Write about your first computer.
I think the Amstrad pictured above, here operating as a word processor,is how I remember my first computer, which I bought in the 1980s after getting my first full-time permanent job as a Lecturer in English at the Roehampton Institute in London. Amstrads were neither original nor particularly good but they were , as you might expect from Alan Sugar (whose dreams of institutionalised greatness were in their infancy and he an East End boy with a foot in the socialism of his to-be revered Jewish – by me at the least – Cable Street ancestry) a money-spinner and fortune-maker for an entrepreneur ready to marketise a trend that some people still thought of as a fad.
It was easier then to think about a computer as an amalgam of hardware and software because the software made itself known not as icons and other picture symbols but as text on a page, green text glaring out from a grey blankness. Word processors even did not show a picture of the product to be printed externally but a page that included all the symbols of commands that organised the page, such as page and paragraph breaks, and commands to enable and inhibit font manipulation such as bolding and italicisation. The product as printed sometimes came as a surprise.
In a world without Microsoft Windows, if you can imagine it, visuals were to be imagined not seen as they might be when produced in the real world on paper (or hard copy as we were learning to say) but in their coded splendour, a human comprehensible translation of basic computer code. Computer processing units first and foremost a mediating function to translate computer language – a series of binary digits (which could be represented in their first translations as 000’s and 1111s) – into a computer language that rendered that binary code into something approaching the symbolic signifiers of a human language. The first and obviously most basic was called BASIC and Digital Operating Systems ran on a version of that language, at least as far as the user was concerned. That is, the base operating system or DOS – Digital Operating System – was based on BASIC.
(from https://nostalgiacentral.com/pop-culture/technology/amstrad-computers/) is rather more complex version than that in first picture above).
For a time it was useful to know a range of computer languages based on refinements of computer language and I remember doing correspondence courses on BASIC, C, PASCAL and one other (but for the life of me I can’t remember why I needed or wanted to). All that changed with a feature then called WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) which I remember feeling (all those correspondence courses behind me where you sent of homework to be marked, such as the creation of code to build a basic but very simple computer game, to seem a rather lazy and unreliable invention. WYSIWIG translated the code displayed by the computer screen into a picture of what you wanted eventually to appear as text or other product. But more revolutionary still in removing the user from the need to understand anything about the computer’s basic mechanism (in the CPU – the Computer Processing Unit) as manipulated by the human-adapted languages at its interface was thee invention of Microsoft Windows, which used picture icons to select processes and initiate commands (of so many various types and levels of operation in the process) to the processor.
As these processes progressed us to the current position where human ‘end-users’ (as the jargon goes) need to know less and less about the computer’s basic processing functions and the high level media (human language and graphics) became quite literally the message, as it is as I now process this onto a page preset for my understanding (well to an extent- LOL).
The old man at his morning blog. The bared leg an error of this kind of unknowing selfie taking. LOL.
Well that’s all for today.
All love
Steve xxxxxx
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