Saturday 5 March 2022
Early Computer Clubs
My incredibly complicated whizzy laptop has informed me that the the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club was held on March 5, 1975 - just 47 years ago.
The Homebrew Computer Club was an informal group of electronic enthusiasts and technically minded hobbyists who gathered to trade parts, circuits, and information pertaining to DIY construction of personal computing devices. It was started by Gordon French and Fred Moore who met at the Community Computer Center in Menlo Park. They both were interested in maintaining a regular, open forum for people to get together to work on making computers more accessible to everyone.
It reminds me of an amateur computer club I helped form in Derby in the very early 1980s when microcomputers had already begun to fascinate a wide range of nerds. We had a few members capable of building their own computer variants but I wasn't one of those.
I began with a Sinclair ZX81 then moved to the dizzy heights of a Commodore VIC20 complete with disk drive. In real terms it must have cost considerably more than this laptop on my knee. I must have spent an enormous amount of time writing software, experimenting with machine code and trying to do the football pools on it.
Looking back I'm not entirely sure what the fascination was, but maybe that is because we've all become entirely accustomed to computers in the home. In those days we weren't and it is no longer easy to recapture the sense of excitement that something technologically important had arrived and we could actually write our own programmes on it.
Happy days.
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7 comments:
Early 1980s is early enough to make you a true pioneer. Apart from a weird dial-up modem thingie at school in the early 1970s which spoke to what was probably Luton's only computer, and the massive mainframe at uni., I don't remember even seeing a computer until the early 1990s at work. Apart from on Tomorrow's World, of course. If Raymond Baxter had told me that I could read the writings of a bloke in Derbyshire who I had never even met, that he could include pictures with his text, and that I and other people could then comment on a sort of a public forum thingie...Well, I would have thought that more far-fetched than the stuff about colonising Mars and eating a pill for lunch.
Dragon 32, BBC Micro Model B, BBC Master, a couple of Risc machines and then my first Windows 95 PC.
And my biggest disappointment? In the earliest of days you could code a program to do stuff directly which was an achievement, then later on it was 'merely' assembling routines under a GUI with the bulk of the effort going into the GUI.
I got really enthused and bought a kit -UK101 I think - from somewhere like Watford Electronics to build at home. It had a proper keyboard so was programmable with built in Basic and came with one game, connect 4 and used the then ubiquitous squealing tape recorder. Next was a ITT 2020 European Apple II clone, cost a fortune, 4 figures I think, in about 1980 but it wouldn't play the Apple II games that we used to 'swap' at a local computer club so it got refitted with an illegal cloned Apple II board. Then they started to get computerised at work and we had BBC model Bs and apple IIs, even a couple of Sinclair office machines until the first early PCs appeared so playing with them at home ceased to be a relaxation. The ITT is still around, somewhere in the back of a wardrobe.
We bought our first PC - an Amstrad 464 in 1985, from Boots in Brighton! It was a b&w screen, as colour was £100.00 more...
It was fabulous for the girls, and since then elder daught has made her career based on IT which started way back then!
I loved the music generator, which gave polyphonic sounds on three tracks, and the Basic Manual allowed me to design my first ever spreadsheet, hense my nerdity these days!
Remember 'Rigel's Revenge'? Great adventure game!
I remember using a Commodore - was it called a "PET"? - as a data-logger and processor of same. Great fun. I used Basic I think, but it was all too long ago for any accurate memories.
Antediluvian isn't it, AKH? [Not going to admit to directing a turtle around a room. I know nothing of Logo.]
Sam - I probably had a nudge or two because my father worked with early computers when Rolls Royce began to use them for turbine design calculations. He used to bring home punched cards and reams of printer paper to work on at home.
DJ - I avoided the GUI for quite a while but finally bought an XP desktop when the internet became a must have. I still miss the simplicity of early machines which could probably be made for a few pounds now apart from the screen.
Woodsy - I remember the UK101 although I never bought one and I also remember those squealing tape recorders which so often dropped out just before the end of a programme load.
Scrobs - those early computers must have given a good grounding for large numbers of people. I remember Amstrad produced a dedicated word processor too, in the days when typewriters were still how paperwork was generated. What a huge change that must have been over just a few years.
dearieme - there was a Commodore PET sold for office work I think. I knew a chap who built a business selling a word processor for it - Wordcraft I think it was called.
James - it is antediluvian but it was fun at the time.
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