A Commodore 64, an 8-bit home computer introduced in 1982 by Commodore International. Its low retail price and easy availability led to the system becoming the market leader for three years. It remains the best-selling single personal computer model. Image by Evan-Amos, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

In previous LifeBits articles, I’ve written about my experiences with early computers accessed through teletypes and punch card machines, and also about my first computer — a Commodore VIC-20 that I owned for exactly one week. That VIC-20 was replaced with a Commodore 64 when I found out the price on the latter had dropped to the price that I had paid for the VIC-20, and I was able to convince the manager at the K-Mart store to let me return the VIC-20 and get the much more capable Commodore 64. That, of course, is the topic of today’s LifeBits.

The C64 holds a special place in the hearts of many of us who were dipping our toes into the waters of personal computing in the early 1980s. This 8-bit computer first hit the market in 1982 for $595 after being introduced at the 1982 Consumer Electronics Show, and to say that it was popular is an understatement. While there isn’t a definitive count on how many C64s were sold, it’s estimated that at least 12.5 million of the beige boxes made it into the homes of the computer-curious.

As I mentioned in my article about the VIC-20, I had separately purchased an Amdek Color 1 monitor for that computer and that’s what I ended up using with the C64. I also still had the cassette tape drive (Datasette 1530) to save and load programs I was writing.

Commodore Datasette 1530 tape drive, Image by Evan-Amos, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Well, I hated that tape drive almost immediately. Maybe it was just me, but it never seemed to work properly. For one thing, it was always annoying to have to use the mechanical tape counter (a three-digit counter that showed the approximate “distance” you had gone on the cassette) to figure out where you had stored a specific program, then use the fast-forward, stop, rewind, and play buttons to try to get to the beginning of a program file.

The next step was typing “LOAD” into the computer, at which point it would prompt me to “PRESS PLAY ON TAPE #1”. The cassette drive would whir, the computer would display “SEARCHING”, and if I was lucky, it would find the program and actually load it.

Now the way this tape drive worked was that it recorded and “played back” analog tones, somewhat similar to the way modems worked. The 1530 had an analog-to-digital converter built in that turned these tones into digital data that the computer understood, and that converter also worked in the other direction, converting programs that had been typed into the computer into tones that could be recorded on tape.

I’d say I was probably successful in loading a saved program from tape about half the time, and the process was slow. The 1530’s data capacity was about 100 kilobytes per 30 minute tape, and the data was read or written at about 50 bytes per second.

After getting irritated by the 1530 for a few months, I decided to buy a disk drive. The Commodore 1541 floppy disk drive was actually more expensive than the computer itself when I bought it, but I felt as if I had really moved into the “big times” by being able to easily (and relatively quickly) read and write files to this noisy drive.

Commodore Datasette 1530 tape drive, Image by Evan-Amos, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

With that nifty piece of hardware in my ever-growing collection of stuff in the “computer room” (AKA “the study” in one of the three bedrooms in our house), I felt like I was really going somewhere! With copies of the latest C64 magazines in hand, I’d sit down and laboriously type in the programs, then save them to a diskette… only to have to usually re-type some of the lines because I’d fat-fingered some of the commands and the program would crash.

That got old pretty darned quick. I decided that it would be a much better idea to download full programs from bulletin board systems (BBS). I described my experiences with BBSs (including being the system operator — sysop — for one for many years) in this LifeBits post.

That required a modem to dial up to the available BBSs, which in this case was a speedy (300 baud!) Commodore 1650 AUTOMODEM.

The amazing Commodore Model 1650 Automodem: Image from pagetable.com.

So, what did I actually do with my C64 other than type in programs, find new bulletin board systems to call, and play the occasional game (confession — I’m not much of a gamer)? I wrote some BASIC programs and I began to write.

The programming was actually quite fun. I wrote a very basic (no pun intended) flat file database management program that I used to catalog the videocassettes we owned (VHS for the win!), the books we had in our library, and so on. At one point I even thought about selling that program… but I never got the nerve to do so. I also wrote some very simple games using the sprite programming feature and the sound capabilities of the C64. They basically sucked compared to what was available on diskette, cartridge, or tape at that point, so my games were just an exercise to see what I could do (not much).

By this point in my life I had been working in the real world for four years, and two things I found I had a talent for were writing and explaining things to other people. I had written papers in college that were well-received by professors, so I started thinking about writing computer how-to books. I had a printer by this point (an Epson FX-80 dot matrix printer), mainly used to print out lists from the database manager:

Epson FX-80 80-column dot matrix printer.

Hey, I could use that to print out proof copies of any books I wrote! Only one problem… I needed something that would let me write and edit my text. For the C64, there were a few word processing programs, including one called SpeedScript that you could type into your machine from Compute‘s! Gazette magazine. By this point, I really didn’t want to type yet another program that was printed in really small type (and probably with some typos…) into my C64, so I opted to buy the rather expensive Easy Script. This word processor was marketed by Commodore and widely available at just about any store where you could buy a C64 or VIC-20.

There’s a wonderful review and “user guide” for Easy Script that was written by Nigel Ruth and printed in Commodore User Magazine in October 1983. A Commodore fan by the name of Ilker Fiçicilar from Türkiye reproduced that review on his website and I include a link here.

How Easy Script appeared on the C64 display (you could change colors…) Image from http://oldmachinery.blogspot.com/2016/06/round-up-commodore-64-text-editors-and.html

So, I had a word processing programs, I had a computer, I had a disk drive, I had a printer, I had a modem… sounds like it was time to get to work!

Well, I quickly found the limitations of Easy Script and the C64 when it came to doing word processing. This wasn’t exactly WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) as we’d know it in the future. The C64 could only display about 40 columns of text, so I’d type in text in a pretty much free-form format, apply the limited formatting tools that were available in Easy Script, save my writing to disk (by the way, the C64 could only hold about six pages of typed text at a time…), and then print out my sample to see how it looked.

Not good. I realized if I was to do any “professional writing,” I was going to need something that could let me display a full 80 columns of text and run a “real” word processing program. At that point, a handful of IBM “clone” DOS computers were just starting to come onto the market and there was also the very popular Apple II, but they all seemed out of my price range. I was visiting a computer store in late 1983 when I saw two things that would shape my future for another year — a rather low-priced DOS-compatible computer and the wildly popular WordStar word processing program.

Like many of the probably hundred or so computers I’ve owned in my life, the C64 and many of its peripherals would soon be advertised for sale as I’d move even further into the world of personal computing. And with that cliffhanger, I leave you for the time being.

Postscript: The Commodore 64 Lives Again!

Any article about the Commodore 64 would not be complete without mentioning that this venerable best-seller has been revived. I really don’t want a C64, so I’m not going to get on the Commodore 64 Ultimate bandwagon. But for anyone who either wants a retro trip back to the days of the original C64 or has a stash of C64 programs or cartridges (yes, the C64 had a cartridge slot…), it’s available in one of two models for $299.99: the ‘Breadbin’ Commodore 64 Ultimate BASIC Beige or the Slimline Commodore 64C Ultimate BASIC Beige.

The Commodore 64 Ultimate BASIC Beige… with a few ports that weren’t found on the original, like the HDMI, Ethernet, and USB ports on the right side of this photo. Image from Commodore’s website.

If you’re a real retro geek, you can also consider the $349.99 “Starlight” model with a translucent LED-lit case or the $499.99 “Founders” edition with “real gold” features!

Although I do enjoy trips down memory lane — hell, that’s why I started LifeBits — I don’t really want to spend money on retro tech, even if it has been updated to some level of modernity. Instead, I choose to spend my retirement nest egg on pocket Linux computers!

Coming soon to the house of an unrepentant tech nerd near you! Image via WaveShare

Yay, you just returned from traveling back in time with me to my life in the 1980s! I hoped you liked this and will consider reading other LifeBits articles. Not a subscriber? Sign up for free using the Subscribe button:

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I also want to get your opinion on a possible project. If you have read my BBS article, you might wonder what it was like to interact “online” in those days. Well, I’m considering setting up a BBS that will only be accessible via terminal apps, but will give you the full ASCII experience that we knew and loved back in the day. To judge interest in this project, here’s a quick poll:

Until next time, keep your C64 program cassettes away from strong magnets!

An IBM 029 Card Punch. Image from TwoBitHistory.org.

In an earlier LifeBits post (Basically Speaking), I wrote about my first brush with computing—typing BASIC programs into a Teletype and watching results clatter out seconds later. Saving your work meant punching it onto paper tape, looping it, and securing it with a rubber band. Primitive? Absolutely. But it worked.

Then I arrived at the University of Colorado Boulder in the fall of 1974 and met what felt like real computing.

CS101 introduced budding engineers like me to Fortran—specifically Fortran IV, the lingua franca of engineering at the time. Developed by IBM in the 1950s under computer scientist John Backus, Fortran (the “Formula Translating System”) debuted in 1957—just months before I did. Backus famously said he created it out of laziness:

“I didn’t like writing programs… so I started work on a programming system to make it easier.” (Source: NBC News article about John Backus’ death)

A man after my own heart!

Thanks to BASIC, I took to Fortran quickly. The chart below shows that the BASIC language was actually an offshoot from Fortran II, something I didn’t know until I started writing this post!

A timeline and family tree of the Algol, Fortran, and COBOL programming language families. Skippppp, Shazz, Borkowsk, Qwertyus, MáneyMánadóttir, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

What really grabbed me was the FORMAT statement—an incredibly flexible way to shape output. I won’t go into boring detail about how this statement worked along with the READ and WRITE statements, but will direct you to this link if you’re interested.

In my first job as a real-life engineer, I pushed it to the limit, modifying a gas distribution network analysis program to “draw” crude character-based maps of the Denver natural gas distribution system using text output. Not exactly modern graphics, but at the time (1979-81), it felt revolutionary.

The real pain wasn’t the programming language we were using as students. It was the interface we were using to converse with the computer. To run a program, you didn’t just type and hit return. You stood in line for an IBM 029 card punch, the machine you see in the image at the top of this article. Each line of code went onto a separate card. Type carefully—because there was no backspace. One mistake? Toss the card and start over.

Image of a Fortran statement punch card. Source unknown.

A full program meant a deck of cards, plus special header and trailer cards to tell the system where your job began and ended, and another card with your name and class code (so the university could bill the right account). Once your deck was ready, you’d wrap it in a rubber band and drop it into the input bin.

Then you waited.

CS101 students shared the mainframe with everyone—grad students, researchers, payroll, the class scheduling system, and other people running massive jobs. Sometimes your tiny assignment would sit for hours behind a monster run. Eventually, your output would appear in the out box, printed on green-bar paper.

The dreaded continuous feed green bar paper used with line printers for mainframe output. Image source unknown.

That moment of picking up your printout was pure suspense. Did it work? Or were you headed back to the card punch line?

Those early CS101 assignments were small (mercifully), but things escalated in my junior and senior years. In a structural analysis class, we modeled large space frames—complex 3D truss structures used in buildings. The core program was loaded via header cards; our job was to define everything else: materials, beam types, connections, coordinates. For large models, that meant hundreds or thousands of cards.

Heaven help you if you dropped your deck. Card order mattered. Lose it, and your program was garbage. The solution? Draw a diagonal line across the entire deck with a marker (as seen in the image below) so you could reassemble it if disaster struck. Low-tech, but highly effective.

ArnoldReinhold, PunchCardDecks.agr, CC BY-SA 2.5

After college, I kept using Fortran—thankfully without the cards. By then I had access to an IBM 3279 terminal at work. Jobs were still batched, though, and since our office didn’t have a line printer, we’d wait a day or two for output to arrive via company mail. But now I was getting paid, so the wait didn’t sting as much.

If you’re one of the few who remember punch cards and Fortran, I’d love to hear your stories—whether they were fun, frustrating, or somewhere in between.

I hope you enjoyed this time traveling trip back to what computing was like 50+ years ago. If you could “Like” this post it would make me deliriously happy, and if you’re not a subscriber, sign up for FREE to receive these occasional posts in your email inbox. Sharing LifeBits with your friends is another way you can help!

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Image generated by ChatGPT (OpenAI) using the DALL·E model.

Yes, it’s been a while since the last LifeBits post! I’ve been busy with a total redesign of a website that took much longer to complete than it should have (I am OCD about website functionality). I’ve also been obsessed with a new way of communicating via radio, which I’ll talk about in this post.

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OK, I’m sure all of the hams (radio amateurs) on Facebook and Substack are going to protest at the title of this post, but it’s a reflection of my personality, not the millions of hams around the world.

My father, who had the US radio call sign NRØP (and WØIEQ before that) until his death in 2017, was a ham for many years. He started with radio before being drafted into the Army for service in Korea, and as a result he was trained and sent into battle as a radioman. That skill worked for him after the Army when he began working for United Air Lines (that was how the name was written in 1955 when he hired on) as an Instrumentation Technician, which basically means he worked on most of the electrical and electronic devices on an airplane — including the all-important radios.

One of my earliest memories was being in the basement of our house in Auburn, Washington where Dad had his ham shack (translation: his radios, maps, and collection of QSL cards — postcards sent between hams who had been in radio contact). This was in the early days of transistors, so much of the radio gear relied on vacuum tubes which would heat up and produce a unique burning smell. That’s what I remember the most; that smell, as well as the incessant beeping of Morse Code transmissions from around the world Dad was listening to.

When we moved from the Seattle area to Denver in 1963, Dad didn’t bring his ham gear with him. I’m not sure why; perhaps he realized that a new and more challenging career as a technician on flight simulators and raising two kids was going to limit his air time. To top it off, we lived in an apartment for two years, and I don’t think the landlord would have been too excited about Dad running wires between buildings for his antennas…

Dad got back into the hobby slowly, first getting a 2m/80cm VHF/UHF band mobile unit for his car in the 1980s. Then he ramped up his ham radio addiction when he retired and decided to get into the “old man’s hobby”. He had a number of powerful transceivers and a rather big antenna that is still at their former house because the new owners were too lazy to pull it down. Dad did a lot of chatting with a friend who was in the southern part of Colorado as well as being a regular on several local “nets” and doing a lot of DX (long-distance) contacts on high frequency bands.

At one point in the late 1990s, my nephew decided to get his ham radio technician license (the easiest to get) in order to snag a Boy Scout merit badge. My sister and her husband both decided to join him in getting their licenses, and I took that as a friendly sibling challenge… In 1999, I took the exam and got my call sign — KCØEZH. About that time I also bought a 2m/70cm Kenwood TM-V71A mobile radio for my car.

The Kenwood TM-V71A I had in my car when I discovered I hate talking on the radio to complete strangers.

That’s when I discovered that I really don’t like talking to total strangers on the radio… I’d set up the radio to broadcast through a local mountaintop repeater (takes your signal and rebroadcasts it to other transceivers, thereby increasing the range of your radio), and found the daily rag-chewing (that’s the term that is used for generally pointless conversations in ham radio) to be dull, often political, and boring.

In 2001 or 2002, I bought a Kenwood handheld transceiver with a built-in GPS so I could play with a digital-only radio mode called APRS (Automatic Packet Reporting System). You know how you can track the location of another iPhone user using “Find My”? Think of APRS as the pre-iPhone version of that feature.

It was kind of fun to have Dad track my position as I drove around town, but that “excitement” lasted for about a week. Probably the most fun I had with that radio was doing an APRS contact with the International Space Station during a pass that went over our neck of the woods. Somewhere I have a picture of the display showing that contact… but of course I couldn’t find it for this writeup.

