottery in life – my high school got 20 PS/2s on a ring network in 1988, my senior year. They were donated to our ‘impoverished school’ by an insurance company in a town an hour away. The business teacher grabbed me and said you want to join my class. I told him I was going to be an engineer, I didn’t need a business class. He told me that I better show up – we were going to sit down together as a group and figure out computer networking. I signed up.
What a great class. The teacher and about ten of us, a smattering of majors, just rolled up our sleeves and worked on figuring out what the equipment could do. Within a week we could push messages to each other’s terminals. By the end of the semester we could create shared files, even databases that could be simultaneously edited by multiple users.
When I got to my employer as a fresh-soph intern they had just taken delivery of a piece of lab equipment that utilized sensors on a network to automate soils consolidation testing. Nobody could get the sensors to communicate with the computer. I used that prior experience to get the sensors talking – cheers and applause, secured my job.
Where would I be if that business teacher hadn’t pushed me. Dang.
You had majors in high school?
Well, it was a stretch, but my group thought of it as such. A bunch of us decided at the beginning of high school that we were going somewhere and we needed a plan. I saw engineering as the way out of poverty but knew I would need to work the plan aggressively to pull it off.
It was bad in the midwest in the 80’s. When the coal mines shut down we lost half our school population. The factories closed up around the same time. My family stayed because of farm ground.
My classmates still kid me about the time I threw a fellow student out of chemistry class. He wouldn’t shut up and kept interrupting the teacher – who we only got for two days a week on a co-op. I finally held up my hand, asked the teacher to excuse me, and proceeded to dress down the offending student with colorful metaphors, ending in “And if you don’t want to escape this f***ing town then get the f*** out of this class because you are in my f***ing way.” The teacher was so stunned I didn’t even get a demerit.
Yeah, we had majors.
I grew up in a similar situation. Dying auto town that once had 8 GM part plants employing tens of thousands of UAW workers. Then one by one the plants closed or massively downsize and they are at a few thousand auto workers today.
We also lost half of our high school class from freshman to senior year. People dropping out or moving away. There was a clear distinction between people that saw school as a way to escape poverty and those that had resigned themselves to working at a gas station or supermarket and living in poverty.
On a positive note – when half the population of a city leaves housing is cheap. You can still buy a nice 3 bedroom home in my home town for about $100K
I have a similar origin story, my high school was also “impoverished” and managed to land two grants, one for an updated computer lab (All new Apple-Talk networked Macs) and an AutoCad lab for the drafting classes with Ethernet (thin net) and shiny 486 DX 66es with VLB SVGA Cards.
Both teachers wanted students to help build and test the network. I already knew a ton about PCs at this point and outpaced the teachers immediately. The Mac network had no security and all the hard drives were shared, so yeah free homework downloads from the teacher’s machine. The Drafting network had “Security Software” on it, but as it was DOS based, I could bypass it instantly. Both teachers didn’t seem to care as long as I kept my knowledge to myself. Ironically, this was “Ethical Vulnerability Disclosure” long before the formal term existed.
My poli-sci major, journalism grad school big sister was exactly the right age to learn to use PCs with command lines, which opened doors for her all through her 20s and has led her to a pretty successful tech-adjacent career despite being trained for an industry that’s been dying her whole post-grad life.
I love playing with old tech. I was a computer nerd for many years, until I deemed that not expensive enough and got in to cars.
I love that you keep these old machines alive!
I’m imagining the image isn’t blurred because it provides an intimate and candid view into Autopian staffers’ homes, but because sharing that image would be breach of contract for disclosing the board of the ambery, shadowy Tailight Interest Committee-Team Amber Council.
Jason blurred it for good reason. While he’s a member of the do-gooder TIC-TAC that supports ambers, he knows his posts are constantly surveilled by the evil radical Taillight Users Freedom Alliance to Stop Signaling (TUFASS), which wants to eliminate all taillights based on a doctrine of “you’re violating my privacy rights, just figure it out dummy.”
Reminds me of the Macintosh SE I have, which also has drawing programs on it, specifically MacPaint and Photoshop 1.0. It’s fun having these old machines around just to see how far we’ve come, and in some cases, how little we’ve changed. I was honestly shocked to find out that learning to navigate my old Mac was intuitive, because the way the old OS worked was not so different from a current MacOS. It’s 38 years old now and still running, apart from the floppy disk drive which I’ll have to see if I can fix someday.
I had an SE with the two floppy drives. No HD, they either weren’t available yet or were another thousand bucks. But the two slots made it a lot more convenient than a MacPlus, where you were constantly swapping your system floppy and your program floppy. Two drives! Luxury!
Mine has a 45 MB hard drive, and from what I remember reading, it was $1000 more than the two-floppy version. The computer was my grandpa’s, and it seems like he fully specced it out, with 4 MB RAM too
Ooo, that’s a Ferrari!
Do you have the programmer’s switch?
I still have in my toolbox a Torx screwdriver with most if the plastic handle shaved back to let the tip reach the case opening screws on Pluses and SEs
It unfortunately does not have the programmer’s switch, although I’ve used toothpicks to activate the switches on the side. I have a screwdriver set from Radio Shack that has a long bit extender and the correct Torx bit, so opening up the case is easy
I used to keep around old computers and computer parts. I always thought it’d be neat to have.
Turns out, they mostly accumulated dust. I would quickly get frustrated by the antiquated hardware, limits, and quirks that I had accepted of the time.
I sure don’t miss boot-up times that can be measured in minutes (plural).
