My introduction to computers took place in the early 1980s in an unlikely setting, a commercial trout farm beside the Snake River not far downstream from Twin Falls, Idaho. I had spent the morning with the pond crew up to my waist in water, scooping up market-ready trout with long-handled nets and dumping them into a tank truck for transport to the processing facility.
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There were a couple computer stores in Twin Falls, but I think I had to get my Timex by mail order. By the time I got mine it was already less than a hundred dollars and it was received fully assembled. Programs could be manually typed into the computer or loaded from a portable audio tape player. Program execution was through a simple version of the BASIC programming language. I had some fun with simple game programs, but soon ran up against the limited capabilities of the machine which motivated me to acquire some expansion accessories including a memory module and a little thermal printer.
The growth of my interest in computers coincided with some changes in my job duties at the fish farm. My boss saw that a guy in his forties with a background in desk jobs was not really cut out for the heavy manual work on the ponds. He transferred me to an indoor facility where it was my job to oversee the development of the trout from the egg stage to being big enough to go into the outdoor ponds. I think I only worked at that for a few months before an opening appeared in the main admin office that directed the operations of a couple production facilities.
There was a computer in the admin office that was used for book-keeping and for generating feeding schedules for the developing fish; it was about the size of an upright piano and it operated with punched paper tape programs. My job was to collect some of the data to feed to the computer including pond oxygen and stocking levels, and to make the results available to the managers of the two farm sites.
A little research into fish farming techniques showed me that the algorithms for calculating feeding and growth rates on the office computer could easily be implemented in BASIC on my tiny Timex. When I demonstrated that to the accountant he passed along the information to the owner, Earl Hardy, who then put me in charge of assembling and distributing all the data needed for daily operations. He also asked me what kind of computer upgrade from the Timex would help to get the job done.
There were some slick looking IBM desktops on the market at that time, but I decided something more portable would be better as I had to travel often between two farms located several miles apart to gather and input data. What I came up with was an Osborne I computer. The machine weighed about twenty-five pounds; it had keyboard built into the case cover and there was a five-inch diagonal monochrome screen. The operating system was CP/M, and programs and data were stored on 5.25 inch floppy disks. What really made the whole thing useful was the included bundle of programs which were actually worth more than the hardware; they were WordStar for word processing and the SuperCalc spreadsheet program.
I trundled the Osborne back and forth between farm sites for about a year. The firm's accountant and the owner were happy enough with the product of my work, but it was not very satisfying to me. The farm managers tended to conduct operations based on their experience and gut instincts rather than on the Osborne's dictates, and the data I had to work with was often neither accurate nor timely. So, when Margaret got a scholarship to pursue a Master's in Social Work at Eastern Washington University I was not unhappy to leave the fish farms and the Osborne behind.
4 comments:
Interesting step back into history. I remember using a Compaq computer that had a similar morphology to the Osborne. It had a small green screen and a keyboard served as the lid. I don't remember if it used the five and a quarter inch diskettes or the more modern three and a half inch diskettes. It ran Compaq's version of DOS. These things cost $1000s back then.
I see in Wikipedia that the Compaq went for $3000 in 1982 dollars. I don't recall what we paid for the Osborne. I did pick up a used Osborne a few years later for just a couple hundred. The Compaq was a spiffier design as well as being mostly IBM-compatible. The design of the Osborne had more in common with the Argus C-3.
Back in that era, I used Digital Equipment VAX/VMS mainframes for seismic data analysis and modeling. I was an unimaginative person. I could understand why companies would use mainframe or mini-computers to do accounting or scientific tasks, but could not grasp why an individual would want one at home.
I think part of the answer is that control of technology has some symbolic value. People who exhibit control over any kind of technological gadget are seen as wielders of power. I'm thinking of the serial films of the 1940s and '50s for instance in which the hero detective is often seen holding a microphone and using a small radio set to communicate with his team. Cameras in those same times were seen in the same light. Wright Morris spent a night in jail for after using his large format camera to make pictures in a small southern town. Russell Lee was threatened with jail when he had the audacity to photograph the post office in Pie Town, New Mexico. I'll try to explore the topic further in a future post.
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