I tried many times to get excited about ham radio again, but eventually sold all of my equipment. I did get a General License, which required another proctored exam that covered more technical subjects. I never felt that it was worth it to get the “top” license — the Extra — simply because I wasn’t using the privileges of the General License I already had…

LoRa

Well, radio kinda crept into my life again in 2025 when I heard about LoRa. From Wikipedia:

LoRa (from “long range”) is a physical proprietary radio communication technique based on spread spectrum modulation.[2] It is used as the physical layer for LoRaWAN, a low-power, wide-area network (LPWAN) protocol that wirelessly connects battery-operated devices to the Internet. LoRa can be thought of as the radio signal technology (similar to Wi-Fi or cellular), while LoRaWAN is the protocol and network architecture that manages communication over that signal.

LoRa communications right now are of two primary flavors. It’s like everything else in the IT world today — why have one protocol when you can have two or more competing protocols and get everyone fighting over which is superior? Those protocols are Meshtastic (which was the first) and MeshCore. Short and somewhat incorrect description: They allow long-distance encrypted texting over what is essentially long-range Wi-Fi.

Diagram generated by ChatGPT (OpenAI) using the DALL·E model.

Originally, I think the little single-board microcontrollers that are used for LoRa were designed to be used for IoT (Internet of Things) applications. Say you were a farmer who wanted to turn on an irrigation pump a mile away. You’d put one node at your house, the other at the pump, and rig it up so when you signaled the pump it would start or stop running depending on its current state. Dedicated nerds have turned this into a public low-cost mesh network for sending short messages back and forth.

LoRa doesn’t require an FCC license, it’s all digital, and is touted (like most amateur radio fans like to brag) as the perfect tool in catastrophes. When the SHTF (“💩 hits the fan”) and the power is out, allegedly only hams will be able to communicate via battery powered devices - when they’re not fighting the zombie apocalypse, that is. That’s been true in floods, hurricanes, and other natural disasters, and I’m not making light of the enormous contribution hams have made to disaster recovery efforts. However, I wonder how many hams (and non-licensed LoRa fans) have backup radio equipment stored in EMP-proof Faraday cages for the true doomsday scenario?

There’s another issue with the SHTF scenario; most Meshtastic and MeshCore boards require a Bluetooth connection to a smartphone app (iOS or Android) in order to communicate. The phone connects to the radio, which sends out the message to the mesh network, and someone receives it with their radio and reads it on their phone (see diagram above few paragraphs ago). What happens if that EMP takes out your phone? That’s why there are some all-in-one devices that have their own keyboards.

I started playing with LoRa after seeing a YouTube video in which a guy connected a Meshtastic radio board to a PicoCalc, which gave him a LoRa-connected “cyberdeck”. Sure, these things can’t do everything that a smartphone can, but they’re almost like a hobbyist’s smartphone…

I actually had a PicoCalc on order… but then I realized that they are rather limited, which is why I decided to buy a Raspberry Pi 500 instead. I waited two months for the damned thing to ship, and canceled it when it was getting ready to wing its way to me.

Heltec V3. That’s a USB-C port on the left side, and a tiny LCD display covers much of the board. The little thing that looks like a gold spring at the upper left of the display is the Bluetooth antenna.

Anyway, my first move was to try Meshtastic using a Heltec V3 single-board computer. I added a cheap antenna, and I think my whole investment was about $40. This is where another of my reasons for not liking radio of any kind reared its ugly head again…

I live in a radio frequency (RF) “black hole”. I’ve always had issues with cell phone signals — even now I have to use Wi-Fi Calling at my house. Back in the analog cell phone days I never got a signal until I was well out of my neighborhood. On top of that radio shadow looms the fact that I live in a community with restrictive covenants banning any visible antennas (except for Dish Network dishes… go figure), so I’m basically screwed when it comes to receiving or sending most RF emissions.

My experiment with Meshtastic was pretty much a bust. I could receive occasional messages, but never had any outgoing texts received. About the end of January, I found out that there were some people in the Denver area who were starting to play with the other protocol — MeshCore. It’s possible to re-program these single-board computer / radios between protocols by re-flashing their firmware, so I did that.

At the beginning of February, I was seeing MeshCore contacts from a handful of people in the Colorado Front Range. Now the number is well over a hundred, so things are looking up. I still couldn’t reliably transmit to other nodes on the network, so I decided to make another investment in a RAK WisMesh 1W Booster. That 1W is the maximum transmit power in Watts; the Heltec maxed out at about .2W. More power, more distance, right?

The RAK WisMesh 1W Booster “Starter Kit” that I thought would connect me to the mesh…

Not necessarily.

On March 9, 2026 I flashed the RAK with MeshCore firmware, attached a rather big antenna, powered it up, and excitedly mounted it in my west-facing upstairs window. About 30 minutes later I started receiving some messages, although it did not appear that anyone was “hearing” my repeated “adverts”. No problem… a lot of the repeaters that re-transmit messages around the area only advertise themselves every six hours or so, and I didn’t expect to see them for a while.

A few hours later, it occurred to me that I was no further along with the RAK than I was with the Heltec. In fact, So, what’s my solution other than selling this stuff on eBay and vowing to never play with it again? I’m gonna sell the stuff on eBay and replace it with something I can carry with me. At least I’ll be able to send messages when I’m away from home and out of the RF pit.

I’ve had numerous folks on the local net tell me to just install the darned nodes as high as I can on my house (preferably on a mast of some sort that sticks up even higher), but I have a) the restrictive covenants and b) a fear of falling off the roof and breaking my 68-year-old body.

The Seeed SenseCap T-1000E. For those who are metric-phobic, those measurements are 3.3 x 2.2 x .26 inches.

There’s a good cheap credit-card sized node called the Seeed SenseCAP Card Tracker T-1000E that can be flashed for either Meshtastic or MeshCore. It lasts for a few days on a single charge, has limited range (so I’ll probably only send/receive messages when I’m within a couple of miles of a repeater), and it actually has some features that the other nodes didn’t — GPS and a temperature sensor, although I’m not sure the MeshCore application can actually take advantage of the temperature.

This gives this retired guy something to play with, and I don’t have to actually talk to people. I can just send ‘em 131-character (max) messages and then move on. It’s perfect for an antisocial radio amateur! With apologies to some of the folks in the local MeshCore community, here’s an example of the sparkling conversations I’m seeing right now:

Now those are conversations I can get excited about! 🤪

Did you have fun reading this? If you didn’t, did you at least learn something you didn’t know before you read the article? Both of these are what I’m attempting to accomplish with LifeBits. Be sure to “Like” this post, subscribe to LifeBits for FREE to get this in your email inbox, and even better, be sure to share this post with friends using that button below.

Until next time… dream up ways for me to place a solar-powered MeshCore repeater on my rooftop without having to climb on a ladder.

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Image generated by ChatGPT (OpenAI) using the DALL·E model... which explains that the word “Park” in National Park on the fake t-shirt is garbled.

I have always had an affinity towards computers named after fruit. After all, I spent most of my tech career using and supporting Apple products. I wrote a number of mainstream books about Macs, iPhones, iPads and the various Apple operating systems, and have written literally millions of words of helpful and informative articles about those products online. At one point I was an Apple Certified Consultant and involved at the national level with the Apple Consultant’s Network.

So I guess it’s not strange at all that I am really enjoying using another computer platform named after fruit: Raspberry Pi. If you’re not familiar with these low-cost computers and “microcontrollers”, here’s a quick primer…

They were initially developed in the United Kingdom by a group called the Raspberry Pi Foundation to create a low-cost computer for use in schools. Thanks to the fact that they’re inexpensive, these single-board computers became popular with hobbyists who started using them for home automation and special projects, and have since spread to a larger audience including companies using them for industrial purposes and robotics. Some are actually being used to control satellites and there are Raspberry Pis on the International Space Station. As of March of 2025, over 68 million of these computers had been sold.

Now you might be asking why the heck I am writing about a current-day computing platform when this blog is supposed to be all about retro computing. Well, there’s something about these cheap computers that has a retro feel to it. Using one for just about any purpose has the feel of being a tech pioneer (or should that be Pi-oneer?) back in the 70s.

What’s my interest in Raspberry Pi? Well, with one of these computers you can do things that you wouldn’t normally buy a separate computer for. Why use an expensive computer to (for example) create time-lapse movies of the weather when a cheap one does the job just fine?

I first got fascinated with these computers in 2012, when the $35 “Model B” appeared on the market. Sure, it wasn’t much - just a circuit board with an SD card reader (used for storage), a processor, a few USB ports, and a port for connecting a monitor. A case (a small plastic box with holes in the right places) was extra.

Even in the early days, the Raspberry Pi ran a version of the Linux operating system. I was familiar with UNIX and Linux from my days as an Apple network administrator and consultant, so the command line instructions required for many functions were second nature to me. There was a desktop point-and-click environment (like macOS and Windows), but it seemed buggy and slow.

What I found with that original Raspberry Pi was that there wasn’t enough processing power, storage, or RAM to be able to do much productive work. The specs on this original credit card-sized computer? A 700 MHz single-core 32-bit ARM11 CPU, a VideoCore IV GPU, 512 MB RAM and a 26-pin GPIO (General Purpose Input Output) header.

Raspberry Pi 500 computer. Image via RaspberryPi.com

Fast-forward to 2026, and the specifications on my recently-acquired Raspberry Pi 500 computer (a Raspberry Pi built into a pretty decent keyboard, seen in the image above) are as follows:

• 2.4GHz quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A76 CPU, with cryptography extensions, 512KB per-core L2 caches and a 2MB shared L3 cache

• 8GB LPDDR4X-4267 SDRAM

• Dual-band (2.4GHz and 5.0GHz) IEEE 802.11b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi®

• 32GB Class A2 microSD included

• Bluetooth 5.0, BLE

• Gigabit Ethernet

• 2 × USB 3.0 port and 1 × USB 2.0 port

• Horizontal 40-pin GPIO header

• 2 × micro HDMI® port (supports up to 4Kp60)

• H.265 (4Kp60 decode)

• OpenGL ES 3.1 graphics, Vulkan 1.3

• SD card support: microSD card slot for operating system and data storage

• Keyboard: 78-, 79- or 83-key compact keyboard (depending on regional variant)

• Power: 5V DC via USB connector

If you’re not a techie and that is all just technobabble to you, let’s just say that this is a pretty darned powerful little computer.

This computer also comes with a mouse and a cable for connecting it to a monitor or HDTV (I have a seldom-used 4K monitor that works quite well). Cost? $120 plus shipping. Compare that to the least-cost Mac desktop machine (a very basic Mac mini with admittedly much better specs for $600), and you’re looking at less than a quarter of the price.

My interest in getting a modern Raspberry Pi grew out a desire to start doing some programming (i.e., teaching myself Python - the “Pi” in Raspberry Pi) and try out some electronics projects. While those ideas are still on the back burner, I’ve also found that for a lot of my needs, this is a pretty darned good desktop computer!

Fourteen years after the first Raspberry Pi hit the market, the machine now has its own flavor of Linux called Raspberry Pi OS. It boots quickly to a desktop familiar to anyone who uses either Windows or macOS. It has its own version of an app store — actually several of them. Believe it or not, with a larger microSD card, this thing can even run a trimmed-down version of Windows 11 (not that I’d ever want to do that…).

While I’ve been familiarizing myself (again) with Raspberry Pi, I’ve quickly learned that they excel at doing what most people spend thousands of dollars on “real” computers for — those general activities that we do every day: Sending and receiving email, surfing the web, even writing documents or creating spreadsheets. I’m very tempted for my next everyday computer to not be another Apple MacBook Pro or even an iPad Pro, but this very same Raspberry Pi 500 (or the new 500+) with its companion $100 monitor.

You can set up your “hard drive” (in this case, that little microSD card) with another computer before you boot the Raspberry Pi for the first time. There’s an app called Raspberry Pi Imager that lets users choose the “flavor” of the operating system that works best on their particular hardware, pre-add network information, add a variety of open-source software like the powerful LibreOffice suite (think of Microsoft Office without the cost and stupid AI “helpers”), and set up an account for Raspberry Pi Connect (which allows remote control of your Raspberry Pi from any web browser), then write that to the microSD card. Connect the Raspberry Pi to power, a monitor, and connect the mouse (and keyboard if it’s not a Raspberry Pi 400, 500 or 500+), press the power button, and seconds later you’re up and running.

I am pretty amazed at what I have been able to do with this “cheap” computer so far! It recognized my Wi-Fi attached Epson printer immediately, which really surprised me since my “real” computers sometimes have issues with printing. I decided to use Thunderbird as my email, address book, and calendar/reminder app, and that was easy to set up. I’m using Google’s Chromium browser instead of the recommended Firefox, just because I do a lot of work with Google Workspace.

A screenshot of my actual Raspberry Pi desktop.

Need to do Zoom meetings? No problem. I have a monthly team meeting with the staff of the website I administer. Using the Zoom web client, an unused Kensington webcam, and my Bluetooth headphones, I was able to get this set up in minutes.

I even figured out a way to run a web server and blog on this thing… which will be fodder for a future LifeBits post. (I just need to figure out what I need another blog for!)

A Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W microcontroller. Image via RaspberryPi.com.

There are other Raspberry Pi products that are simply microcontrollers. These are tiny and very efficient computers that do not run an operating system like Windows, macOS, or Linux. That makes them perfect for electronics projects. Remember that comment about a “weather cam” I made earlier? All that needs is a little computer that is programmed to take a picture every so often and save it into a directory. These microcontrollers can run full weather stations, be the backbone of a music synthesizer, or act as the brains for robotics or home automation setups. Or, as I mentioned earlier, they can even be in satellites, like the GASPACS CubeSat launched into orbit in 2022.

A PicoCalc. Photo via Clockwork Pi.

I almost bought a device called a PicoCalc (see above), which is a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller with a little color display and keyboard, set up to run a version of the BASIC programming language that turns it into a very small programmable handheld computer. I got tired of waiting on my order (I think the company must crank these out one at a time), canceled it, and bought the RPi 500 instead… But what a cool little computer! It has all the fun of a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 portable computer but it’s a hell of a lot more powerful.

Summing it all up, I have to say that I think the Raspberry Pi computers, microcontrollers, and ecosystem make up the best products to come out of the UK since the Supermarine Spitfire fighter plane of World War II fame. If you’re interested in “playing” with one but don’t want to spend the money on the full-fledged Raspberry Pi 500 or 500+, here’s a cheap way to start exploring. If you already have a USB keyboard, mouse, a microSD memory card, and an HDMI monitor (or HDTV) laying around, pick up a Raspberry Pi 5 (2 GB) and the recommended power supply for less than $70 and start having fun.

Next time, I promise I’ll be back to reminiscing about old computers and other fun sci/tech stuff — well, until I get it in my brain to write about some fun new project I’m working on.

Did you have fun reading this? If you didn’t, did you at least learn something you didn’t know before you read the article? Both of these are what I’m attempting to accomplish with LifeBits. Be sure to “Like” this post, subscribe to LifeBits for FREE to get this in your email inbox, and even better, be sure to share this post with friends using that button below.

Until next time… come up with some project ideas that you could build with a Raspberry Pi!

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Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100. Image via Wikimedia. By NapoliRoma - Own work, Public Domain

As an older person, I am trying to declutter my life, so I turn away from the addictive hobby of collecting a lot of old tech. My “Museum of Obsolete Tech”, for example, is just one shelf above my desk. Sure, I could be like some friends of mine who had every Mac they had ever owned since 1984 — all in working condition, of course — but I never want to have to move all of that stuff.

However, if there was one computer that I owned at one point in my life that I would love to have again, it would be the TRS-80 Model 100. Developed by Tandy (AKA Radio Shack), Kyocera (hardware), and Microsoft (software and OS), this was truly a portable computer.