And, much like I love my mechanical keyboards, I’ll claim to miss the Model M keyboard from the old family PS2 that I kept for years and years, I can’t go back to it now – those are some heavy, loud, harsh keypresses that wear me out.
Many rose coloured glasses for nostalgia need to be set aside. Especially true with tech (exceptions for the features that Microsoft continues to strip out of Windows & new ‘features’ – like moving the taskbar to the top of the screen, or continuously reminding me about Onedrive)
My Model M keyboard is currently in mothballs because my wife can’t stand the noise. (And my work desk is situated in our bedroom.) But I fully intend to put it back into service if/when I get my own room.
In fact, that heavy feel (along with the long key travel and tactile feedback) are the things I love most about typing on it. Though I’m sure my hand muscles have probably atrophied by now from typing on lesser keyboards for all this time since COVID.
The succession of MX-style switches on various boards have spoiled me; I have no desire to go back to it.
My first PC? A TI 994A. My Dad worked for Texas Instruments, so when they got out of the home computer biz, he bought every piece of hardware he could, along with all the software he could get his hands on.
Mine had the main computer, a floppy drive, memory expansion, RS232 interface, and one other module. They were boxes that plugged in a chain to the main unit. I had every game released, PLUS every finished but unreleased game! I remember playing a lot of 3D tennis.
I tried to learn BASIC programming on it, but never advanced much beyond making the screen flash different colors. I ended up using the monitor as a TV.
I had a TI994/A also, without most of the extra stuff you mention (I did have the speech synthesizer), so I had to store my programs on cassette tapes. I did get rather good at it’s version of Basic, to the point that my programs hit the limit of the available memory. But it was more about “making” the games than actually playing them most of the time. It was an exercise in “can I make a game that is a facsimile of _____”. I also discovered that because the cassette drive fed the TV speaker that you could play a music tape as the “Soundtrack” to any given game after you had loaded the program and started running it.
“I’m not sure I can listen to things, I mean really listen, without doodling. It’s been like that as long as I can remember”
Yeah, me too. Turns out that’s ADHD.
So, it seems they were chasing volume by making a “cheap” decontented version of their main product, but also didn’t consider (or care) about the customer’s existing investment in peripherals, or interoperability.
So they spent a ton of dough on the ad campaign for a hobbled product, and when people found out, they decided there was better value elsewhere.
I’m shocked (ish) that they didn’t see this coming.
And, of course, if this seems to rhyme with what companies are doing now, well, of course it does.
Another story from that time that will rhyme: IMSAI – a good product, but a cautionary tale of getting sales and marketing way out in front of your production capability and capacity. Plus an extra side of super-culty “EST” training.
(and everyone should read Fire in the Valley)
Can’t be true, we’re told that ADHD is only a modern era problem.
/s
Yeah, before that, you were just “a bad kid who didn’t improve your behavior despite all the punishment”
Sad but true.
I’m not bored.
Anyone else do this kind of stuff in high school programming classes in 90’s, early 2000s?
Our high school didn’t have a computer as of 1982 when I graduated. However, in an ill-fated decision that would dictate the course of my life, I opted to major in ‘Computer Science’ because ‘that was the future’ according to my parents. How was I to know that between the two of them, they only shared one brain cell? I thought they were old and wise?
Anyway, yes, that was the gist of the first computer class I took in college. I thought it was hard, dumb, and pointless. I shoulda changed my major.
Late 90s/early 2000s we were doing animation in “computer class”. I still remember being told to make a fish swim in a realistic-ish manner.
In the early ’80s practically every British school had at least one BBC Micro. My dad taught at a school and over the holidays brought home the school’s computer for us to play with. I’ve been messing about with computers ever since.
The processor (ARM). in the later Micro models is the great great granddaddy of the one used in most Apple as well as many many other products today.
In the mid 70’s I spent a week writing cobol programs on coding sheets which we took to the local university to be run on their mainframe. When the teacher discovered I had already built an Altair kit computer and could program in Intel Assembly and C I received a pass for the class and got to teach labs.
Later at university while studying Computer science and Electrical Engineering I built interface adapters fiber optical interfaces, write operating systems, compilers and interpreters. Was much geeky fun.
Did a fair bit of graphics messing around over the years. Try writing a postscript program to draw your cars. Postscript is a weirdly wonderful language.
I doodle in meetings too when I’m not drafted into running the damn things.
A wireless keyboard, I guess in the 80s? Wasn’t that unheard of? Why didn’t they keep offering this on their PCs? Was it unreliable or failure-prone?
they were IR-based, and just didn’t work that well, especially in classroom environments where there was a lot of cross-talk. plus, batteries. And, wireless just isn’t that crucial when it has to be line-of-sight and like a foot away; may as well just have a little cord!
The PCjr! My father-in-law had one, possibly for decades. As far as I know, he used it to print out Christmas card mailing labels. I’m sure he did other things with it, maybe financial stuff, but I just remember it looking dated even when it wasn’t terribly old.
He was an IT guy, worked for ETS (the SAT people) on the whole fill-in-the-circle-with-a-#2-pencil system. So, the right kind of person to own an early home PC.
Heh – a doodle-Bug
Torch will be kicking himself for not thinking of that.
God I miss my IBM AT Model M keyboard. God’s own keyboard. They sell for good money nowadays, and for good reason.
I don’t.
Heavy, loud, harsh.
I’d far rather modern mechanical switches.
The Model M was nice, but old sliding alps keyboards are the GOAT for me. A really long time ago someone gave me a Dell AT101W. My typing speed instantly increased 50%. That keyboard was incredibly comfortable.
I’d have loved to use it for my day job, but it’s way too loud for an open office.