Though this is my first blog on the subject, I would consider myself a well-versed amateur in the art of computer affairs. A short conversation during my senior year of college with a professor not much older than myself revealed the very distinct privilege I was given to have been the first generation able to associate my childhood with computers.
Santa finally - though not without a certain measure of humor - answered my years of requests for an Atari with a Radio Shack Tandy 1000 EX for Christmas 1986. Santa had written my sister and I a note, instructing us to snoop around the tree. Christmas and wide-eyed children being what they are, the glittery splendor of yet-wrapped presents managed to glutton-blind the two of us, effectively camouflaging a bright beige monitor and keyboard-drive unit set up on a dining room chair. After an embarrassing thirty seconds of Meg and I completely looking past the computer, then over it, behind it, and past it again, until soon on the verge of shrugging our shoulders and digging into the slightly more recognizable Christmas presents at the base of the tree, my father directed our attention to the space-age spectacle sitting right in front of our faces. He flipped the "on" switch and, MS-DOS startup disk in drive, the Tandy proceeded to run a batch file whose author was immediately apparent (in all caps, no less):
MERRY CHRISTMAS, MEG AND MIKE! I HOPE YOU LIKE THIS COMPUTER, MUCH BETTER THAN OLD ATARI!!!!!BY THE WAY, WHERE ARE MY MILK AND COOKIES? NO MATTER, I NEED TO WATCH MY WEIGHT FOR MRS. C!
'TIL NEXT YEAR - S.C.
I love my father - er, Santa. Back in the days when the Shack was still attempting to sneak a living from the home computing gravy train, this knockoff of the PCJunior was the quintessential family computer. It was simple; nothing more than a typewriter-sized, keyboard-CPU-and-disk-drive composite piece attached to a monitor. The keyboard gave little action for your flying fingers; those bred on stiff Smith-Coronas would inevitably stuff a few unnecessary letters into every other word. The EX's John Bull heart was a 8086 chip was of the "Golly, it's a horseless carriage" generation which, for those who don't know, managed to put out a thundering 4 megahertz of processing power. Mass-produced models of the same price today deliver, of course, over one gigahertz. Files whose saving time we take for granted would involve at least ten times the wait back then, a user serenaded by the now-nostalgic gree-gronk, gree-gronk, gronk-gronk, gree; gree-gronk, gree-gronk of an accessing 5 1/4" magnetic floppy disk drive. My office computer's 3 1/2" drive emits a similarly antique groan when it operates. If I pay attention (during those times when I actually use it) I'm immediately brought back to 1986. Finally, the Tandy showed its IBM-clone-for-kiddies colors by boasting a three-channel sine/square/sawtooth sound module tied into a white-noise generator. Even for early games, the three channels could be utilized for full triad representation; by the early 1990s, music designers were squeezing entire orchestrations out of it.
With the computer my father had purchased a small assortment of entertainment and educational software; a handful of disks came along with the Tandy and Dad bought four more on his own, one for each family member. Mom, an impeccable typist but to this day a woman who fears computers much like homo-erectus feared fire, was given Typing Tutor. I opened up a copy of Fraction Fever, a representative of the sorts of games many of my generation were fooled into playing on Commodore 64 stations in elementary school. My sister was given King's Quest II: Romance of the Throne, sequel to the game by Sierra On-Line that defined a three-dimensional computer adventure, King's Quest: Quest for the Crown. My father, not to interrupt a string of classics, bought for himself the DIY-space-exploration extravaganza Starflight. I still remember him tearing off the paper and showing the rest of us the sleeve cover, a painting of a lithe little starship gracefully buzzing by the center of the composition, somewhere in the nameless cosmos.
We popped in Fundamentals EX, one of the bundled programs included with the Tandy. The family gathered around to be taught the basics of computer physiology via interactive, graphic presentation. Meg and I found particular joy in playing a maze game which, under the guise of teaching use of the numeric keypad, allowed participants to smack a stocky little mascot "John" into maze walls again and again and again and again. Tough little devil; he'd bump into the wall, fall flat on his backside and then dutifully stand right up for another go.
The Tandy served us well; King's Quest and Starflight provided months of entertainment - the latter an added benefit of sweaty palms when wandering through hostile territory, it was such a powerful game. Through chore-money, Christmas and the occasional lobby success, I saw added to the Tandy's complement games like Lode Runner, Pinball Construction Set, Earl Weaver Baseball, King's Quest IV, Starflight II, and Arcticfox. A collection of BBS-traded games found their way onto choc-a-bloc disks over the years as well, the glorious little time-wasters. I even learned - self-taught - a smattering of GW-Basic and managed to put together pieces of a lewd, prepubescent-male text adventure.
We upgraded the Tandy's memory; we turbocharged its CPU from sessile to ungodly slothfully slow; we added a second disk drive, as two times very little capacity or throughput is, of course, much more efficient.
By 1993, when finally time caught up with frugality and the Tandy could but pitifully handle even the most modest application or game, we replaced it with my father's hand-me-down 286 10MHz machine; to soon be replaced with a 486, eventually upgraded to a Pentium 166; to finally be supplanted by my old 300MHz Gateway buy.
But we've still got the Tandy; it sits in its original box in the basement. My father cleared out his fire-hazard back room in our basement last weekend and opened up a clear path to the Tandy's storage space. Although its main disk drive is iffy, the hunk of Neanderthal computer is still an unofficial family heirloom; God willing the strength of its silicon sinews, I'll be able to bring the antique out for children and grandchildren.
Or myself. There's really nothing like hearing "Greensleeves" played by a trio of sine wave generators.