Announced on April 26, 1983, this computer was 300 by 215 x 50 mm in size (11.8 by 8.5 by 1.97 inches) — almost the size of a US 8.5” x 11” standard piece of paper, but a bit thicker, of course. It was also quite lightweight for the time — 1.4 kg (3.1 lbs) when loaded with the four AA batteries that powered it.

It didn’t run MS-DOS, TRS-DOS (the operating system for several of the Radio Shack computers), or AppleDOS. Instead, when powered up it immediately showed a screen that looked like this:

No, I don’t have a Model 100. What you see is a screenshot from an online emulation of the Model 100! Click that link if you’d like to play with this amazing computer… or at least a good facsimile of one.

As you can see, the Model 100 came with five main functions built-in:

1. BASIC Language Interpreter

2. Text Editor

3. Telcom (for using the built-in 300 baud modem to connect to bulletin board systems or act as a dumb terminal to a smarter computer)

4. Address Book

5. Schedule (a calendar)

For some reason, I was entranced by the Model 100. Maybe it was the idea of having a full-fledged computer the size of a piece of paper, or the ability to program it in BASIC, but I loved the idea of this thing. However, I really didn’t have the money to spend on yet another computer, but my devious mind thought of a way to have the company I worked for buy one… or more.

These things weren’t exactly cheap! In 1983 dollars, they went for $1,399 for the 24K model, which is about $4,400 in 2025 dollars. That didn’t include the necessary accessories like a printer cable, an acoustical coupler for those places where a landline phone couldn’t be unhooked from the wall, a cassette tape drive for saving and loading programs, and more. The price did drop quite a bit — I remember purchasing most of our Model 100s for about $799.

In the mid-1980s when I first started getting attracted to this amazing little computer, I was looking for reasons to use computers at work. I was also given the job of figuring out how to speed up the processing of our payments to contractors who were building pipelines and compressor and metering stations for the gas pipeline company I worked for.

That’s when I had the idea for a Model 100-based system that would capture the data that field engineers usually entered onto a paper form, send it to our home office electronically, and then be processed. In the meantime, we’d also have an idea of how our construction projects were progressing… Yeah, I know this sounds pretty mundane given that someone could now probably do this with a smartphone, but at the time, this was a very unique and daring idea.

The idea was pretty simple; I’d write a BASIC program that would prompt the engineer for the paper form information, field by field. Once entered it, it was saved in a file on the Model 100. To upload the info to the office, I took one of our first IBM PCs and set it up as a bulletin board system (BBS). Since the computer was also being used for other purposes by people in our office during the day, I would set it up to host the BBS only between 4 PM and 8 AM. It was at this time that I got the idea of running my own BBS; the link in one of the earlier paragraphs goes into detail about MAGIC, the system I ran for many years in the pre-internet days.

I won’t bore you with the details of how the “Automated Construction Project Management System” worked. I wrote and presented a paper at an Institute of Gas Technology (now GTI Energy) “Computers in the Gas Industry” conference during the late 80s, and if you’re so inclined you can read a scanned copy here. Oh, and in 1986 I managed to persuade the company to purchase six Model 100s along with the necessary accessories. Five were for the field engineers, the sixth was for me to use in creating the necessary software and to play with.

Back to the original use case for these computers. During the first construction season (between about May and October), the field engineers enthusiastically used the Model 100s and we were getting good timely data from them. I remember hosting a post-season meeting to get complaints, compliments, and ideas for improving the system. Common complaints were just how long it took to fill out the digital “form” (it took about the same time as filling out a paper form by hand), the rarity of RJ-11 jacks in some of the motels where the engineers would stay while on a project (which is why we included the acoustical coupler), and the lack of a paper copy of the output.

A Kodak Diconix 150 inkjet printer, similar to the ones we used. Image via the Retro PC Store.

The next year, we added small portable printers — the Kodak Diconix 150 (or 150+) inkjet printer. These cost about $400 each and actually weighed more than the Model 100, tipping the scales at around 6 lbs. They could run off of five rechargeable NiCad C-cells or an AC adapter, and printed on regular typewriter bond. That gave the engineers the option to create their own hard copies of daily reports for posterity. We found out that many of them also used the Model 100/printer combo to write letters to send to their spouses — remember that this was in the days just before widespread email!

People who know me know that I love to write, and the Model 100 was the first computer that made it possible for me to write anywhere. So function #2 on that earlier list — the text editor — was amazing to me:

Authors, and especially newspaper reporters, loved the Model 100. For the first time, they could write a story while in the field, then send it electronically to the newsroom. I recall seeing a Denver-area sports reporter still using a Model 100 in the 2000s in the press box at a Major League Baseball game!

Sadly, these wonderful little computers have become a footnote in retro tech history. At least the Model 100 still has those of us who remember it fondly. Some folks are even using the Model 100 cases with a much more powerful computer inside and a higher resolution (and probably totally unreadable) color display:

Image via Hackaday

Other enterprising individuals have updated the Model 100 with a Raspberry Pi computer inside, and a 2015 Ars Technica post has details on how writer Sean Gallagher used a Raspberry Pi as the interface between a Model 100 and the internet!

Of course, truly portable laptop computers would soon be pushing the Model 100 into retirement. By 1991 Apple released the PowerBook 100, which was the first really useful laptop that was about the size of the Model 100! But in terms of ease of use and ability to do a few jobs very well, the Model 100 remains a favorite of mine.

And that’s it for this LifeBits post! If you’re the kind of person who likes to read about “ancient technology history”, could you please Like this post by clicking the heart shaped icon(♡) at the top of the page? To get this bit ‘o history in your email inbox on the occasions where I’ve had the time to write an article, consider subscribing to LifeBits for free!

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Until next time… give some of your ancient technology a bit of love!

Old dog, courtesy of ChatGPT (OpenAI) using the DALL·E model.

Most LifeBits articles are about things I have done at some point in the 68+ years that I’ve been living on this planet. I thought I’d expand outside the box today and tell you what tech fun I am up to these days.

Computers!

I still love computers, but I find I’m getting bored with my existing stable that consists of a 2021 M1 MacBook Pro, a 3rd generation 11” iPad Pro, and an iPhone 16 Pro Max. Getting bored is dangerous, because it means that I’m probably going to reach for my wallet to do some hardware updates.

That doesn’t help the main driving force of my life at this point, which is to learn new things. Having the same software on new hardware is like putting me in a tux - yeah, I look better, but it’s still my same aging body and face looking back at me from the mirror.

So to do something new and completely different, I have decided to combine a few things into one big change — I’m going to buy a Raspberry Pi 500 Desktop Kit (a single board computer that costs a whopping $120) and learn to program it in Python. I already have a big 4K monitor that I don’t use, so now I can use that with the Pi. I’ve asked ChatGPT to create a tutorial series for me so I can teach myself Python, and it has already laid out a decent course for me.

Raspberry Pi 500 Desktop Kit. Image via raspberrypi.com

Why would I do this? Well, it also gets me back up to speed on the Linux operating system (Raspberry Pi has its own Debian-based variety called Raspberry Pi OS), and since the 500 comes equipped with a GPIO header to which I can attach all sorts of sensors and stuff, I can use it as a cheap computer for doing some things I’ve wanted to do when we do RV trips.

Those things include doing GPS logging of our exact routes, keeping a database of fuel stops, pinging the specialized GPT (yes, an AI tool) I created for troubleshooting RV problems, displaying a constant feed of weather, and so on.

Sure, this isn’t the world’s most powerful computer, but it gives me an opportunity to get back into programming and play around with some new things. That’s the best way to learn and keep your brain active — play!

LoRa Radio - AKA Meshtastic

Next up? LoRa Radio, which is a mesh network for low-powered radio devices that can talk to each other digitally with short messages. Think of it as text messaging without using a cellular system, that also doesn’t require an amateur radio license.

There are two competing systems right now in the LoRa world: Meshtastic and MeshCore. Both seem to be very popular in the UK and Europe, which isn’t surprising considering the entire UK is 10,000 square miles less in size than the state of Colorado where I live. Cram a lot of people into that area (about 70 million in the UK right now) who don’t necessarily want their government listening in on their digital conversations, and you have a lot of users.

The Heltec V3. This thing is actually much smaller than this image, about 2.6 inches wide by .8 inches high, and about a quarter-inch thick.

There are regions of the US (the Seattle area and Silicon Valley come to mind) where LoRa has really become popular, but I find that I’m living in a dead zone. My little Heltec V3 transceiver cost me only $19.90… although shipping from China was almost the same amount. It took very little time to set up — maybe 5 minutes, and I was moving slowly.

Once I had it powered up I set it in a window and immediately saw signals from about five other nodes. However, none of them appear to be able to see me! It’s not surprising, since I live in a neighborhood that appears to be shadowed from radio signals (hence the lousy 5G cell service I can get from all cellular providers). I’m not giving up, though — I’ll be mounting this thing inside my truck to see if I can actually be visible in the Meshtastic world.

Which reminds me, you might want to know more about Meshtastic? Well, just click that link and you are on the Meshtastic website, which hopefully explains to you what it is better than I can. MeshCore has some different features, but is even less well-adopted in my area than Meshtastic. I’ll stick with what I’ve got…

Home Automation

OK, you probably remember my battles with connected devices from my August article. Well, I don’t know if I am just picking the wrong devices or am cursed with bad luck, but I think all but one of the “smart switches” I have in the house have decided to take permanent vacations. Try as I may, I can’t get them to stay on the network (which has been expanded with multiple extenders).

We’ve had a home security system from abode (they use lower case for some reason unknown to mankind) for years, and I’ve been pretty happy with it. The heart of the system is a hub that has a backup cellular system built into it, so if our internet connection is down, it can still talk to the abode security monitoring center.

It started acting up several months ago, with an error message that said that it can’t get onto the cellular network. The abode tech support folks, bless their hearts, could do a reset remotely and get the cell connection to work again… usually only for a day or two. Then it would fall off of the network again, I’d open another trouble ticket, and we’d go through the process again.

This all happened after years of working fine while perched on the stand for our TV. The tech support dudes decided that I needed to move the hub up to a higher level of the house, so I moved it upstairs to a north-facing window. Nope, that didn’t help. The last change has been to move it to a south-facing window, and so far I think that has lasted a week. I refuse to let the tech guys close this ticket until this problem is resolved!

Anyway, I’ve been pretty happy with their system, so I decided to try one of their smart switches. It doesn’t work with the Apple Home app (does anything?), but I can control the abode switches through their app. They had them on sale a few weeks ago, I ordered one, and of course the item that showed up wasn’t a smart switch — it was a door sensor (for determining if a door is open or closes). So now I’m waiting another two weeks while they get this sorted out and ship me a new smart switch.

If, and at this point that’s a big IF, it works, I will spend the money to replace every non-working smart switch in the house so I can at least pretend to have some sort of home automation going on.

Virtual Machines

My MacBook Pro, with Ubuntu Linux running in a VirtualBox VM. That’s an MMBasic icon I made up to launch the programming language on the VM.

When I was doing a lot of writing for both Apple World Today and The Rocket Yard, I always tried to show people how they could use their Macs to run Windows and Linux. That’s a necessity for people who have specialized apps they need to run that are only available on Windows and Linux, so those posts were usually quite popular.

Apple, of course, made the switch from Intel processors to their own in-house M-series processors starting about five years ago. While it’s still possible to run those other operating systems on the Mac, it’s become a lot more difficult. Why? Well, it’s hard to find versions of Windows (and Linux to a lesser extent) that run on the ARM architecture that is the basis of the Apple M-series processors.

The PicoCalc handheld computer. Image via ClockworkPi

For a while, I was going to purchase a PicoCalc, a handheld computer that runs on a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller and has a tiny keyboard and display. Why? Because it has such a retro feel to it. I waited two months for the damned thing to ship, then realized that I really needed something that used a more modern programming language.

The PicoCalc runs on MMBasic, an open source version of the good ol’ BASIC programming language. In order to develop applications that would run on the PicoCalc, I thought it would make a lot more sense to use either my MacBook Pro or at least an iPad. So I tried to get MMBasic to run on the Mac…

That required setting up a Linux virtual machine. A virtual machine emulates a “guest” operating system while running on the “host” operating system — think of a Mac that has Windows running on it at the same time, and you have the idea. I wanted to do this for free (hey, I am retired, and this gig doesn’t pay very well), so my choices to run virtual machines (VMs) were VMware, VirtualBox, and UTM.

One of the good things about paying for a VM environment like Parallels Desktop is that you usually get very good integration — like the ability to copy and paste between operating systems. The other choices? Well, it’s very sketchy and depends a lot on the guest operating system you’re running. I had VirtualBox running Ubuntu Linux, sadly without the ability to do copy and paste but I had a shared folder that I could plop files into and open in the VM. In VMware, I was able to get Debian Linux running but ran into some other limitations.

On that VirtualBox Linux machine, I was able to get the Linux version of MMBasic running, and actually wrote a few programs… By that point, I was so tired of fighting with the guest operating systems that I said the hell with it, cancelled my order for the PicoCalc (which had finally become ready to ship), and decided to go with the Raspberry Pi and Python programming language.

And that’s where I am today. I’ve decided to keep the VirtualBox VM with Ubuntu on my Mac, just in case I need to damage my brain again.

What are some of the non work-related projects you’re playing with right now? Leave your answer as a comment.

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If you’d like to read more about retro computing and one guy’s life in tech, consider subscribing to LifeBits for free. If you found this glance at tech history to be informative or at least amusing, consider being a paid subscriber! You don’t get anything special for paying for a subscription, except the money generated gives me a chance to try some new techie toys to play with and write about.

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It’s also helpful if you “Like” this and other LifeBits posts, as that makes my writing more visible on Substack.

Until next time… stay busy with things that make you happy!

I’ve always been an early adopter of tech… in some cases being one of the first people in my immediate circle to latch onto some new and exciting thing. It was that way with personal computers, the Mac, wireless networking (what we now call Wi-Fi), CDs, DVDs, you name it. Since my wife and I had been avid photographers for many years, I was also early to jump on the digital photography bandwagon.

The first consumer digital camera didn’t come from a well-known camera manufacturer like Nikon or Canon; it came from Apple. I happen to have one of these in my “Museum of Obsolete Tech” (a cluttered shelf in my office), although it was not my first digital camera. But it was the first digital camera that I actually touched, and it made me come to the realization that eventually film photography would be a niche market.

The very dusty and cluttered “Museum of Obsolete Tech”. Photo © 2025, Steven Sande

Yeah, I’m old enough to remember using cameras that you loaded with film, shooting photos without any idea of what the final product was going to look like, and then surrendering your film to someone else to develop as prints or slides. It was expensive, processing was usually slow, and the results varied all over the map. Now if you don’t like a photo that you just shot, you can erase it and take another, or edit it immediately with tools that seem downright magical!

A closeup of the one roll of film I have in the Museum… which I think is exposed. Photo © 2025, Steven Sande

My first hands-on experience with any digital camera was with the Apple QuickTake 100 at the May 1994 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, California. I believe it was at a evening session, and Apple had a table set up where you could have your photo taken with the QuickTake, and they would work it into a faux Macworld Magazine cover and present you with a printout.

Apple QuickTake 100 Digital Camera from above. The black “crescent moon” thing is the shutter button. Photo © 2020, Steven Sande

It was a wonderful marketing idea, only in practice it didn’t work out that well. The QuickTake 100 could only store about eight 640 x 480 pixel color images, or 32 320 x 160 pixel images. In either case, once they filled up the memory (there was no removable media), Apple staffers had to stop taking photos and connect the camera to a Mac with a serial cable. The software on the Mac was an “Apple QuickTake” program that pulled the images from the camera and allowed simple editing like rotating, cropping, and resizing.

