What did computer geeks do before computers?

[Beamin]

Amateur Radio was a big deal and that goes back a long way - like around 1900.  The ARRL Handbook is where you learned electronics.  I built my first scope back in the late '50s from plans in that book.

Most of the math we used was discovered centuries ago by very bright people.  Trigonometry dates back to around 150 BC.  During the Great Plague of 1665-6, Newton developed Calculus.

I can imagine all these great minds sitting around and inventing all the things we take for granted.

Eniac, the first computer, was completed in 1946 so a large segment of the living population postdates the computer.  For me, computers became available in 1970 so I've been banging on them for 48 years.

Electronic analog computers predate the digital computer and mechanical analog computers go way back BC.  I'm sure there were in-house courses presented by experienced users.

The brains behind the modern analog computer is Lord Kelvin 1824-1907.  His rewriting of differential equations to isolate the highest derivative on the left and all the other stuff on the right leads immediately to programming electronic analog computers.

Lots of smart people and I suspect most of them presented material in one way or another.

Numberphile has videos showing how they did math long before slide rules by drawing a circle then a triangle and more angles and circles to solve equations we would only dare do on a calculator. I had no idea this was even possible. Guess that's what you do when you have no electricity you start thinking.

When I see hard core gamers/coders/hackers I couldn't imagine them not on a omputer.

Speaking of things you can't do anymore rememberphreaking which was messing with the pone line? When I was a kid those green boxes in the yard were much fun especially when you could cross people telephone lines or put capacitor circuits on their lines making tons of static that they couldn't figure out. Also there was atrick where you could rerecord answeringmachines to dial log distance or piss people off or piss people off usingtheir long distance. My favorite was the "paisley box" I saw on newsgroups where it was a Honda generator atached to the phone lines with your grandmas paisley wall paper on it. Take that blue box. 

[Beamin]

The Sears catalog, women's undergarments section.  It was rough I tell ya!

Seriously, Amateur radio was a probably the major (electronics) geek hobby.

Ordering or jerking?  I like Fredrick's or VS's.

[Beamin]

Pissing off truckers with CB radios, pissing off neighbours with FM transmitters, pissing off British Telecom as a phone phreaker, pissing off everyone by picking locks and making explosives and smoke bombs (not small ones!)

Computers kept me out of jail

Edit: some more passtimes of the early 1980s for me I forgot, which usually devolved into something being blown up: radio control models, rockets, bowling, fishing, camping, baiting store detectives.

[Beamin]

Pissing off truckers with CB radios, pissing off neighbours with FM transmitters, pissing off British Telecom as a phone phreaker, pissing off everyone by picking locks and making explosives and smoke bombs (not small ones!)

Computers kept me out of jail

Edit: some more passtimes of the early 1980s for me I forgot, which usually devolved into something being blown up: radio control models, rockets, bowling, fishing, camping, baiting store detectives.

We have almost exactly the same hobbies (less bowling) but computers almost got me in jail.. Did you know just the retainer alone on a federal case is 5,000$?!?! The post patriot act world effects you even if you don't know about it.

I call the people "loss prevention" and many have small man/small penis syndrome. They act like the store merchandise is personal family heirloms . I always liked to say "Whileyou have been followingme realtheives haveprobablybeen stealing. Good job."

[james_s]

I remember a friend's house had two phone lines because there was a family business. We could call two people we knew at the same time and connect them together in conference mode. That made for some pretty amusing moments for a group of 14 year olds.

[Alex Eisenhut]

Recreational explosives.

[andyturk]

There is a pretty good book I read many years ago by Steven Levy about the beginnings of the computer revolution.  At MIT they had a model railroad club.  Kids were playing with the old telephone switch gear to automate the layout.   

Quick search, looks like the PDF is on-line if anyone still reads:
http://www.temarium.com/wordpress/wp-content/documentos/Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution.pdf

WTF is up with "Paul Alien" of Microsoft in that text?

Proofreading wasn't invented until 1990?

 

[joeqsmith]

There is a pretty good book I read many years ago by Steven Levy about the beginnings of the computer revolution.  At MIT they had a model railroad club.  Kids were playing with the old telephone switch gear to automate the layout.   

Quick search, looks like the PDF is on-line if anyone still reads:
http://www.temarium.com/wordpress/wp-content/documentos/Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution.pdf

WTF is up with "Paul Alien" of Microsoft in that text?

Proofreading wasn't invented until 1990?

 

I pulled out my old yellow copy of the book and checked the first few and they were correct.  Maybe there was a problem with the conversion to PDF. 

