This is the third installment in the countdown series and will cover the expertise level of club members. Except for a presentation laptop here or there or perhaps some PDAs WiFi-ing on occasion, look around at the next meeting and you will see people — the Sandy Rands and Dick Maybachs willing to help a newcomer with a computer problem or argue with an old-timer about some obscure technical issue, or the Ruth Lewarts and other workshop leaders coming up with endless slices and dices of what software programs can or cannot do, or the Andrea Tarrs honing in on graphic talents to be shared with all. It’s you, you, and YOU that make BCUG what it is.
Looking
back over the years, the club has had some pretty darn good programmers. “I was
not a programmer,” said Jeff Baumwell. Jack Miller, on the other hand, agreed
with Clay Adams about programming. “There wasn’t anything out there. If you
wanted a program, you had to program it yourself. Because of my training, I was
quite capable of doing my own programming. I wrote a merge sort, which allowed
me to enter new data in sorted fashion.”
There were
also some engineering types. Bob Buus built light pens for the TRS-80. The
light pen is an LED device that senses light and dark areas directly from a
monitor. A light pen could be used to draw on the screen or to hit a hot spot
evoking a procedure circa 1980 style. Sounds familiar, object oriented
programmers?
“You could
drop the TRS-80 from the top of the Empire State Building, break it into a
million pieces, and Bob could put it back together again — he was the epitome
of hardware. I had a botched lowercase installation and took it over to Bob
(early personal computers and printers did not have lowercase descenders for
the letters gjpy). He hooked the lowercase chip up to an oscilloscope,
shook the chip, and replaced the pins on the chip that were causing static on
the scope. Here, ‘you’ll never have any more problems,’” Jeff quoted Bob. “I
never did.”
The club
certainly had its share of tinkerers? How about paper tape backups? Dave Kelly
interfaced his teletype to the Model I. “You had to search all over for
hardware, disk drives, and everything. You had to wait and wait.” “Why wait?”
Jeff mused, as he recalled the day when he and John Chohamin tried to interface
an IBM Selectric typewriter to the Model I. It never did work, but nothing
tried, nothing gained!
“We were
the first to get music out of the cassette port,” chimed in Kelly. More things
were interfaced to that lowly cassette port than were ever intended — RS232s, TTYs.
light pens, and voice input devices. There was even a routine to unfreeze the
cassette relay if it got stuck — and it often did!
The club
had plenty of penny pinchers. Fred Kagel recalled his cassette network. Radio
Shack had just come out with its first network controller. It worked off of the
cassette ports. Radio Shack wanted over $500 for the host alone and about $25
in cables per station. “I needed some means to simultaneously upload and
download students’ programs at my learning center. I found out that by using an
ordinary tape recorder as a line amplifier, and $25 total for multiple cables
and ‘Y’ connectors, I could load four computers simultaneously from my one disk
drive system. I just had to run around the room like crazy, issuing a cassette
load command on the terminals and make it back to the host computer in time to
issue a cassette save command.”
Still yet,
we had inventors and computer contest winners as members. Richard Buus, Bob’s
son, created a user interface for handicapped individuals. He entered his
invention in the Johns Hopkins Personal Computing Contest to Aid the
Handicapped, which Radio Shack had sponsored. Richard won third place in the
New York/New Jersey Region. Kagel had also entered the same contest, not
knowing that Richard had entered, and took eighth place. Richard later released
his program to Radio Shack for $1.00 and installed his communications system in
some Cerebral Palsy facilities. Kagel’s synthesizer reading program, designed
for dyslexic children, couldn’t keep up with changing hardware fast enough.
Maybe today’s tablet PC with its handwriting technology is the right match for
Kagel’s program.
The club
has had many teachers. An educator with a major influence on the club was
Stephen Radin of Staten Island. Steve started with a TRS-80 and became
instrumental in developing a computer curriculum for the New York City Board of
Education’s Office of Technology. Fighting the influence of Apple computers
along the way, Steve went on to pen ten books in the field of computer
education and became the president of the Association of Computer Educators,
Inc.
The club
has had several authors, but when one speaks of authors, one always conjures up
the unmistakable accent of Cass Lewart. Cass has written on just about every
conceivable topic there is to write about on computers: from a morse code
trainer to digital interfacing and modems, and from the PC Jr. to the pocket
computer. Cass has never felt that it was beneath him to scribble a quick
schematic of the Model I’s video pin outs or of an LED RS232 breakout box for a
hapless solderer or two.
So if you think a
computer club is just about computers, you are dead wrong. It is about people,
who just happen to wear labels as programmers, engineers, inventors, educators,
authors, artists, hobbyists, tinkerers, or just plain computer users. You are
the club!
The next installment
will summarize what we have learned over the last twenty-five years and project
where we might be headed in the next twenty-five. Somewhere between the
frustration of operating a computer and the thrill of discovering an
undocumented feature of a program, this computer stuff is just plain fun.
Fred may be
contacted at fkagel@optonline.net to add your own recollections. Please use
subject: BCUG 25th Anniversary.