The business end of my QuickTake 100 (hand for scale). At left is the actual lens, the “lens” in the middle is for the look-through viewfinder with a couple of sensors above and below, and the flash is at right. Photo © 2020, Steven Sande

The back end of my QuickTake 100. The optical viewfinder is at left (not digital), and LCD at right showed how many photos you had taken. Photo © 2020, Steven Sande

Well, it took quite a while for those low resolution (my iPhone 16 Pro Max can shoot at a resolution of up to 48 megapixels, the best the QuickTake 100 could do was about .3 megapixels) images to transfer to the Mac. Once that was done, some poor Apple employee had to overlay the image with the fake magazine cover, and then send it to a QMS ColorScript Laser 1000, which at less than $15,000 was the first “affordable” color laser printer. The images took about 2-3 minutes just to print, and the entire process was very slow (I’m thinking it was about 10 minutes per picture), so a lot of the attendees gave up on having their photos taken! A few days later I was able to hold a QuickTake 100 and actually take a picture with it, although I never saw the final image.

Despite the relatively poor performance of the QuickTake 100, it had one thing going for it: it was the first digital camera to gain widespread consumer acceptance, and it was very popular — even with a price tag of $749 (that’s like $1637 in 2025 dollars!).

At 640 x 480 pixels, the images weren’t that great, so I kept myself from succumbing to consumer envy and didn’t buy a digital camera until late 2001, when I bought a Canon PowerShot S100 Digital Elph. It boasted a 2.1 megapixel sensor, and I used it with a great deal of success at the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, even after dropping it about 20 feet onto the hockey rink!

The QuickTake camera I have in the “Museum” was a freebie. My nephew was a graduate student at MIT around 2010 and found it (and some other vintage equipment) in a discard pile. He smartly grabbed it and asked me if I wanted it. Yep! I sure did!

The QuickTake 100 had a fixed-focus lens that gave it an angle of view equivalent to a 50mm lens on a 35mm camera. There was no zoom and no focus, but those who wanted to take low-light photos were in luck — there was a built-in flash.

Exposure was set by the camera. Using a slow film speed equivalent of ISO 85, the shutter speeds ran from 1/30 to 1/175 of a second and aperture from f/2.8 to f/16. Here’s a sample photo at the “high-resolution” 640 x 480 mode:

QuickTake 100 Image by Gmhoffman via Wikimedia

The QuickTake 100 had no screen, so there was no way to view your photos on the camera itself. Instead, they were connected to either a Mac or Windows machine (support for Windows came late in 1994) with a GeoPort serial cable. Files were in a proprietary QuickTake format, and were exported as PICT files.

If for some sick reason I suddenly decided today that it would be a good idea to take photos with this camera, it would require a pretty good investment in some other retro tech. I’d need a mid-1990s Mac running System 7 or 8, the necessary cable, and the QuickTake software. Current Macs do not support the old Apple serial protocol, and even some of the web-based online emulators would find talking to the camera with a custom USB-C to serial connector to be impossible. As of today, there is only one contemporary application that can even read PICT files — Graphic Converter.

Today my QuickTake 100 sits on a shelf collecting an healthy layer of dust along with other obsolete equipment, a testament to the first really successful line of digital cameras.

What was your first digital camera, and what year did you get it? Leave your answer as a comment.

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If you’d like to read more about retro computing and one guy’s life in tech, consider subscribing to LifeBits for free. If you found this glance at tech history to be informative or at least amusing, consider being a paid subscriber! You don’t get anything special for paying for a subscription, except the money generated gives me a chance to try some new techie toys to play with and write about.

It’s also helpful if you “Like” this and other LifeBits posts, as that makes my writing more visible on Substack.

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Until next time… keep filling up your phone and the cloud with your digital photos!

Consultant: a person who gives professional or expert advice.

That’s the dictionary definition of a consultant, which leaves out the bit about the consultant getting paid very well for giving “professional or expert advice.” I was a tech consultant unofficially (meaning that I gave that advice to an employer) for much of my business career starting in 1983, the year I did some research for the executives of the gas pipeline company I worked for.

The subject of that research? Personal computers, which were just starting to be used in business. My study was more than just information about how computers could be helpful in increasing employee efficiency in our company; it provided details on how each division (Engineering, Operations, Billing, Administration) could actually use computers and the return on investment in this technology. I had just received an Masters in Business Administration at the time, so I used all of my skills as a know-it-all former grad student to produce the study.

Well, that study turned into a request to implement the plan, and things began to take off. Before I knew it, my position as “Special Project Supervisor” in the Engineering Division of the company turned into “IT specialist”. I basically talked and worked my way into an IT management position that was outsourced to IBM (actually its early service group, Integrated Systems Solution Corporation, now known as IBM Consulting) in 1995. I spent nine years of my career with ISSC and IBM Global Services before deciding I’d had enough corporate fun and set out on my own as a self-employed consultant.

Every company has a name, and mine was named after an animal that “spoke to me” one night after I got off of a light rail train after work. I was exhausted (having worked another 16 hour day, and of course I didn’t get overtime pay — long hours were expected at IBM…) and walking to my car at the light rail parking lot when a raven squawked at me a few times, picked up a rock, bounced over to me, and dropped the rock at my feet. I think he was trying to tell me something… so I named my company Raven Solutions. You’ll hear more about that company in future LifeBits articles.

A raven… although not the one which inspired the name of my consulting firm. Photo © 2022, Steven Sande

My First “Real” Consulting Gig

A friend and former employee of mine had gone out on his own as a Mac consultant. One of his clients was a big-name legal firm that used Macs in their business. He ran into something out of his level of expertise, and he asked me if I’d be interested in doing some work for him. I wasn’t an IBM employee yet, so it was something I could do in my off hours without running into a conflict of interest. Sure, sign me up!

Here was the setup: the legal firm was taking part in a large trial and had thousands of pages of supporting documents and images they needed to access within seconds. This was before document management systems were commonplace, and the now ubiquitous PDF file format was just starting to make it into desktop publishing workflows (this was in early 1994).

Now, my brain likes to immediately jump to a solution. Whether or not I have the skills to implement that solution isn’t important — I’ll find a way. In this case, I immediately envisioned a solution combining bar codes, scanned document files, a laser bar code scanner, a Mac with some big (for the time) hard disk drives to hold the scanned documents, some off-the-shelf software, and several large CRTs (basically large TVs provided by the law firm). This solution was roughly the IT equivalent of duct-taping a bunch of car parts together and calling it a car… but it worked!

The idea? Each document would be assigned a number and barcode, and each reference to another document or supporting image would also have a number and barcode. The lawyers, who all had a detailed knowledge of the case and the documentation, would hear something during the trial and want to display either transcribed testimony or an image as evidence. They would open a printed, notebook-bound copy of the testimony, use the scanner to scan a bar code, and within seconds the information would be displayed on the CRTs for the judge, jury, lawyers and gallery to see.

The “secret sauce” of all of this was the off-the-shelf software. I used a combination of AppleScript (a system scripting language that had come out the previous year) and a really cool program called QuicKeys 3.0.1 from CE Software. The latter was a “macro automation tool” that could copy keystrokes and mouse actions (point at a particular position on the screen and click or double-click), then repeat those steps.

This was one of the two diskettes used to install QuicKeys. Image via the web.

Most of the time, the system would be sitting in a loop just waiting for one of the lawyers to scan something, then it would leap into action. Once a scan was initiated, QuicKeys would launch an AppleScript I had written, grab number from the barcode, associate it with the appropriate file, and then display the file on the screen before going back into the loop. Total elapsed time from scan to screen? About three seconds.

We came up with an estimate for my consulting time, the equipment, and of course some decent profit, and submitted it to the legal firm. They jumped on our estimate, which was apparently an order of magnitude or two less than what they had received from other consultants, all of whom had suggested commercial document management systems that were very expensive and had much slower response times. Now all I had to do was to get this to actually work quickly and reliably.

The solution was actually quite simple, but did require some really boring work at one point going through the testimony documents and embedding barcodes in the proper places. Getting the scripting done and scanning and storing the documents was very easy. The documents were stored on several of the largest SCSI hard disk drives we could find at the time. Mac System 7 could only address about 2 gigabytes (GB) of storage, so we used a pair of external 1 GB drives that cost about $1,200 each! As a side note on how much technology has changed since 1993, my iPhone 16 Pro Max has 256GB of storage…

We demonstrated the system for the client early in the project. I took a handful of the documents, scanned them, and got the scripts, macros, and part of the hardware ready. The demo was a success, although the client wanted changes to the user interface. They also wanted a way to get the entire system working again quickly if (for example) someone pulled a plug out of the wall — ya don’t want to hold up the wheels of justice!

I decided a Mac laptop (which I believe was a PowerBook Duo 270c) would fulfill the unlikely “unplugged” requirement. It was battery powered and equipped with a mini dock to handle the connection to the SCSI drives. The only issue we had was how long it took for Mac System 7 to boot up. Even with minimal extensions, it took us about 60 seconds to get to the point that the custom “software” could launch. The client decided that was the best we could do and that they’d just beg the court’s indulgence if they had to reboot.

With that, we turned the system and documentation I worked up over to the client, provided them with an invoice for the final hardware costs and testing, and received payment. I never did hear how it worked in the actual court case, but I think it must have fulfilled their requirements because we never heard any complaints.

I really enjoyed both the paycheck and the work, and this planted a seed in my mind to eventually go out on my own. That would take another 12 years to come to fruition — I still had to suffer under some of the worst managers I would ever work for…

Did you ever “duct tape together” an IT solution? I’d love to hear about it, so leave a comment if you did!

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Until next time… dream up a wacky solution that will never work, and then make it work!

Image © 2000, Nigel Tout, VintageCalculators.com

When it comes to British computing legends, probably no one person (well, other than Alan Turing) comes to mind other than Sir Clive Sinclair. He was a likable red-haired inventor, electronics tinkerer, and entrepreneur who was quite ahead of his time. For example, he had a fascination with electric vehicles. In the early 1980s, Sinclair started a company called Sinclair Vehicles and came out with a rather impractical one-seater “tricycle car” called the Sinclair C5. He died in 2021, so I’m hoping that Sir Clive smiled happily at the mass marketing of practical electric vehicles from a variety of manufacturers before he passed on…

His companies (Sinclair Radionics, Sinclair Research, Ltd.) also made some extremely popular and inexpensive personal computers. The first was 1980’s ZX80 (which sold in both pre-built (£99.95) and kit (£79.95) forms) which had a whopping 1K of RAM. It was sold primarily in the UK, although Sinclair did sell both the computers and kits in the US. The ZX81 came out in 1981 and was even less expensive — fully built for £69.95 and as a kit for £49.95. It was a bit more useful since you could buy a 16K RAM expansion cartridge for those larger BASIC programs. Just in case you’re wondering, at the exchange rate at the time that meant that a ZX81 could be purchased in the US as a kit for about a hundred bucks.

Another Sinclair computer was the ZX Spectrum, which featured a color display (if you connected it to a color TV) and sold for about US$200. This computer, which was sold as the Timex Sinclair ZX Spectrum, sold almost 2 million units around the world. About the same time as the Apple Macintosh hit the market in January of 1984, the last Sinclair computer hit the market. The Sinclair QL used a Motorola 68008 CPU similar to the 68000 used in the Mac, but had some serious issues... despite the fact that it looked quite nice. It was slow, used tape microdrives for storage (rather than diskettes or a hard disk drive), and was never successful.

By EWX, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13983436

Those of us who like to play with the Linux operating system owe a debt of gratitude to the Sinclair QL, since according to Wikipedia:

Linus Torvalds has attributed his eventually developing the Linux kernel, likewise having pre-emptive multitasking, in part to having owned a Sinclair QL in the 1980s. Because of the lack of support, particularly in his native Finland, Torvalds became used to writing his own software rather than relying on programs written by others.^[29] In part, his frustration with Minix on the Sinclair^[30] led years later to his purchase of a more standard IBM PC compatible on which he would develop Linux.

I never did succumb to one of the Sinclair computers, mainly because in the early 1980s I was still dubious about the future of “home computers”. But I did end up building a couple of Sinclair calculator kits in the 1970s, and those are what this post is all about.

My last LifeBits article was about some of my experiments in electronics kit building, in particular making a pair of electronic synthesizer kits. After having some success in soldering together those two kits, I felt I could build some more useful tools — namely, calculators.

The first was a kit to build my own Sinclair Scientific calculator. At this point I was using an off-brand scientific calculator (see this LifeBits post for more details) to help me get through engineering school, and was salivating at the RPN-based HP calculators that a lot of my fellow students were using .

Money was really a problem for me in college - just ask my wife of 46 years what a cheap SOB I was at the time. I knew I couldn’t afford to buy an HP calculator to get that RPN fix, which is why I took notice of an ad for a kit version of the Sinclair Scientific that came out in the latter part of 1975. What attracted my eye? If I remember correctly, the price of the kit was $30 (plus shipping).

When the kit arrived, it looked like this:

Image via VintageCalculators.com, photo © 2011 Nigel Tout, who runs that website!

There weren’t a lot of components in this kit. That’s where the genius of Sinclair and one of his employees, Nigel Searle, came in. They knew that with fewer electronic components, the cost of the calculator would be less than competing models. As you can see from the image above, there was an LED display (far left), a one-piece bubble-type keyboard (and plastic case front), a printed circuit board, a couple of chips, and a switch. The one chip did most of the heavy lifting was a Texas Instruments TC0805, a microcontroller that was programmed to do scientific functions as a “calculator on a chip”.

Compared to the synthesizer kits, this thing was a piece of cake! It just required soldering three or four pieces to the circuit board, pressing the circuit board into the front of the case, and then pressing the back of the case onto the front. I believe I got it all assembled in about an hour. I popped in four AAA batteries and started to try to figure out how this thing worked. Fortunately, the kit came with a manual.

The first thing that hit me about this calculator was how tiny it was! It measured a scant 50 x 111 x 19 mm (2.0 x 4.4 x 0.75 inches) — truly pocketable. The second revelation was that it was rather inaccurate, at least as compared to my other calculator. That inaccuracy had to do with how they went about having the chip perform scientific calculations. The third annoyance was how it handled numbers — everything was done in scientific notation as it always put a decimal point after the first digit you entered. That was fine if you were trying to add single-digit numbers, but when you wanted to perform calculations on bigger numbers, you had to do a mental calculation of what exponent to use before entering the number.

Let’s say you wanted to enter the number 34,567.4 Rather than just typing 34567, decimal point, 4, you would enter 345674 E 4 — displayed on the LED as 3.45674. In other words, move the decimal point four digits to the right of the first number. Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? Likewise, if you did some calculation and got an answer that looked like 6.7346 E 2, your mind would have to look at that number and realize that the answer was actually 673.46. Fortunately the Sinclair Scientific came with a small user manual the same height and width of the calculator that told you how to do all of these things.

Now, about the inaccuracy… The Sinclair Scientific was about as accurate as the usual engineering “calculator” of the day — a slide rule. Compared to the contemporary scientific calculators at the time, the HP-35 and TI SR-50, that wasn’t very good. I won’t go into an explanation of why it was so inaccurate, as someone (Ken Shirriff) has already done so. He’s also created a web-based simulation of the Sinclair Scientific that you can try out.

