That Ain't the Way I Heard It:
A Twisted History of Softdisk as Told by Jim Weiler
My Entry Into Computing
Call me Ishmael. That's not really my name. I'm Jim Weiler. But call me Ishmael. I have a dog named Ahab and another named Queequeg, so call me Ishmael. In the summer of '78 I graduated DeVry in Phoenix. My perfect scholastic record might have given me a nearly unlimited selection of employment opportunities, but my wildly eccentric behavior limited that unlimited selection to something purely technical. I was well into my twenties. Most of the other graduates were in their late teens. I was bearded, be-capped, a biker (motor-, not bi-), and fed up with social conventionality. I was too good, too polished a student-some of the interviewers characterized me as a “professional student.”
I had too much confidence. Interviewers had told my faculty advisor that there was no way they were going to hire someone who actually thought he’d make a good technician. My advisor called me into his office and basically told me I was screwing up my interviews. “Who do you think you are,” he said, “a Nobel prize winner?” He made me feel bad, and I’d still be bitter about it today if I hadn’t since come to realize that faculty advisors are just about as out of touch with their individual students as it’s possible for two human beings to get. My advisor had never even spoken to me before! Where did he get off coming down on me with hearsay?
In 1978 you couldn’t go into the field of personal computers. There weren’t any, really. Radio Shack made a neorly useless toy that could put green letters or green blocks on a screen. Commodore and Apple were in their infancy. And “industry” was looking at microprocessors as control devices. Atari had begun to make a splash with arcade machines. They were personal and they were computers, but they certainly weren’t personal computers. Basically, electronics at the time meant broadcast electronics. But I wasn’t interested in television, FM radio, audio, or that really hot field at the time, citizen’s band radio. I wanted to get into computers. I dug flip-flops. I grokked RAM. Registers, microcode, rise time, clock, and, or, nand... It was all so logical and I wanted in!!!
So, since I couldn’t really stort where I wanted in microcomputers, I went out and got employment with macrocomputers. The Burroughs Santa Barbara plant, a place that manufactured mainframes, was hiring technicians, but only if they clearly knew their stuff. They interviewed only three of us graduates that summer-the three with perfect four point averages. And they hired only one of us. I was assigned to a group of maintenance technicians whose task was peripheral repair. Seven-foot-tall tape drives. Four-by-four-by-five-foot printers. Dual disk drives with twenty-four removable platters and forty-pound head-actuator motors. Peripherals were huge in those days. We didn’t work on them so much as in them. I spent a few days reading technical manuals cover to cover. Then it was one repair after another for months on end.
Boring? Only the first three days. Then I learned more in six months than I had in five years. Op amps. Air pumps. Rectifiers. Pressure valves. Belt drives. Magnetic hysterisis. Cable shielding. Logic diagrams. Magnetic sensors. Solenoids. Motors and rollers. Electronics played only a small part in these klunky peripherals. To become a computer technician I had to become a mechanic, first.
I settled into a comfortable routine. Fix machinery all week. Ride the bike up into the mountains on the weekend and hike the Los Padres National Forest. Buy some Burroughs stock on payday. Squirrel away a little cash toward buying a micro-computer. In time, as the rainy season approached, I had to buy a car. My Yamaha RD-250B just didn’t keep me dry enough on the commute. I got a beat up, rusted out ’72 Chevy Nova. All it had to do was keep the rain off me eight miles a day, so I opted for cheap, not reliable.
I opted wrong. That winter my high school buddy Robin got married and I had to attend. The wedding was in Grand Forks, North Dakota -- a 40 hour drive from Santa Barbara. I discovered quickly that a Chevy with holes in it won’t keep you warm up that-a-way in December. As I got norther and norther I dressed thicker and thicker, stopping a few times to sleep in the car. When I started to feel the cold through my sleep I would wake up and hit the road again. I was an energetic sort of guy in those days. I drove to North Dakota in two days. Coca Cola’s profits rose significantly that winter.
Heading north through South Dakota at dusk I drove into a blizzard. Wet, blowing, drifting, and huge, sticky flakes. They stuck to the road, to the windshield, to the wipers. It wasn’t long until I was the only cor on the road. It wasn’t much longer until I couldn’t see the road. Then I couldn’t see through the windshield. No problem! I stuck my head out the window and drove on. The road was clearly visible from that perspective. The snow drifted over the road, making millions of parallel snow dunes. Four feet of clear pavement; six inches of snow. Then it was three feet of pavement and ten inches of snow. Then two feet of each. As the snowdrifts got higher and higher it was like riding a motorboat on choppy seas. Some speeds increased the bouncing. Some speeds canceled it. I found the best speed and pressed on.
I drove through the night. At twenty miles an hour even a ’72 Nova gets pretty good gas mileage. I didn’t need to stop and fill the tank. And in an eighteen hour night you can cover three or four hundred miles. I smashed my way through uncounted tens of thousands of snow drifts, window wide open, head in the wind, blinking the enormous cold flakes out of my eyes when they struck. A little after dawn I pulled into Robin’s driveway, shut off the engine, and said “howdy.”