[Nusa]

Well, to take my father (still alive at 87) for example, he got degrees in Chemistry and Physics and was a rocket scientist for Lockheed in the 1950's. He ended up writing some early compilers for the computers of the day, because nothing better existed at the time. He switched to academia in the 1960's, specialized in Quantum Chemistry and also helped found the Computer Science Dept when that became a thing.

Dad tells stories about making experimental rocket fuels as a teen from chemicals that were not regulated at the time. (Today you'd be investigated as a bomber for trying to get that stuff.)

So as a result, I've been exposed to computers practically from birth, which is unusual for someone of my age (61 now). There's a family story about how I pressed the big red emergency stop button on the wall of the computer room at the age of 2. I don't actually remember that one, but it's probably true.

[EEVblog]

So what did geeks do before computers? Many did nothing. Many perhaps were not even born. Some, like Woz, were hams, others, like Jobs, were hippies.

Jobs was an electronics hobbyist like Woz. He famously called up either Bill or Dave at HP and asked for some free parts to make a frequency counter. He got the parts.

[EEVblog]

I think IBM's greatest success here was selling corporations on the value of a PC, and at the time that was a HUGE market compared to the home users. Prior to IBM getting involved, personal computers had a reputation more as toys for geeky hobbyists than as serious tools. The Apple II series was very successful, in the home market it was much more popular than the PC initially and the popularity continued in schools. Unfortunately Apple started to move away from the open, well documented, hacker friendly philosophy with the development of the IIgs and to an even greater extend with the Macintosh. Even with the Apple II, there were only a small number of clone makers and the biggest one, Franklin got into some kind of legal trouble with them and stopped.

IBM's PC on the other hand became popular in businesses and they did not aggressively fight the clone manufactures. Between people wanting to have a home computer that was compatible with the one they had at work, and the growing ubiquity of inexpensive clones, "IBM" quickly became the defacto standard. While not lasting as long as the PC clones, the Apple IIe was made right up into 1993 which is a pretty good run and the mostly backward compatible IIgs was popular in schools up into the mid to late 90s.

Make no mistake, the key thing that made the PC popular was business was the spreadsheet. Businesses would buy a computer for the sole reason of running a spreadsheet program.
You could have made a computer with Lotus 123 in ROM and if it didn't do anything else it still would have sold like hot cakes.

[bitseeker]

You could have made a computer with Lotus 123 in ROM and if it didn't do anything else it still would have sold like hot cakes.

That'd be quite the calculator.

[nfmax]

The 'breakthrough' in business acceptance of personal computers was VisiCalc, running on the Apple II, long before Lotus 123 appeared, and long before the IBM Personal Computer was a thing. And the idea of a spreadsheet running form ROM was tried, and failed: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/3509/Convergent-Technologies-WorkSlate/

For an eclectic romp through the past, present, and future of computing, I recommend:

Tony Hey & Gyuri Pápay, The Computing Universe, Cambridge University Press 2015, ISBN 978-0-521-15018-7

[Muxr]

I remember dialing into a BBS with my first modem in the late 80s and having my mind blown. That was truly the profound moment that made me realize the awesome power of computers. It took another decade after that for the Web to be born and become mainstream, but the writing was on the wall. It is actually kind of mind boggling how fast the world changed in just a couple of decades.

[digsys]

Ahhh yes, the ol' BBS :-)  I helped setup a 4-6 line in > live view technical site, and 1 or 2 for chip manufacturers. It was awesome !
Roaming the swap-meets looking for 64K ram chips at exorbitant prices !! :-)
Then along came VIATEL and everything changed ... wrote heaps of code / sites for it. Anyone remember Viatel? We got it from the French I believe.
Then Compuserve came along .. Did lots of design for the aussie MicroBee .. etc etc ... ahhhh memories

[bd139]

Pissing off truckers with CB radios, pissing off neighbours with FM transmitters, pissing off British Telecom as a phone phreaker, pissing off everyone by picking locks and making explosives and smoke bombs (not small ones!)

Computers kept me out of jail

Edit: some more passtimes of the early 1980s for me I forgot, which usually devolved into something being blown up: radio control models, rockets, bowling, fishing, camping, baiting store detectives.

We have almost exactly the same hobbies (less bowling) but computers almost got me in jail.. Did you know just the retainer alone on a federal case is 5,000$?!?! The post patriot act world effects you even if you don't know about it.

I call the people "loss prevention" and many have small man/small penis syndrome. They act like the store merchandise is personal family heirloms . I always liked to say "Whileyou have been followingme realtheives haveprobablybeen stealing. Good job."

Here we just got told off by the police. I got caught stealing a linesman’s set out of a BT van once and only got told off. Literally in the 80s no one cared that much.

