My First “Real” Computer

One of the “ice breaker” type of questions I ask in beginning computer science courses is “What was the first computers that really got you interested in programming?.   That leads us to talking about the history of computing and how computing has evolved over the past century.

The two machines that moved me from the “this is fun” to the “this can be a profession” mindset were computers we had in the lab I  was part of in my first attempt at graduate school:  the Tektronix 4406 and Texas Instruments Explorer LISP Workstation.

The Tektronix 4406 Smalltalk Workstation

Most people know Tektronix for their test equipment, with their oscilloscopes being the thing that most people remember.   They still make decent gear.    But in the mid-to-late 1980s, Tek was a bit of a corporate dilettante with their hands in a number of things.   One of those was a foray into the workstation market with machines based on the Motorola 68000 processors.

Tek was an early player in the Smalltalk ecosystem and by late 1980s was producing a Smalltalk focused 68000 workstation that ran a rather hacked-up version of Bell Labs Version 7 UNIX.   My M.S. thesis advisor was an A.I. sort and had managed to get grant money to get one of these machines.    He had moved on to other things by this point and just told his graduate students to have fun with it.    I had been following Smalltalk since reading a popular press article on the Dynabook project and was seriously geeked out about being able to play with it.   This was my first big dive into the Smalltalk language, the Smalltalk programming environment, and the UNIX operating system.

The Texas Instruments Explorer LISP Machine

The thing that had captured my advisor’s attention was a TI Explorer LX Lisp Machine.  LISP Machines were interesting beasts as their processors and architecture was designed and optimized to run LISP.   Most of the CAD tools for chip design from this period were built using LISP and so TI licensed a design from LISP Machines Int’l. to create the TI Explorer product line.  One of the innovations in this design was that it used the NuBus bus architecture, which was one of the early expansion bus architectures.  So the LX included a co-processor card that that was basically an independent 68000 UNIX workstation running AT&T UNIX System III.   

My boss told me on my first lab in the lab: “Make it work.”   So what do I on my first day?  Inadvertently do a “rm -rf *” in the root directory on the UNIX co-processor after spending about four hours loading the OS image from tape.   Oops, but what can I say as I was definitely a noob at the time.   

Fun machine, tho’, as I got to experience the LISP Machine environment and run EMACS as God and Stallman originally intended.    A large part of the really weird stuff we see today in GNU/Emacs was a straight UX port from the LISP Machine.   Things like the “CTRL-Windows-Alt” modifier keys (CTRL-SUPER-META on the LM).    And the operating system was written entirely in LISP and you had the complete source code.    And a lot of my sysadmin experience came from having to figure out to make that co-processor work.   

The Result

One of the things that got me hired at NCR was they were looking for people with Smalltalk experience.   And a lot of the people who worked on the Smalltalk team at Tek migrated to NCR when NCR tried to build a UX Research Center in Atlanta in the late 80s-early 90s.    And getting exposed early to these programming environments and people who knew how to use them made me a better programmer.

Selah.

There was a meme going around Facebook a while back where you were asked to write “25 Random Things About Yourself, Then Tag Someone Else to Do It”. This was one of the posts that got lost in the transaction from my old web host to the new host. So, I thought I might copy this over for the sheer joy of your reading pleasure. So, here’s 25 random things about me (most of which I suspect people might not have wanted to know)

1. I have stood on the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem and watched the Sun rise over the Mount of Olives.
2. I’ve been programming computers for almost 30 years.
3. I wonder why it took me 15 years to realize that I would be much happier if I finished my Ph.D.
4. I am allergic to coffee and marijuana.
5. My mother is amazed by the fact that I like to work in my yard and to garden given how little effort I put into helping in the yard and garden when I was little.
6. Only one baby picture of me survived the fire that destroyed my parent’s mobile home when I was five years old.
7. I hate vacuum cleaners as result of my brother always making me vacuum the house when he babysat my sister and I when we were growing up. This explains why I get along so well with the Dust Bunnies in my home.
8. I am terribly afraid of bees, hornets, and wasps due to an emotionally scarring experience at a family picnic when I was 4 years old.
9. However, it was that same picnic where I first learned to fear bees that resulted in my fascination to this day with trains.
10. I was a complete and total emotional train wreck during most of my undergraduate years at Sewanee.
11. Of all the courses I took at Sewanee, I have found that the acting classes have best prepared me best to work in academia due to fact that I treat every lecture as a performance.
12. I suspect that I’m like every other graduate of Sewanee who’s is working on or has completed their Ph.D.: I wonder if I could ever join the faculty?
13. As much as I love to read science fiction novels, I really cannot stand most of the science fiction on television and in the movies.
14. People always seem to underestimate the comic genius of The Three Stooges.
15. I spent New Years Eve of the Millennium Year 2000 in a trauma center in my hometown awaiting gall bladder surgery. You see the most fascinating things in a trauma center on the New Years Eve of the Millennium.
16. I have spent extended periods of time in London, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Mexico City.
17. I have been to every state except for New Hampshire and Vermont. I intend on rectifying this deficiency once I complete my Ph.D.
18. I have a great fear of heights.
19. Someday I hope to be invited to lunch with Nero Wolfe and see the orchids in the greenhouse on the roof of his brownstone.
20. Someday I hope to be able to play Shakespeare’s merry rogue, Falstaff.
21. It is difficult to write, it is damned difficult to write well.
22. Guilty admission time: I really like The Benny Hill Show.
23. I will continue to practice until I can consistently make a good pan of biscuits.
24. Someday travel plans: go back to the Holy Land, visit the Isle of Lewis in Scotland, again drink a pint in a country pub in England, ride the train over the Andes in Chile, drink wine in the wineries of South Australia, and see the Taj Mahal.
25. I have been greatly blessed by all of those whom I’ve had the great fortune to have met over the years, hope to be able to meet the rest of you, and wish you all “Bon Chance” and “Auf wiedersehen” wherever you may go and whatever you may do.