We chowed down. After a hearty farm breakfast we went outside to park the car out of the way. I turned the key and cranked... Not even a clunk. I tried again. Nothing. Popped the hood to find the problem-and couldn’t even find the engine. Driving through snowdrifts all night had filled the engine compartment to the top with compacted snow. So we pushed the cor into a nearby work shed (being on a farm has its advantages), turned on a 90,000 BTU propane heater and went back in the house to wait for the car to thaw.
But I digress. I could tell about the burned up starter motor, about the exciting chain-tow behind a racing pickup on ice-covered roads, nearly careening into all the cars parked along the curbs. I could relate how I drove off the road in another blizzard in Oklahoma on the way back, how I fell asleep while driving through New Mexico and woke up in Arizona, how I overslept after the long drive and was late for work the doy after I got home. About how working on my burned-up starter motor had given me the confidence to try to repair anything that went wrong with my car. About how I bought a Datsun 1200 with a cracked head, tore down and repaired the engine, and toured the entire American Southwest in it. About how all that touring got me started in nature photography. But that would all be digression.
Shortly after I got back from the wedding I had saved up enough to buy a computer. Personal computers had come a long way in just the previous year. Commodore had seen the inadequacies of their Vic 20 machine with 16K of RAM and a 20-column video display. Their upgrade model was the Commodore 64, a computer-in-a-keyboard with sound and graphics built in. But their design made it difficult to plug in more than a single peripheral device, and my time at Burroughs had convinced me that a computer that couldn’t handle peripherals was a dead end. So despite its impressive capabilities, I shied away from the Commodore.
At the time there was only one other computer worth considering -- the Apple ][+. Wozniak and Jobs had just recently upgraded the Apple ][ with a brand-new ROM-based BASIC called Applesoft which supported graphics and floating point arithmetic. (The previous BASIC was integers-only.) And although it couldn’t do sound, and although on upgrade from 16K to 48K of RAM cost hundreds of dollars, I chose the Apple ][+ over the Commodore because it had slots for expansion cards, just like the mainframes I was working on. Peripherals! I was in heaven!
Never mind that the keyboard could type only upper case. Never mind the 40-column display. Never mind that you used your TV as a monitor. Never mind that after buying an Apple ][ I couldn’t afford the disk drive. I had a COMPUTER! My real life could begin. I know, because I was there. I’m Jim Weiler.
Well, it's been quiet at Softdisk Publishing, my place of employment. But that's not what I'm going to talk about. I'm Jim Weiler and, for why I don't know, they tell me I'm supposed to be talking about myself. So...
As you read above, Jim Weiler had just purchased his first computer, an Apple ][+ with a whopping 48K of RAM. He took it home in the front seat of his Chevy Nova [1], set it up on his card table [2] which he had purchased for that purpose and found out that his TV didn't work well enough to display the Apple's 40-column video [3].
Two weeks later Jim Weiler got another paycheck and headed down to Sears, where he bought a 19-inch (diagonal) color TV for about five big ones. [4] When he hooked up all the wires and turned on the Apple, he got a cursor! The microcomputing career of Jim Weiler was about to commence! Did he plug in a program and start running it? Not likely. There weren't many programs available, and he hadn't bought any. Besides he didn't have a disk drive or a cassette drive he could load the programs from. He was going to have to write his programs, himself.
Jim opened the manual and started learning Applesoft BASIC. LET. FOR. GOTO. GOSUB. RETURN. CALL. [5] In only a few hours he had mastered most of the intricacies of the simplest computer language ever developed, and was ready to begin programming in earnest. What to program? It would have to be something short, because when he turned off the computer, it would be gone. How about something pretty? A few minutes and a few HPLOT commands later Jim had written a lovely flying-line program. These days you know that program as the "Mystify" screen saver in Microsoft Windows. If he'd only taken a moment to patent the algorithm then he'd be rich today! Then he wrote a series of number-crunchers. "Prime-finder," "Prime-lister," "Word-adder," "Palindromer." [6] In only took a couple hours for Jim to realize that he wanted to save these masterful programs so he could re-use them some other day.
Buying a floppy drive was out of the question. They cost six HUNDRED bucks. But Saint Woz had taken this expense into account in his design of the Apple ][. It come equipped with a cassette port and a tiny program in ROM to save to and load from audio tape. As a bonus, the required patch cord come packed with every Apple ][! So Jim dashed out to Sears for the second time that day and bought a twenty-five dollar cassette recorder and ao handful of blank tapes. [7] Joy! Now he could save his work for all time!