The Sinclair Scientific kit also had one other annoying problem; the two-part case tended to fall apart, meaning that the back would fall off and the batteries would scatter onto the floor. My high-tech solution to this when it first happened was to wrap a rubber band around the case to hold it firmly together. That looked pretty bad, so I resorted to gluing the two case halves together with model airplane glue for a more permanent and aesthetic fix.

Despite the inaccuracy and other quirks, I really admired the tiny form factor and cool design of the Sinclair Scientific, so I used it when I wanted to impress someone and say “I built this!”

What was the other Sinclair kit? Another calculator. It was selling via mail-order for about $25 (including shipping) and I thought it would be fun… It was the Sinclair Wrist Calculator.

Photo © 2003, Nigel Tout, VintageCalculators.com

Yes, this ugly hunk of plastic was a calculator that strapped to your wrist. It could do the regular four math functions (add, subtract, multiply, divide), plus do percentages, squares and square roots, inverts, and hold partial answers in memory.

Once again Sinclair had come up with a kit, probably figuring that adding labor to the cost of this device would put it into the “not worth it!” range:

I remember having issues soldering this kit, mainly because the printed circuit board was so small. When assembled, the entire calculator watch measured 47 x 45 x 18 mm (1.9 x 1.75 x 0.7 in). Once the soldering was complete I had to find some mercury button cells (hearing aid batteries) — this thing used six of them for power, stacked end to end.

As with the Sinclair Scientific, the case really didn’t fit together too snugly and had a tendency to pop open. However, since I needed to unsnap the black plastic back from the red transparent plastic front in order to change the batteries, I couldn’t just glue the two halves together. Fortunately, the cheap watch strap that came with the Wrist Calculator was connected to the top (red) part, so if you strapped it onto your wrist tightly enough it kept the back connected.

Even though I was a nerd in the 1970s, I had enough fashion sense to never wear this thing in public unless I was wearing long sleeves. It was truly ugly, and it didn’t work that well either. The issues with keeping the back on also meant that the buttons sometimes pushed the circuit board away without making electrical contact, so it was necessary to push buttons a few times to get them to register. Needless to say, this was an experiment that quickly ended up in the desk drawer, hidden away.

I honestly wish I had kept the Sinclair Scientific. The design of that calculator was quite nice, and it was definitely different. However, not that long after I built the kits I graduated from engineering school, got a pretty decent job, and began to have enough money to buy fun electronic toys.

If you’d like to read more about retro computing and my life in tech, consider subscribing to LifeBits for free. And if you found this glance at tech history to be informative, consider being a paid subscriber! You don’t get anything special for paying for a subscription, except the money generated gives me a chance to try some new techie toys to play with and write about.

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Until next time… go search for some Sinclair products on eBay!

Image of many vintage synthesizers via Music Gateway.

For some reason, maybe something encoded in my genes, I have never been able to play a musical instrument or read music. That doesn’t mean that I lack musical ability — I have always had a very good singing voice, had almost perfect pitch, and could pick up a song (or a part, usually tenor) after listening to it once or twice. But put a keyboard or a guitar in front of me, and my fingers and brain refuse to cooperate.

I’ve tried teaching myself keyboards and hit a brick wall. I even bought an electric guitar a few years ago, tried the Fender Play app, and found that my fingers are a bit too short to easily squeeze out chords. At this point in my life, I’ve pretty much given up. But in the early 1970s, I wanted nothing more than to do some really cool things with music.

Part of my lack of musical skill probably has to do with the fact that I’ve never taken a “real” music lesson and I stop practicing when I get to the point of diminishing returns. When I was in fifth grade, I was handed my sister’s clarinet — she was getting braces on her teeth and could no longer play the instrument, so rather than trash the investment, my folks decided that I’d like to learn to play. My elementary school “instruction” just consisted of having the band leader run us endlessly through a few simple songs so we could play a concert for our parents. All the other kids got to go to lessons on how to play their instruments and read music — I just fumbled along somehow as a self-taught clarinetist for three years.

However, I kept up the hope that someday I’d be able to play music, and when I was in high school a new sound began to make its way into the mainstream — the electronic synthesizer. The Beatles were among the early users (the Mellotron — not a true synthesizer — was used in Strawberry Fields Forever), and then musicians like Elton John and Stevie Wonder, and groups like Pink Floyd began to experiment with the instrument. Other prog rock groups like Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer relied heavily on synth. I loved the sounds, which were totally unlike the traditional guitar/bass/drums/keyboards sound that had dominated the 1960s.

As I was entering college in the fall of 1974, I chanced upon Snowflakes Are Dancing, classical music re-realized with synthesizers by Isao Tomita. In the spring of 1975, Kraftwerk blew my metaphorical socks off with Autobahn, an electronic extravaganza that is still worth listening to. Larry Fast’s 1975 album Synergy: Electronic Realizations for Rock Orchestra and the following year’s Sequencer were both playing constantly in my dorm rooms. I was hooked on electronic music!

When I got into college and had a few bucks saved away, I saw an ad for a synthesizer kit. I had to have one. Forget about the fact that I had no experience with electronics or kit building, or that I couldn’t play an instrument — I wanted to be able to make those amazing sounds.

Advertisement image courtesy of Scott Lee, PAiA Electronics.

The name of the company that was selling the kit was PAiA Electronics, and they’re still in existence here in 2025! The company was founded by a man named John Simonton in 1967, when yours truly was just ten years old. They didn’t start off with synth kits; that came in 1972 with a synthesizer (the 2700) that initially didn’t have a keyboard — instead, it used pushbuttons. But considering that the 2700 cost $230 in its most basic form when “real” synthesizers by companies like Moog and ARP cost $5,000 to $10,000, it’s no wonder that struggling techie musicians were fascinated in building their own synths. One could add modules to the 2700, and they ranged in price from $50 to $800 — still a bargain compared to the commercial pre-built units.

The low prices of electronic kits was one of the reasons for their popularity. Anybody remember Heathkit? This company made a variety of electronic kits for many years. You could purchase kits to build amateur radio transceivers, oscilloscopes, TVs, stereos and amplifiers, and so on. In later years, they even made personal computer kits and a do-it-yourself robot called the HERO!

Electronic kits were a fun way to learn something about electronics — Heathkit usually included easy-to-understand explanations of how the various components worked together to perform some function.

The synth kit I became entranced with was the PAiA Model 3740 “Gnome Micro-Synthesizer”, at a price of just $48.95 (plus shipping). While I was waiting for the box to arrive at my dorm, I went to a local Radio Shack in Boulder, CO and picked up a pair of diagonal piers (wire cutters/strippers), a fine point soldering iron, a couple of 9 volt batteries, and some solder — the things I’d need to be able to build the kit. A fully constructed Gnome looked like this:

Image via Reverb.com from an advertisement for a used, non-functional PAiA Gnome.

The mental image that most of us have of a synthesizer probably goes back to Keith Emerson (Emerson, Lake, and Palmer) or Rick Wakeman of Yes sitting at a keyboard near a huge patch board with wires dangling all over the place… or one of the newer MOOG machines like this $1,899 (in 2025 dollars) Subsequent 37 Paraphonic Analog Synthesizer and MIDI keyboard:

Image via Amazon.com

So the Gnome was and is a bit of an anomaly… no keyboard, just a bunch of switches, knobs, a red button, and a weird wired dangly bit with a metal probe on the end of it. That probe was used to select the pitch of the tone you were generating from the Gnome by running up or down that black strip you see the probe resting on in the previous image.

The Gnome had three main components — a VCO (voltage controlled oscillator), a VCF (voltage controlled filter), and a VCA (voltage controlled amplifier). I won’t go into the mechanics of how all of this worked, but basically once the kit was functional you’d power it on, hook it up to an amplifier, and then start playing with different settings of the dials and switches. Here’s a link to a series of articles written by John Simonton for Radio Electronics magazine explaining how to build and use the Gnome. It’s also very informative in describing the theory behind electronic synthesizers.

As I mentioned before, I had no prior experience building any sort of electronics kits. I had done some rudimentary soldering in an electronics “shop” class in junior high school, but I wasn’t really all that sure that I would be able to build this kit. When it arrived, the Gnome consisted of a printed circuit board, some wires, a plastic bag filled with resistors, diodes, and capacitors (and a total of one integrated circuit - an “LM3900 quad current differential amp”), and the aforementioned knobs and switches. In addition, there was a sleek looking screen-printed metal control panel and a couple of wood pieces that the panel and circuit board were fastened to.

While other dorm rooms reeked of unwashed socks and marijuana, mine had the memorable aroma of hot solder. I really wanted to get this thing built quickly so I could start playing with it, so I recall spending a weekend sitting around doing nothing but soldering. There were several times I really screwed things up and put some of the components into the wrong holes, resulting in the need to unsolder the pieces and put them back in the correct location. The sole integrated circuit (IC) — that’s the black boxy-looking thing with seven little legs on each side — was a real pain to install as I kept putting on too much solder, which made connections between the pins (the “legs”). I kept removing solder and trying again — hoping all the time that I wasn’t damaging the IC. Eventually everything looked like it was in the proper place.

The next thing to do was to install a couple of 9V batteries (the type used in transistor radios), run a cable from the Gnome to the aux input jack on my all-in-one stereo (hey, I was living in a dorm and there wasn’t a lot of room), and go through the testing and calibration process outlined in the manual. To my surprise, everything worked! By the way, if you want to see that manual, head to this page on the PAiA website and click on the links in the forum.

Well, now I had something I could make really wild sounds with… but that was about it. I amazed my roommates, made the other people on the same dorm floor wonder what the hell those noises were, and when I hooked up headphones to my stereo and wiggled the left/right balance knob while doing some synthing, I could even mimic stuff I heard on some of my growing collection of electronic music albums. I had the feeling that I needed to add a keyboard to the mix…

PAiA Oz Mini-Organ. Image via “inbetweengigs” on Etsy.

And along came the PAiA Model 3760 Oz Mini-Organ, which was designed to work with the Gnome… provided you made a slight modification to the Gnome so it would receive the output from the Oz. I was making a bit more money at my college jobs at this point, so shelling out $84.95 plus the obligatory shipping fee was no problem. I think this came out in 1976, and I was busy falling in love with my wife of 46 years at that point, so it rather surprises me that I had the time or interest to build it.

Compared to the Gnome, I thought building the Oz was a piece of cake. PAiA still has the instruction manual for the Oz hanging around online… A couple of interesting things about this keyboard. First, it had only 18 keys compared to the usual 88 on a “real” piano keyboard. However, the second knob from the left allowed you to switch between octaves (from 1 to 5) so you could create a complete range of tones from growly lows to tweeting highs. The second cool thing was a pitch bender, which would change the pitch of the sound being played as you applied pressure to it.

Most modern electronic keyboards use a pitch wheel rather than the resistive pitch bender used by the Oz. To be honest, I always felt the pitch bender was a bit useless as it required a LOT of pressure to achieve even a little bit of change in pitch.

There was one more problem. Even with just 18 keys, I couldn’t play much on the keyboard. My lack of coordination hit again, so the Gnome and the Oz started to collect dust. Now, I’m not one to let unused things just sit around; there’s something in my genetic makeup that tries to sell old items, which is probably why I don’t have a stack of 50 or 60 used Macs sitting around in my house. In my senior year of university studies, I decided to sell the musical duo of Gnome and Oz so I put an ad in the campus rag (The Colorado Daily) and managed to sell it to an actual musician for the huge sum of $130 (don’t ask me why I remember that figure…). I hope he got some use out of it!

That ended my fun with building musical instruments, but not the end of building kits. I built a couple of calculator kits, and I also helped a college friend of mine build a MITS Altair 8800 computer. I’ll talk about both of these kit building adventures in future LifeBits articles.

Writing these LifeBits memories also ignited a need in my deepest soul to start doing some modern-day kit building and programming, so I recently ordered a Clockwork Pi PicoCalc, which is a fully-functional computer the size of a calculator that runs on a Raspberry Pi PicoCalc 1H microcontroller. Compared to the Gnome and Oz, this is a snap to put together — no soldering required! I still don’t know what I’ll do with the PicoCalc, but that’s half the fun of being a nerd.

Did you enjoy this retro journey into the electronic synth kit world in the 1970s? If you did, consider subscribing to LifeBits for free and you’ll get the latest articles as soon as they flow out of my brain and onto the digital page. Really like what you’ve been reading? Become a paying subscriber and get my undying thanks for your support!

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Until next time… go listen to some of those synth classics of the 1970s!

The Kings Point SC-40 Scientific Calculator might not have been widely known, but there’s one in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution / National Museum of American History.

In the summer of 1974, I was both looking forward to and somewhat dreading my move that fall to Boulder, Colorado — the home of the University of Colorado. My choice of studies? Civil Engineering. For some odd reason known only to my 16-year-old brain (yes, I was 16 when I started college…), I chose that specific field of engineering because I had dreams of developing new ways of moving people around from place to place. Transportation engineering was not a degree option; it was a subset of the rather broad field of civil engineering.

The anxiety came from the choices I had to make that year: what dorm I wanted to live in on campus, whether or not I wanted to start off with freshman calculus or take a somewhat remedial algebra class, and what I thought was the most important decision of all — which scientific calculator to buy.

Pocket calculators were pretty new at the time. My dad had actually purchased one in (1973, I think). I’m pretty sure it was this — a Sharp EL-8102.

Image via John Wolff.

Pocketable? Barely. It weighed over a pound, actually 1.33 pounds when the batteries were inserted into the back. Speaking of batteries, it burned through six AA batteries pretty quickly unless you plugged it in. It wasn’t exactly svelte. It was a boxy 174mm x 106 mm x 49 mm (6.85″ × 4.17″ × 1.93″). The digits were displayed on a vacuum-fluorescent display with a memorable green glow. It was better than a four-function (add, subtract, multiply, divide) calculator; it actually had square root and percent functions, as well as a single memory.

Despite its clunkiness and ability to eat batteries the way that Joey Chestnut eats hot dogs, calculators like this were extremely rare, so I had to bring this sucker to high school and show it off. My friends were impressed!

I knew very well that an engineering student in 1974 was going to need something more powerful — a scientific calculator that featured trigonometric and logarithmic functions, roots, powers, etc… Some of my nerd buddies had more money than I did (or parents with deep pockets), so they were jumping on the HP-35 — Hewlett-Packard’s scientific calculator that came out in 1972. It used something called Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) in making calculations; there was no equals sign ( = ). Adding two numbers, let’s say 12 and 34, you would type in 12, press the ENTER key, type 34, and press the plus sign ( + ). Up would pop 46 on the display! An algebraic notation calculator would do addition in a much more traditional way — 12+34 =46 .

I won’t go into the wars that were going on between those who preferred the HP calculators with RPN and those in the Texas Instruments (TI) camp who preferred “algebraic notation” — let’s just say that it was as bad as the VHS vs. Beta wars of the early 1980s, or the Mac vs. Windows and iOS vs. Android battles that are still continuing…

TI really didn’t have a true scientific calculator until the end of 1974 with the SR-50; the SR-11 was called a “slide rule calculator” and really didn’t have much more than the standard four function plus square root, squared, and inverse (1/x) functions. During the spring of my senior year of high school and on into the summer, I was desperately looking for a true scientific calculator that didn’t cost as much as the HP-35, yet had true scientific capabilities and didn’t have that weird RPN. Yes, even $195 was considered expensive to me.

That’s why I got quite excited when I found an ad in a magazine for a mail order calculator called the Kings Point SC-40. Yeah, now there’s an electronics company that had staying power... The company was located in Jersey City, NJ and had these calculators built for them in Japan.