With respect to the store detectives we never stole anything, just grabbed a security tag off the counter and waved it around the sensors on the door and dropped it. The security guy would chase us which was the cheap thrill.

[Messtechniker]

In the pre computer period, I spent quite a lot of time repairing and
aligning tape recorders, like:
Revox G36, A77,  B77, A700, Uher Report, Variocord and Royal de Luxe
Braun TG 1000 and a bit later Telefunken second hand T9, M5, M10.
Avoided other brands like Grundig and consumer Telefunken tape recoders
like the plague.
Today I sometimes apply my soldering skills to elderly motherboards and PSUs
replacing bulging caps. Basically just for fun.

[joeqsmith]

The 'breakthrough' in business acceptance of personal computers was VisiCalc, running on the Apple II, long before Lotus 123 appeared, and long before the IBM Personal Computer was a thing. And the idea of a spreadsheet running form ROM was tried, and failed: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/3509/Convergent-Technologies-WorkSlate/

For an eclectic romp through the past, present, and future of computing, I recommend:

Tony Hey & Gyuri Pápay, The Computing Universe, Cambridge University Press 2015, ISBN 978-0-521-15018-7

You haven't created a schedule until you have had to use VisiSchedule.  I can't think of any case where a pencil and napkin would not out performed it. 

I think I had VisiCalc running on my old Televideo CPM machine, along with WordStar.    

[German_EE]

Geeks have always been geeks, just driven by different things. Take this guy for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Dibnah

He started off his working life as a steeplejack but over the years he became an expert on steam engines and Victorian engineering in general. Then there's this fellow who went on to great things:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Faraday

No formal education and his first job was apprentice to a bookbinder, that gave him access to lots of science books and the rest as they say is history. Or you can take another amateur scientist from a bit earlier:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_Lavoisier

He was a chemistry geek, and a tax collector. Thanks to the French Revolution that didn't turn out too well 

[bsfeechannel]

Jobs was an electronics hobbyist like Woz. He famously called up either Bill or Dave at HP and asked for some free parts to make a frequency counter. He got the parts.

Yes. He called up Bill at his home and talked with him for 20 minutes and got not only parts but a job at the HP factory that made the counters.

Woz can be considered a geek avant la lettre, because he was fascinated with computers way before the term was coined with that meaning.

Jobs and Woz were also phreakers. They founded Apple with the money they got by selling blue boxes.

[bsfeechannel]

The 'breakthrough' in business acceptance of personal computers was VisiCalc, running on the Apple II, long before Lotus 123 appeared, and long before the IBM Personal Computer was a thing. And the idea of a spreadsheet running form ROM was tried, and failed: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/3509/Convergent-Technologies-WorkSlate/

For an eclectic romp through the past, present, and future of computing, I recommend:

Tony Hey & Gyuri Pápay, The Computing Universe, Cambridge University Press 2015, ISBN 978-0-521-15018-7

Well, if you need an eyewitness, none of the professional environments in which I worked in the 80s had personal computers other than IBM PCs (later clones like Compaq). Except for workstations by Sun or HP. And before the IBM PCs they had mainframes.

Apples, Amigas, etc. were not even considered.

[glarsson]

Apples, Amigas, etc. were not even considered.

What about all the companies using VisiCalc? VisiCalc was THE APPLICATION that put personal computers in the office.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc

[bsfeechannel]

I didn't work for any of them. The first spreadsheet I saw being used in a company was Lotus 1-2-3, the killer app for the IBM PC. In the early 90s, everyone switched to Microsoft Excel.

[glarsson]

That was a long time after VisiCalc.

[bsfeechannel]

Precisely. When personal computers finally called the attention of corporations, VisiCalc was already a has-been.

Here is a snippet of Jobs official bio by Walter Isaacson that seems to corroborate my perception of that era:

When IBM introduced its personal computer in August 1981, Jobs had his team buy one and dissect it. Their consensus was that it sucked*. Chris Espinosa called it "a half-assed, hackneyed attempt", and there was some truth to that. It used old-fashioned command-line prompts and didn't support bitmapped graphical displays. Apple became cocky, not realizing that corporate technology managers might feel more comfortable buying from an established company like IBM rather than one named after a piece of fruit. Bill Gates happened to be visiting Apple headquarters for a meeting on the day the IBM PC was announced. "They didn't seem to care", he said. "It took them a year to realize what had happened".

Reflecting its cheeky confidence, Apple took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal with the headline "Welcome, IBM. Seriously". It cleverly positioned the upcoming computer battle as a two-way contest between the spunky and rebellious Apple and the establishment Goliath IBM, conveniently relegating to irrelevance companies such as Commodore, Tandy, and Osborne that were doing just as well as Apple.

*They still do.