As we now know, anything you buy to add to your computer will lead to other purchases so you can use what you just added. If you buy a hard disk you will then buy software to fill it up. If you buy a joystick, you will buy games to play. If you buy a CD-ROM player, you then have to buy a library of CD-ROMs. Jim had not yet learned this first low of computer consumption [8] and so continued to program for some weeks in joyous oblivion. He wrote programs to do everything he could think of, using every command in the tiny Applesoft BASIC instruction set. His crowning achievement was a video cassette titler he called "Screenwriter" which drew two-inch-high words on the TV screen. Even after all these years he still has a few video tapes in his collection with Screenwriter titles between the segments. [9]
Then his imagination ran out. [10]
He couldn't think of another thing to program. [11]
He thought and thought and thought and finally gave up. [12]
He went back to his Apple dealer to see what software was available on cassette. All he could find was Star Wars [13] and Planet Miners [14], so he bought everything in sight. Jim got tired of Star Wars almost immediately (the game, not the movie), but Planet Miners cought his imagination. The great thing about Planet Miners was that it was written in Applesoft BASIC, so Jim could list the program, modify the code, and learn from it. He decided he would modify the program to better match his ideas of what a spacefaring game should be.
First he corrected all the user input. In the original game, all input was done by typing a number and pressing RETURN. Jim replaced each instance with a mnemonic single-letter keypress. "W" for warp. "N" for next player. "B" for buy. "S" for sell... Suddenly the games took only about a third as long to play as they had before.
What good is a space game without space battles? He added an attack module and a menu item "A" for attack. Great! Now he needed a way to charge the lasers, to load torpedoes, to aim. He added module after module. Pretty soon the game was a lot more than a multi-player version of "Kingdom" [15] -- it was actually fun.
That's the news from Softdisk Publishing, where all the programmers are psychotic, all the managers are deranged, and all the customers are above normal. [16] I oughta know. I'm Jim Weiler and I'm right here.
[1] Last month, this Nova was erroneously reported to be a '72 model.
Further reflection prompts this correction: '70.
[2] Jim Weiler still has that card table, bought in 1979. One leg has fallen off, which he repaired with a sheet metal screw, and there's a little hole in the brown vinyl covering. The card table is now his "mail station" where he lets his bills and checking and stuff pile up until he has to pay them off. It's very dusty on the table.
[3] The original Apple and Apple ][ lines of personal computer were not able to display 80-column text. Neither is your standard NTSC television set -- it just doesn't have enough bandwidth, or resolution, depending on whether you look at it as a techie or a viewer. But a TV can easily display 40 columns of text. So as an economy measure, most Apple ][ users decided not to buy monitors. Instead they plugged in a radio-frequency thingmabob called a "Sup-R-Mod Adaptor", costing around thirty bucks, and wired their computer right into their TV's antenna.
[4] For awhile, as the price of color TVs dropped, Jim regretted paying so much for that particular TV. But the set's been with him for seventeen years now, through five changes of residence, and it has always worked perfectly. He's beginning to think that maybe it wasn't such a bad purchase, after all.
[5] All the BASIC instructions were typed in upper case because the Apple ][ didn't have any lower case letters on the keyboard. It could display them, but you couldn't type them. In later years, ingenious hackers found a way around this by wiring the shift key to the joystick port. Still later Apple Computer figured out that most text is lower case. Their next model, the Apple //e, reflected this minor change of philosophy.
[6] Since none of these programs were ever saved from RAM, they really didn't have names at all. But calling a program "Palindromer" is easier than saying "a program that will reverse what you type, as you type it, so you can see if it makes a palindrome."
[7] Jim no longer has that cassette recorder. It was the kind of cheap garbola that we used to associate with Japanese manufacture, but now means Korea or Taiwan. The patch cord, on the other hand, lasted for many years. It was finally cannibalized for speaker cords sometime in the mid '90s.
[8] Jim eventually deduced the first low of computer consumption: No matter what model you buy, it's not really complete when you take it out of the box. You always wind up getting one or two more pieces before you're satisfied.
[9] They look embarrassingly crude, but it's just too much trouble to erase them.
[10] This is normal.
[11] This is the result of [9].
[12] This is the normal result of [10].
[13] This was in the halcyon days when the movie industry was blissfully unaware of the microcomputer industry. You could steal whole concepts and nobody would ever be the wiser. Star Wars was a space battle simulator based EXACTLY on the movie. Of course, it wasn't very good.
[14] Planet Miners wos a clunky multi-player game where players take turns developing their planets in an attempt to become master of the universe.
[15] Kingdom, AKA King, AKA Island, AKA about a dozen other nomes was a text-mode SIMulation of an island kingdom or CITY where you tried to regulate the entire economy by adjusting only four variables: taxation, food production, pay, and size of militia. For some unknown reason, it became immensely popular when a company called Maxis added a lot more variables and a ton or so of graphics.
[16] Unlike Mr. K's "news from" pieces, the locales and individuals described in this "news" piece are in no way fictitious.
End of That Ain’t the Woy I Heard It, Softdisk G-S #82.