It had a red LED display like those TI calculators, a full set of scientific functions, and it was right on the edge of my affordability limit at $149.99. I wrote a check, tucked it into an envelope with the coupon, and a few weeks later I had my calculator in hand.

I have to admit that I was pretty happy with this calculator. It saw me through my first two years of engineering school, got great battery life, and the manuals that it came with had examples of how to perform certain functions that weren’t built in!

SC-40 Owner’s Manual

SC-40 Scientific Calculator Application Guide and Operating Examples

The only problem with owning the Kings Point SC-40? The crap I got from other engineering students for having an off-brand calculator! Usually the abuse was a sneering look followed by a “What IS that thing?” type of comment as they pulled something like an HP-65 out of their backpack. The bad-mouthing went on for the entire time I owned this device (it was replaced with a Texas Instruments TI-59 in 1977… more about that in a future LifeBits). By the way, technology was advancing so quickly (at least in the calculator field) that the SC-40 was selling for $28 by the time I bought my TI-59.

It’s not as if I really even needed a calculator my freshman year at C.U. Believe it or not, electronic calculators were forbidden in exams until my sophomore year. What did we use to do calculations during tests? Slide rules…

One side of a Pickett Model 4 Slide Rule. Image via Michael O’Leary, International Slide Rule Museum.

Wikipedia refers to slide rules as “hand-operated mechanical calculators”, so you could say that this was the common “calculator” up until 1975 (at least for CU engineering students).

All in all, I guess I should have held on to the SC-40. Who knows? I probably could have sold it to some vintage calculator collector for more than I originally bought it for!

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Until next time… don’t diss somebody because of their choice of scientific calculator!

In my lifetime, I’ve owned more computers, programmable calculators, tablets, smartphones, and other electronic devices than I can remember. But I’ll always remember my first personal computer, mainly because I only owned it for a week.

It was the spring of 1983, and my wife of three years and I were living in a small ranch style house in Aurora, Colorado. Although I knew about personal computers from friends and co-workers who owned them, I thought that they were overpriced. For example, an Apple II with 48K of RAM and a single 5-1/4” floppy drive was priced at $2,175. I wouldn’t hesitate to buy a computer nowadays for that price, as it would have some pretty good specifications. But that $2,175 is equivalent to $7,303 in 2025, and there is no way I’d spend that much on a computer! I was just five years into my career in 1983 and wasn’t making the big bucks.

There was also the question of a “use case” for a personal computer (to this day, I still find myself needing to justify any frivolous purchases like the Raspberry Pi 500 I’m about to blow money on). My spouse and I were both finishing up a Master’s degree program at that time, and one of our fellow students had an Apple II that he used with a word processing program to write his papers. Well, after trying his Apple II I found that I could pound out my homework much faster on my trusty Smith Corona Coronet electric typewriter with its cool ribbon cartridges (it looked exactly like the image below)! My output also looked better, since he was printing out his papers on a lousy dot matrix printer.

Spreadsheets? VisiCalc was the “killer app” for the Apple II, but at the time I really couldn’t see a need for something that crunched numbers and put them in a nice table. Database programs? Now there was something I could get my mind around. I like to organize things, and my thinking back then is that spouse and I could do an up-to-date inventory of items for insurance purposes, or maybe catalog our growing collections of vinyl record albums and VHS videotapes.

Programming? Yeah, I liked doing that. Games? I wasn’t much of a gamer, although we owned an Atari 2600 and a number of cartridges. Home automation? It was the thing of dreams in 1983, although a friend of mine that you’ll read about in many of these posts — Rick B. (last name redacted in respect of his passing) — and his father had done some pioneering work in this area.

The thoughts of doing some programming, perhaps writing (hmmm… a foreshadowing of a future career path for me), and organizing my OCD life with a database manager started to obsess me a little bit. Of course, I had also heard about the new world of bulletin board systems and online information sources. But the price tag of a computer just didn’t seem to be worth it to me.

Then came the day that I became aware of the Commodore VIC-20. I’m not sure, but it could have been Captain Kirk beckoning me on a voyage to seek out new expensive hobbies:

OK, so it was a “home computer” and not a “real” business computer. But heck, $299.95? Much less than that Apple II, and you could get a word processor, a home inventory program, and even a biorhythm program for it (remember that pseudoscientific nonsense?). WOW!

One day in (I think) March or April of ‘83 I happened upon a Kmart ad that had the VIC-20 listed on sale for $249. OMG! For that price, I knew I could afford a few of the peripherals I’d need to get in addition to the computer. First, and most important, was the cassette tape drive (the Commodore Datasette 1530) that was selling for $79. Next — because there was no way I was going to hook this up to our one and only color TV set in the living room — I needed a monitor. I wanted something that was color and that might work with whatever computer I knew I would upgrade to in the future.

A local computer store had just what I wanted — the Amdek Color 1 monitor. Oddly enough, it was more expensive than the VIC-20 at (I think) $329. But I figured I was going to have it for a while… Here’s an ad that showed it with the popular computers of 1982 — the VIC-20, the Atari 400/800, and the Apple II:

Image via Vintage Computing and Gaming.

Something kept me from buying the Commodore Automodem 1650 while I was spending all of this money. I did see one at Kmart when I picked up my VIC-20 and Datasette 1530, but it would have to wait.

Since my wife and I were both working and in grad school at the time, we had desks in a spare bedroom and that’s where I set up the VIC-20. I recall connecting it to the monitor with the included Commodore A/V cable (no need for an RF modulator box, since I wasn’t connecting it to a TV). I plugged in the tape drive, opened the manual, and hit the power switch on the right side of the computer… and was greeted by something that looked like this:

Now, the VIC-20 had a user manual that was aimed at those who had absolutely no background in computers… which was most people at that point in time. I have to admit after looking at this scanned manual that it was actually quite well done in that respect. I’ve written user manuals for software, and found it’s always best to assume that your reader has no idea of what they’re doing, so you explain things in very simple language. This is written so that a kid (probably the target market) could use it.

Seriously, if you haven’t clicked that link for the manual yet, do so now. This book took you through everything, including some cursory BASIC programming. If anything, it was preparing the VIC-20 user for hours of typing in BASIC programs from magazines. All through the manual, your journey was accompanied by that VIC-20 with a face, arms and hands, and legs. Frightening stuff…

It took me less than a week to run through all of the example programs in the manual and I even wrote a few programs myself to practice what I had learned. I learned just how slow the Datasette 1530 was, and how to use it to store programs and retrieve them.

At that point, I saw another Kmart VIC-20 ad:

That really ticked me off! I had spent $249 just a week before, and here it was available for $178? Well, there was something else that caught my eye a day later; a flyer for the same Kmart store at 4298 South Parker Road with the Commodore 64 for $249! What the heck?

I had a plan… I put the VIC-20 back in the box, grabbed my receipt, and headed down to the store, which was only about 10 minutes from our house. I walked in and said that I wasn’t happy with my purchase and wanted a full refund. The cashier looked at the receipt, then said “I can’t refund that amount; the price is now lower” so I demanded to see the manager. I explained to the manager that the computer wasn’t going to fit my needs and that I had just bought it for $249, and by gosh, I wanted my money back (insert scowling 25-year-old face here). He told the cashier to refund the full $249.

Now, I didn’t have the courage to actually buy the C-64 at that store since my demanding a full refund was borderline unethical. Another local Kmart had the same price so I scooted over there and bought the discounted computer. In an instant, I had upped the specs of my home computer significantly:

I was set! I’d keep that Commodore 64 for about a year, when it would be replaced by first a Sanyo MBC-555 PC compatible, and then a Mac 512K. More on all of these computers in future posts here on LifeBits!

Did you enjoy this little bit of personal computing history? If you did, would you consider doing something?

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Until next time… don’t type NEW at the prompt on your VIC-20 unless you really mean to erase that program in memory!

A weird AI “dream” of how my office may have appeared in the days of the MAGIC BBS. Image generated by ChatGPT (OpenAI) using the DALL·E model.

When I got my first personal computer in the summer of 1982 (a Commodore 64), one of the things I decided to do was see if I could connect to a Bulletin Board System (BBS). Now, that computer didn’t do too much, but it was capable of doing things that “real” — and much more expensive — personal computers like the Apple II and IBM PC handled, like word processing, spreadsheets, games, and telecommunications.

The way most of us found out about computer-related things in the 1980s was through magazines. I was partial to Byte Magazine, which always seemed to know what was going on across the nascent personal computing world before any other source did. It was in a Byte issue sometime in 1982 that I saw two things that caught my eye — an article about bulletin board systems that were seemingly popping up everywhere — and an ad for an inexpensive Commodore-branded modem.

The amazing Commodore Model 1650 Automodem: Image from pagetable.com.

Now, what the heck was a modem? That’s a contraction of modulator/demodulator, which Wikipedia defines as “a computer hardware device that converts data from a digital format into a format suitable for an analog transmission medium such as telephone or radio.” They’re still around — my current cable-based internet service uses a cable modem to give me speeds of up to 1 gigabit (1 billion bits) per second.

Back in the early days, you’d plug your phone line into one of the ports and another one went between the modem and a telephone. You could switch most modems to an “auto-answer” mode, which meant that anyone who called your phone number would be greeted not by your sultry voice, but by that wonderful screech we associated with modems. Fortunately, most modems also had a D/T switch that allowed the device to switch between data usage (D) or telephone (T).

The modem of my desire was the Commodore Model 1650 Automodem, which operated at the blinding speed of 300 baud. The reason I wanted this particular modem was that it came with software on a cassette tape that enabled the computer to dial into online services like Dow Jones News/Retrieval and the Commodore Information Network.

The latter was a subsection of CompuServe, an online service that was booming at the time. The main reason for CompuServe’s success? Most big cities had a local phone number you could dial into — remember, these were the days when long-distance phone calls were expensive! So you’d dial into that local number with your telecommunications software and modem, and be connected to the entire CompuServe service.

I didn’t like CompuServe for a number of reasons, but primarily because they charged a monthly fee for their service. If only I could have looked into the future and viewed today’s world where everything is a subscription! So what did I dial into instead? Bulletin Board Systems.

Most BBSs had the same functions in common: a message board, a way to share files, and sometimes even a way to have discussions with other users (for BBS’s that had more than one dial-up line available). Think of a bulletin board system as the caveman equivalent of online forums and social media.

The early BBS menus were quite similar in how they looked and operated. This was all text-based, although later BBS hosting software provided Mac users with the familiar graphical interface.

Sample BBS Main Menu actually taken from a sticker that is for sale online…

Email? It may show be a menu item in that picture above, but it was not on the systems I used in the early days. Instead, there were message boards, lists of other BBS phone numbers, and the ubiquitous file download areas where you could grab public domain software or (on some notorious sites) copies of pirated “real software” that someone had removed copyright protection from… As I was running a BBS, I kept away from hosting the pirated stuff on my system as I had a fear of lawyers.

In the days of the Commodore 64, my online sessions were usually something like this.

• Turn on the computer and monitor

• Let the computer boot up

• Turn on the cassette drive (later a disk drive) used to load software, and make sure it is attached to the computer

• Type in the commands to load the software from the cassette or disk

• Tell my wife that I was going to tie up the phone line and not to make any calls

• Connect the phone line to the modem

• Run the terminal software and log onto the system

Initially, I typed in the BASIC program that was in the back of the user manual for the Commodore 1650 Modem and saved it to a cassette for future use. I found an old faded printout of this program in a drawer, so this may not be the actual code… I hope none of you were planning on typing this into your Commodore 64 today!

100 OPEN 5,2,3,CHR$(6)

110 DIM F%(255), T%(255)

200 FOR J=32 TO 64: T%(J)=:NEXT

210 T%(13)=13: T%(20)=8: RV=18: CT=0

220 FOR J=65 TO 90: T%(J)=K:NEXT

230 FOR J=91 TO 95: T%(J)=J:NEXT

240 FOR J=193 TO 218:K=J-128: T%(J)-K:NEXT

250 T%(146)=16: T%(133)=16

260 FOR J=0 TO 255

270 K=T%(J )

280 IF K <> 0 THEN F%(K)-J:F%(K+128)=J

290 NEXT

300 PRINT " " CHR$(147)

310 GET#5,A$

320 IF A$="" OR ST <> 0 THEN 360

330 PRINT " “ CHR$ (157);

340 IF F%(ASC(A$))=34 THEN POKE 212,0

350 GOTO 310

360 PRINT CHR$(RV) " “ :CHR$(157):CHR$(146);:GETA$

370 IF A$ <> "" THEN PRINT#5,CHR$(T%(ASC(A&)));

380 CT=CT+1

390 IF CT=8 THEN CT=0:RV=164-RV

400 IF (PEEK(37151) AND 64)=1 THEN 400

410 GOTO 310

As usual, this didn’t work properly for me the first time I tried to run it. Fortunately, my boss at the time was knowledgeable about these things as he had a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model II that he was obsessed with, so he helped me get it working. Once I did, I found the phone number for a local Commodore 64 BBS and logged in… and the first thing I did was to download a decent terminal program.

After that, downloading public domain games, programs and utilities for the Commodore 64 occupied my time, as well as finding the phone numbers for other local C64 BBSs and reading the messages that were left on the board. That was the fun use of bulletin board systems. How about the work use of BBSs I refer to in the subtitle for this article? Well, I’ll write about that in a future LifeBits.

My third use case for BBSs was as a hobby. By the time early 1985 rolled around I was the proud owner of a Mac 512K computer, and I knew that I would have to be a frequent user of the local Mac boards. However, I didn’t like most of them for one reason or another. My brilliant solution in September of 1986 was to start my own Mac BBS called MAGIC (Mac And GS Information Center).

MAGIC, Red Ryder, and The CompuServe Kerfuffle

As a Mac user, I had heard about a wonderful “shareware” terminal program called Red Ryder written by a guy named Scott Watson. Shareware meant that you could download it for free and distribute it to anybody, and if you really found it useful, you’d send a token donation to the developer.

Not only did Watson write Red Ryder, but he also came up with Red Ryder Host, which was BBS software that ran on the Mac. I was in business! I set it my old Mac 512K with its own phone line, and let some of the other local BBSs (and Mac user groups) know about my board.

Somehow, I was able to gain both infamy and fame within a few weeks of starting up the board. Remember my earlier comments about CompuServe? Well, I had an account on there but really didn’t use the service primarily because of the cost. About the only thing I did was to haunt the message boards, and that’s where I posted a short blurb about my new BBS. Imagine my surprise when I got a letter from the CompuServe legal department about two weeks after starting up the site.

The letter was a “cease and desist order” threatening legal action for copyright violations, allegedly because I was “posting software that had been downloaded from CompuServe”. I never downloaded anything from CompuServe because of the cost and the interminable amount of time it took, even with a 1200 baud modem. I wasn’t too happy about this.

Anyone remember InfoWorld? It was a weekly newsmagazine about the IT business (it’s still in existence as a website), and by 1986 I had managed to get my employer to pay for a subscription. Well, I sent them a letter (snail mail…) and told them what was going on with CompuServe. The next thing I knew, an InfoWorld reporter called me and asked some questions about the situation, and had me fax him a listing of the few program files (all in the public domain) that I actually hosted at that time on MAGIC as well as a copy of the letter from CompuServe.

The next issue of InfoWorld contained an article about the situation, which was very sympathetic to me and painted CompuServe as a bunch of suits who were picking on the little guy. CompuServe dismissed its threat, and I ended up getting some very nice national publicity for MAGIC — and a lot more users since the article listed the phone number for the BBS. Note — if anyone can find a copy of that InfoWorld article, please let me know.

The next level of fame? Fast-forward to this article in the September, 1987 issue of Macworld magazine:

Woo-hooo! Even though they got the location wrong (Highlands Ranch is nowhere near Boulder), the number of users increased significantly, and I decided to add a second Mac (part-time), modem, and phone line to MAGIC (at one point I would have four dial-in lines running on two Macs). All of that had a cost, of course, so I decided to see if I could start charging for a higher level of access.

MAGIC Goes Commercial

As I mentioned earlier, the original MAGIC BBS ran on a piece of software called Red Ryder Host. This was very “un-Maclike” in that people who dialed into the BBS interacted with it just as if they were dialing into any other BBS — there was no graphical user interface. I didn’t like that and wanted to offer the most “Mac-like” (and Apple IIGS-like) interface I could, so I started evolving through different software.

I don’t recall the dates and exact software versions, but the chronology went something like this:

• Red Ryder Host

• Second Sight (same as RRHost, but with a new name), which became White Knight

• Something called NovaLink 2.0 that I honestly don’t remember

• TeleFinder from Spider Island Software, which added a graphical user interface and more capabilities

• FirstClass — the last BBS software I ran before starting up my first website. It really looked like the Mac desktop

A screenshot of FirstClass. Image from http://macos.retro-os.live/

Not everyone was thrilled about my idea to charge the onerous amount of $15 per year for full access to the system. I didn’t want people to stay online for hours on end, so each session was limited to 15 minutes for non-subscribers, and subscribers could chalk up an hour a day of online time.

There was a guy by the name of Jack Rickard who published a newsletter called “Denver PC Boardwatch”, and he was quite outspoken in October of 1988 about my decision to actually charge money for better access to a bulletin board system:

Contrary to Mr. Rikard’s opinion, I did not “go on at some length concerning their lack of obligation to provide an up system for any length of time.” I simply had a short disclaimer that people agreed to when signing up that due to equipment failure, busy signals, and software bugs I couldn’t guarantee 24/7/365 service. Sheesh, let’s overreact a bit, Jack!

There was one interesting feature of both TeleFinder and FirstClass — you needed to have the graphical user interface software before you could call into the BBS, and the best way to do that was to give away disks with a customized version that had the phone number(s) pre-loaded. Your users would pop the disk into their disk drive, copy it over to their hard drive (if they had one), then double-click on the MAGIC icon to dial into the site.

I gave away a ton of those disks at user group meetings, and finally one Mac user group (MacinTech — still around, first organized in 1987!) made MAGIC their official BBS. I’m still doing stuff for MacinTech on occasion - I’ll be doing a Zoom presentation for the group on October 14, 2025!

PC Pursuit and Fidonet

You may have noticed a reference to “PC Pursuit” in the Macworld article screenshot earlier. PC Pursuit was a service operated by Sprint (remember them? This was before their days as a mobile telecommunications company) that let people dial into BBSs around the country without incurring long-distance phone call fees. You’d dial an access number, then enter the number of the BBS you wanted to reach, and soon you’d be perusing a website on the other side of the country.

Sprint charged for this service: $30 for 30 hours of off-peak (6 PM - 7 AM) access was much cheaper than a long-distance direct call. If you wanted to call during peak times, Sprint charged $14 an hour. Off-peak hours in excess of the 30 “included” were charged at $7.50 an hour. My use of PC Pursuit was limited to that 30 hours, and I had to really keep track of how many total minutes I had used as I got close to the end of a monthly billing cycle.

But one really cool thing that started expanding in the late 80’s and early 90s was FidoNet. Think of it as an early Internet in which individual BBSs could be linked together, passing along email and files — a network of BBSs linked by phone lines. If you knew a specific user’s FidoNet address, which was in a format like Steve MAGIC@1:250/250.10, the email (which was sent with a subprogram called EchoMail) was passed along from one node BBS to another until it reached the proper place. FidoNet made it possible to send email and files not only locally, but internationally. I remember that my site usually went down for an hour or so each night for what was called the Net Mail Hour when it passed mail and files along to other nodes.

I was familiar with FidoNet from the original (non-networked) PC BBS software that had come out in (I think) 1984 from a couple of alpha nerds by the names of Tom Jennings and Ben Baker. I used the FidoNet software at work as early as 1984 to run a work BBS for project management… but that’s a story for another time.

Of course, being a Mac-based BBS meant that I had to use a non-PC version of the FidoNet “Mailer” called Tabby. Somehow it all worked.

The end of MAGIC / The beginning of PDAntic.com

MAGIC stayed online until (I think) the end of 1993. Why did I give up? I was totally in love with the new girl in town, the World Wide Web. Most of the Internet was dial-up at this point; high-speed connectivity was a thing of the future for home users. I struggled my way through understanding all of the esoteric oddities of this new world, and somehow, some way, put my first website together.

I’ll relate the story of how I got on the Internet for the first time in 1993, then became an early online author of articles about mobile devices (what we called Personal Digital Assistants - PDAs) in early 1994 on a website I cleverly named PDAntic.com.

Could you do me a favor? If you were even mildly entertained by this post or learned something you didn’t know before, could you please “Like” this by clicking/tapping that “heart emoji” at the top of the page. And if you’d like to see more of my trips down memory lane, subscribe to LifeBits for free to get this in your email inbox every time a new post oozes out of my brain. Real fans can subscribe for $5 a month and support my work.

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Until next time… don’t let the CompuServe legal department get you down!

A crystal radio similar to the one I had. Image via antiqueradios.com member 34sparton.

Long before Amazon existed and brick-and-mortar stores like Costco attempted to carry every possible item in the world, there was Fan Fair. Well, at least in Aurora, Colorado in the period between 1961 and 1965. This huge, architecturally unique store closed not that long after my family moved to Aurora in June of 1965.

The reason? Bad management and the rise of discount stores like Woolco and Kmart. But before those stores took over, we had a chance to shop at Fan Fair a few times. On one of those visits, I had a whole dollar to spend on kid stuff, so I searched everywhere for something that would be out of the ordinary and interesting to my 8-year-old brain.

My attention was captured by a display of transistor radios, but the cheapest 6-transistor pocket radio cost $6.99 — way out of my price range. Then I saw a tiny radio in a colorful box (like that one at the top of this page) with a price tag of $0.79, and I had to have it! I think I also grabbed a couple of comic books with my change, and happily ran out to the new family car (a maroon 1965 Chevrolet Impala station wagon that got about 9 miles per gallon in city driving) with my purchases in hand.

Now, for some reason I didn’t want to let the rest of the family in on what I had bought. We had a nice “table top” transistor radio in the kitchen that Mom controlled, and I knew Dad did ham radios as a hobby, so I hid this little device to myself. I was planning to listen to one of the local pop music stations — probably KIMN, which was verboten on the family’s kitchen radio — all on my own. I was a rebel!

Image via antiqueradios.com member 34sparton. My radio looked like this, except it was red with a gold tinted “speaker” (it wasn’t a speaker…)

What I didn’t realize when I got the radio home and finally looked at it carefully was that it wasn’t a transistor radio. In fact, it didn’t even come with a 9-volt battery or need one. After looking at the rather confusing instructions, I figured out that you hooked it up to something metal using a wire with an alligator clip on one end, plugged the hearing-aid type earphone into your ear, and then moved a little rod in or out to tune in an AM station. It was called a crystal radio… more about that later.

I took it out to our back yard and dutifully clipped the alligator clip to our chain link fence, which was made of galvanized steel. I could hear something whispering in my ear, but it wasn’t very loud. Hmmm…

Back in the house, I found that the bottom of my bed frame was steel and tried that as my “antenna”. Success! I could actually hear a radio station, although I remember being dejected that it was a local “holy roller” religious programming station. I tried the tuner, and gleefully found a few more stations — one was KOA, a local news and music station (still around) that broadcast with a 50,000-Watt transmitter so it was the easiest to hear. KIMN? No such luck.

I was keeping my radio listening a secret, so I decided to listen at night after I went to bed. I’d sneak the radio out, attach the alligator clip to the bed frame, and see what I could pick up. Soon I started hearing radio stations from other places! St. Louis, Missouri — KMOX. WGN — Chicago. WSM — Nashville, Tennessee, although I didn’t appreciate the country music they played in those days.

I attempted to hear the same stations during the day with no luck, which was discouraging because my friends didn’t believe that I was hearing stuff from those far away cities. Later, I found out about ionospheric skip, a phenomenon in which radio waves bounce off of that layer of the earth’s atmosphere and sometimes allow broadcasts to be heard hundreds of miles away. To a kid in Colorado, it was magical to hear “local” news and ads from remote places. I also got my first introduction to major league baseball, even though I was quickly bored listening to it.

Some stations were audible during the day, but disappeared at sunset. Because of that same atmospheric effect that let me hear stations from other parts of the country at night, many AM stations had to either power down or shut off at sunset. That’s still required by the Federal Communications Commission in order for these stations to avoid interfering with other broadcasters.

There was one station in particular that had a rather sad piece of classical music that they would play as they were powering down. I don’t know what the piece was or who wrote it, but I always felt melancholy when I heard it. Someone at the station must have decided that it was appropriate for a broadcast “dying” at night.

That little red crystal radio didn’t last too long. At one point I forgot to remove the alligator clip from the bed frame when I was getting ready to put the radio away, and the clip and the wire that went into it parted ways. I could have had the radio back in order immediately if I had asked my dad to solder the clip back to the wire, but I didn’t want him to know about that radio for some reason known only to my pre-adolescent mind. As a workaround I just held the bare wire to the bed frame, which made it impossible to go to sleep listening to those distant radio stations. Eventually the radio went the way of all broken toys and ended up in the trash. For some reason, it never left my memory.

Make Your Own Crystal Radio!

I was reminded of my little crystal radio while watching the excellent World War 2 miniseries “Masters of the Air”, in which one of the characters builds a radio receiver from scrounged materials so they can clandestinely hear news of the war while languishing in a German POW camp. Radios based on vacuum tube amplifiers were state-of-the-art at that time, but in the early days of radio — about 1914 until the middle of the 1920s — crystal radio sets were widespread, and the character in the series had built one as a child.

There are actually quite a few online articles and YouTube videos for learning how to make your very own crystal radio, but it’s probably cheaper to purchase all the parts as a kit instead of trying to find a diode here, a resistor there, and a high-impedance earphone somewhere else.

Sure enough, guess where you can buy a crystal radio kit? Amazon! It’ll only lighten your wallet by $35, but think of the bragging rights you’ll have when you tell the world that you’ve built your own radio, just like Gale “Buck” Cleven did in Masters of the Air!

It’s not as pretty as my little plastic crystal radio and some assembly is required, but here’s your chance to build your own! Here’s the Amazon link.

How Crystal Radios Work

Despite having earned an amateur radio General license, I still really don’t understand how this stupid little radio worked - hey, I was a civil engineer, not an electrical engineer. While researching this article, I finally learned what had eluded me for so many years.

Radio signals are essentially medium frequency (kilohertz, or thousands of vibrations per second) electromagnetic waves that are broadcast from a tall metallic antenna. On the radio receiver side, the antenna (the bed frame or a long wire) picks up the radio signal and the crude circuitry creates a very weak electrical current. That electricity flows through the radio and is adjusted by the tuner to select a broadcast at a particular frequency.

This diagram shows the AM radio wave (top) and how the germanium diode rectifies the full carrier wave that is filtered into an audio signal (bottom) by a capacitor. That audio signal is heard through the earphone. I’m sure my explanation is missing a few steps, but hopefully you get the general idea.

Over the years since, I’ve had transistor radios, crappy car radios, mammoth AM/FM/Stereo receivers with amplifiers that are partly to blame for my current hearing loss, and now listen to most of my music either through SiriusXM satellite radio when we’re in our RV or through online means (Apple Audio, Spotify, etc…). Radio lost its attraction for me after years of listening to stations on the way to and from work in my car, putting up with endless, repetitive ads. Even so, I’ll always have fond memories of that cheap little crystal radio whispering songs and baseball play-by-plays into my ear at night.

Could you do me a favor? If you were even mildly entertained by this post or learned something you didn’t know before, could you please “Like” this by clicking/tapping that “heart emoji” at the top of the page. And if you’d like to see more of my trips down memory lane, subscribe to LifeBits for free to get this in your email inbox every time a new post oozes out of my brain. Real fans can subscribe for $5 a month and support my work.

Until next time… don’t go deaf listening to flyback transformers.

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A Teletype Model 33 ASR connected to a MITS Altair 8800 computer. Note the rolled-up paper tape on top of the computer. Image by Tim Colgrove via Wikimedia.org under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

What awaited us was not a cake, a rocket, or even a taxidermied frog wearing a lab coat. Nope — it was a Teletype Model 33 ASR (Automatic Send/Receive). This, my friends, was the Cadillac of slow, noisy, UPPERCASE-ONLY data terminals. It came complete with a keyboard that required the strength of a minor deity to press, a paper tape reader (for storing your digital masterpieces in a series of holes in a one-inch wide roll of beige paper), and an acoustic coupler — a device designed to let your Teletype whisper sweet nothings to a computer over a 110-baud dial-up connection.

Let me be clear: the Teletype was not a computer. It was the keyboard and printer for a computer. Specifically, a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8 at the school system admin building running a time-sharing system known as TSS-8. This meant a bunch of junior high kids could dial into a far-off computer and share time on it — presumably when it wasn’t busy calculating lunar trajectories, printing class schedules, or winning chess tournaments.

Our first assignment? Play tic-tac-toe against the machine. Over and over. The clattering, the whirring, the SCREAMING CAPS LOCK — it was glorious! And as we slowly got better at outsmarting the PDP-8, I began to realize I was falling in love. Not with tic-tac-toe, but with technology.

The Teletype had a distinct smell — like hot electronics, mechanical grease, and burning paper mixed together in an electromechanical incense. The printer’s motor ran constantly and heated the case to “caution: egg-frying” temperature. It even had the word HOT printed on top, just in case you were thinking, “Hmm, I should probably stick my fingers in there.” (Spoiler: I did. So did my buddies. It was a rite of passage.)

Also hidden inside was a mechanical bell. Not a cute electronic beep, but a real, honest-to-goodness hotel-desk-style DING! If you typed Control-G, the bell rang. So naturally, I wrote programs that rang it repeatedly until a responsible adult screamed “MAKE IT STOP!” and hit Control-C like they were launching nukes.

Though I never became what you’d call a “real” programmer (i.e., no hoodie, no startup, no coffee addiction), I spent a surprising amount of time writing code over the years. It all began with one magical, slow-as-molasses language: BASIC.

And I do mean slow. BASIC was originally designed for use over dial-up at 110 baud. That’s 110 bits per second, or roughly 11 characters per second — assuming each character was perfect and you weren’t typing like you were hammering spikes into railroad ties. To put that in perspective, my current home internet connection runs at 845 million bits per second. The Teletype would spontaneously combust if it even heard about speeds like that.

So yeah, we’ve come a long way since 1969. But I’ll never forget the day Mr. Klotz introduced us to the magical, clunky, bell-ringing monster that sparked a lifelong love of tech. And it all started in a junior high gymnasium filled with kids, curiosity, and the soothing DING of the future.

BASIC inventors John Kemeny (right) and Thomas Kurtz. Picture source is unknown.

BASIC Instincts

BASIC — which stands for Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code — was invented by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth College (now Dartmouth University) back in 1964. Their goal? To take the mysterious, intimidating world of programming (where only engineers, scientists, and Bond villains dared to tread) and open it up to mere mortals — like art majors and 8th graders.

Unlike the cryptic incantations of assembly language or the stone tablets of FORTRAN, BASIC used English-like commands that even a hormone-riddled teenager could understand. Commands like IF, THEN, GOTO, PRINT, and the emotionally satisfying END. All you needed was a vague sense of logic and fingers of steel to survive the Teletype keyboard.

Amazingly, BASIC is still around, more than 61 years after its May 1, 1964 debut. Not bad for something originally designed to help college students make math class slightly less soul-crushing.

Of course, not everyone was a fan. Dutch computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra once growled:

“It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.”

Gee, Ed, tell us how you really feel.

But don’t worry — I turned out (mostly) fine. After my BASIC beginnings, I moved on to the engineering heavyweight language of the ’70s: FORTRAN. It was like trading in a Big Wheel for a Volvo — not flashy, but it got the job done.

By the early 1980s, as personal computers became less “hobbyist curiosity” and more “everyone-has-one-except-grandma,” BASIC had become the lingua franca of home computing. Most machines came with some form of BASIC interpreter baked right in — because what else were you going to do with 16K of RAM and no hard drive?

Now, most people couldn’t actually write games or software from scratch in BASIC, so we had a national pastime: typing in hundreds of lines of code from computer magazines. That’s right — you’d get a glossy issue of COMPUTE! or BYTE or The Rainbow, flip to the 14-page single-spaced program listing in tiny print, and spend the next three hours typing it all in, line by line, praying you didn’t miss a comma.

And if you did miss one? Congratulations! You just broke the entire program and earned a new appreciation for professional developers.

These magazines were extremely tribal. Own a Commodore 64? You subscribed to Commodore Power/Play. Have a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer? You were reading Hot CoCo. (Yes, that was a real magazine title, not a breakfast cereal.) And so it went — every computer had its own cult and corresponding stack of magazines.

Speaking of BASIC — did you know Microsoft’s very first product was a BASIC interpreter? That’s right, Bill Gates and Paul Allen whipped up a version of BASIC for the MITS Altair 8800, one of the earliest personal computers. The story of how that all came together (and why “Micro-soft” had a hyphen back then) is a juicy one — but I’ll save that for a future LifeBits entry.

Back at East Junior High, computing was still a bit of a novelty. We had one Teletype in 1969, and it rotated between schools like a substitute gym teacher. But by the time I was a junior at W.C. Hinkley High School, we’d entered the big leagues — a fleet of Teletypes and an actual Computer Algebra class!

That class was the gateway drug: algebra by day, programming by night. We’d get math assignments and then write code to solve them. It was like Mr. Klotz had joined forces with HAL 9000 — but in a good way. In fact, that class may have done more to prepare me for engineering school than anything else in high school (apologies to Miss Francis, my eighth-grade typing teacher).

Sample Visual Basic 6.0 code. Screenshot by Michael Billington. Public domain image via Wikimedia.

BASIC Today

BASIC made a bit of a comeback in the 1990s and 2000s when Microsoft released Visual BASIC (now Visual BASIC.NET). There was a flavor of Visual BASIC called Visual BASIC for Apps (VBA) that gave users of the Microsoft Office suite (Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Access) the ability to automate repetitive functions, share data between those important apps, and ease data entry through those wonderful forms and windowed user interfaces we’re used to. In my humble opinion, Visual BASIC took all of the fun out of BASIC…

It grieves me to see that BASIC is no longer in the top spot for programming languages for beginners. The crown of 1970s nerdiness has been passed to Python and JavaScript, and BASIC doesn’t even make the cut in top 10 lists. Many of us old-timers now have to commiserate in places like the Facebook “BASIC Programming Language” group, which we peruse on our smartphones while telling kids to get off our lawns.

That’s not to say that you can’t still play with BASIC. There are a ton of ways to code in BASIC, often in a web browser emulating one of the old “flavors” that existed like Commodore BASIC, Microsoft QuickBASIC, and AppleSoft BASIC. Sadly, nobody has created a Teletype Model 33 emulator to pound the keys on, but that’s progress!

Just to prove that I still have incredible BASIC programming skills at this time, I found a decent version of BASIC that would run on my iPad and iPhone, loaded it, then cranked out this important and very useful program:

It produces the following output, which I need to slow down so me and my buddies can sing along to the lyrics. Currently, I don’t think I could drink one bottle of beer in the amount of time it takes to get from 100 to zero bottles of beer (on the wall).

See? Who says that useful, life-changing programs can’t be written in ancient programming languages for beginners?

The beautiful simplicity of BASIC is apparent in this example. Need to leave a remark in your code? Start a line with “REM”. Want some output on the screen? Use PRINT. How about checking to see if a condition has been met? Use an IF… THEN statement. Those are just the basics (no pun intended), and every version of BASIC has its own flock of statements, commands, functions, and operators to turn it into a toolkit for exploration of computer science!

My upcoming not-so-secret project is to get this same BASIC editor/interpreter (HotPawBasic) in the flavor that runs on a Raspberry Pi single-board computer, then write some programs that will actually have utility that I can run on a sub-$100 computer in our RV. That sounds like a future LifeBits article to me…

Thus endeth the fourth chapter of Steve’s Epistle to the Nerds, AKA LifeBits. Could you do me a favor? If you were even mildly entertained by this post or learned something you didn’t know before, could you please “Like” this by clicking/tapping that “heart emoji” at the top of the page. And if you’d like to take more of these trips down memory lane, subscribe to LifeBits to get this in your email inbox every time a new post oozes out of my brain.

Until next time… don’t burn your fingers with a soldering iron.

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Remember this game? This wholesome-looking family does. Mom appears to be winning and I think Dad is out of the game already…

Today I’m going to write about—wait, hold on, I need to check in real quick. OK, I’m back. So this post is about… actually, my watch says it’s time to stand. One sec. And… where was I? Right! You’re going to love this post, it’s all about—dang, time to hit the exercise bike if I want to keep my streak alive. BRB!

Welcome to my life, now fully gamified.

Gamification — it sounds fun, right? Make the hard stuff in life more entertaining? But somewhere along the line, fun turned into a full-time job. Everything’s a challenge, a badge, or a leaderboard now. Sure, a little competition is great — it pushes us to improve. But when you’re in a constant duel with your friends and yourself, it starts to feel a bit… exhausting.

One of the early examples of gamification in apps was FourSquare, now called Swarm. The idea? Check in wherever you go, and if you check in more than anyone else, you’re the mayor. The app turns errands into a turf war. You even compete with friends for leaderboard supremacy. After years of maniacal check-ins (especially while traveling), I’ve never hit #1. Apparently, I’ve failed at life.

Yep, I’m the mayor of many places… Screenshot from the Swarm app.

Swarm throws you coins, too. You can “spend” them on virtual stickers. Use a sticker on a check-in? Boom—more coins. What are coins for? No idea. But I’ve got ‘em. And friends can heart your check-ins. Is that for validation? Proof of life? Probably both.

Apple took it to a whole new level with the Apple Watch. Ever seen a group of people all suddenly stand up at 10 minutes to the hour? Yep, the watch told them to move. We’re obedient little cyborgs now.

Then there are the rings — Apple’s Move, Exercise, and Stand rings. Close all three every day, and you feel like a superhero. Me? After approximately 3,752 days of wearing an Apple Watch (not that I’m counting), I’ve completed all my rings maybe 500 times. Go ahead, judge me.

And don’t even get me started on the Streaks app. Want to feel guilty about stuff you’re not doing? This app will remind you — gently but persistently. I have two tasks: “Exercise 20 minutes” (I do OK on that), and “Do weights” (which I think I did once).

Driving? Also gamified. My Ford Maverick hybrid gives me a score after every trip. Nothing like a digital pat on the back for squeezing out 65+ mpg on the way home from exercise class.

Even my car insurance is gamified. An app tracks my every drive, rewarding me with a 10.5% discount for safe habits and entering me in monthly sweepstakes. All I need now is dumb luck.

And it doesn’t stop there. I earn rewards for drinking beer (thank you, Untappd), blessings for Bible readings (hello, YouVersion), and digital high-fives for sleeping through the night with my CPAP strapped to my face like an Aliens facehugger.

Even games are gamified! Every Monday, Microsoft Solitaire nudges me to complete 16 games to earn “double XP.” What do I get for all those points? Nothing. But hey, Microsoft — if you’re listening, how about tossing in a free year of Premium Solitaire for us XP hoarders?

So yeah, everything’s a game now — life, driving, praying, even snoring. But maybe that’s OK. If a few digital badges and imaginary points help us move a little more, laugh a little louder, or just remember to show up, then game on. Just don’t be surprised if I check in, stand up, close my rings, read a verse, and log a beer… all before lunch. Achievement unlocked: Modern Life Master.

What are your favorite gamified apps or devices? Let all of us know through the Comments!

Image generated by ChatGPT (OpenAI) using the DALL·E model.

One of the many blessings—and occasional curses—of being a tech blogger for years was the parade of free stuff. The blessings came when someone sent me a genuinely impressive piece of tech magic in hopes of a glowing review. The curses arrived each fall, when box after box of new iPhone cases would show up like migrating geese, each manufacturer convinced their latest plastic rectangle was the holy grail of smartphone protection.

At some point in the early 2010s, a few of those companies started branching out into more… aromatic territory. Belkin, for example, teamed up with kitchen appliance makers to drag home cooking into the 21st century. Around 2011, they launched a smart home division called Wemo, based on a simple premise: What if everything in your house could connect to the internet and boss you around?

To be fair, some of their products were early pioneers in what we now call the Internet of Things. They released one of the first remotely controlled smart plugs—perfect for turning on a lamp in your living room in Colorado while sipping a drink on a beach in Australia. These days, you can buy smart plugs just about anywhere, all proudly declaring their compatibility with Alexa, Google Nest, and occasionally Siri (when she’s in the mood to cooperate). But more on the turf wars of virtual assistants in a future post. It does Matter…

Anyway, Wemo eventually partnered with Newell Brands to bring smart technology to the kitchen. Never heard of Newell? Maybe you’ve heard of Mr. Coffee or Crock Pot, some of their “Brands”. Now we’re cooking. Literally.

As a reviewer, I ended up testing a Wemo-branded Mr. Coffee coffeemaker and a smart Crock Pot slow cooker. I still use the Crock Pot today—though it continues to blink its lonely little Wi-Fi light, patiently hoping I’ll remember to connect it and reduce the heat on a simmering pot of chili while I’m off painting wildflowers or ice climbing in Ouray (which is obviously a thing I do all the time.)

To borrow the wise words of Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park: “Your engineers were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Do I really need a coffeemaker that connects to the internet? One that I can control from my phone while I’m still in bed?

Unless it can fetch the beans, grind them, insert a filter, fill the reservoir, sense my circadian rhythm, and deliver the finished cup to my bedside… I still have to do 95% of the work. The only “smart” thing about it is how quickly it makes me question my life choices before caffeine.

Same deal with the Crock Pot. Sure, it’s cooking all day. That’s its thing. But I still have to physically prep the meal and dump it in. Couldn’t it just have a good old-fashioned built-in timer? The only scenario where the remote feature makes sense is if I abandon dinner halfway through to go out instead—which, let’s face it, means dinner becomes a sacrifice to the garbage disposal gods.

That said, both gadgets worked just fine. They did their jobs. And reviewing them gave me plenty to write (and joke) about. But perhaps now, with the wisdom that comes with a few more miles on the odometer, I’ve accepted that not every product needs to be “smart.”

Some things are perfectly fine just being appliances. Especially the ones that make coffee.

ChatGPT’s Sora model created this nightmarish image of 1978 skinny Steve standing on the University of Colorado Campus. Original photo by Barbara Mackinder, © 1978.

I’m sorry about the title of this first LifeBits post being a reference to a Grateful Dead song. Well, maybe I’m not sorry, because it has been a strange time travel trip from the late 1950s till now.

Sure, there have been equally dramatic changes in other parts of our daily lives. But none of those changes have had as much of an impact on my life as those that occurred in the technological realm.

Here’s a quick review of that life: Born in 1957 exactly twelve days before the first earth-orbiting satellite — Sputnik 1 — was launched. Dad was a former Korean War Army radioman turned airline mechanic working on radio, navigation, and electronics on the big piston engine propeller airliners of the era, and an amateur (i.e., “ham”) radio operator for most of his life, so I grew accustomed to the smell of solder and hot vacuum tubes while I was still in diapers.

Dad’s interest in technology and science rubbed off on me in childhood and into my teens, as I became fascinated with the US space program, astronomy, computers (which at that time were big clunky affairs tended to by nerdy acolytes), rockets, chemistry, meteorology, and other topics. I also read way too many science fiction books, and watched TV shows like “Lost In Space” and “Star Trek” religiously.

In high school I realized I’d better decide what career path I wanted to pursue and decided on engineering. Four years at the University of Colorado and a lot of hard work gained me a BSCE degree and a fiancée who was also an engineer. My career path after that point? Here’s about 45 years of work condensed down to a bullet list:

• Engineer for a natural gas utility and pipeline company

• Manager of a “special projects” team

• Started an IT department at the pipeline company

• Got outsourced to IBM, where I did IT support and project management

• Went out on my own as a consultant while starting to write tech-oriented books

• Taught business analysis classes around the USA

• Became a tech blogger, had books published, started a new tech blog, retired

For each one of those bullet points, there are probably hundreds of stories. Some have already faded from memory, while others pop up while I reminisce about those years. There are also early experiences from my pre-college days that are worth laughing about! All of these stories, from toddler years to now, are the heart of LifeBits.

Today’s post is going to be different from the usual LifeBits fare in that I’m setting the stage for the more anecdotal stories I’ll be bringing you once or twice a week from the dusty archive of my brain. What do I mean by “setting the stage”? It means you get to see a list! Excitement abounds!

I asked my AI helper (ChatGPT) to create a list by decade of what the big changes in technology over the past 68 years:

📜 Timeline of Major Technological Advances (1957–2025)

🛰️ 1950s: The Dawn of the Space Age

• 1957 – Sputnik 1 launched — First artificial satellite; ignited the space race.

• 1958 – Integrated circuit invented — Laid the foundation for modern electronics.

• 1959 – First commercial nuclear power plant (U.S.) — Civilian use of atomic energy begins.

🚀 1960s: Exploration and Early Computing

• 1960 – First working laser built — Coherent light becomes a powerful new tool.

• 1962 – Telstar satellite — First live transatlantic TV broadcast.

• 1964 – Computer mouse invented — First step toward intuitive computing interfaces.

• 1965 – Moore’s Law proposed — Predicted exponential growth in computing power.

• 1969 – ARPANET launched — Predecessor of the internet.

• 1969 – Apollo 11 moon landing — First humans on the Moon.

💾 1970s: Microprocessors and Personal Computing

• 1971 – Intel 4004 microprocessor — Start of the microcomputer revolution.

• 1972 – First email on ARPANET — Digital messaging is born.

• 1975 – Altair 8800 released — Hobbyist computers become reality.

• 1976 – Apple I launched — Apple enters the PC market.

• 1976 – Laser printer introduced — Office printing goes high-speed.

• 1979 – Sony Walkman — Portable audio becomes mainstream.

🖥️ 1980s: GUIs, Mobile Phones, and Digital Storage

• 1981 – IBM PC released — Standardizes personal computing.

• 1983 – Cellular networks launched in U.S. — The mobile era begins.

• 1984 – Apple Macintosh with GUI — Popularized graphical interfaces.

• 1985 – C++ standardized — Pushes object-oriented programming forward.

• 1989 – GPS becomes operational — Geolocation becomes possible.

🌐 1990s: The Internet and Wireless Revolution

• 1990 – Hubble Space Telescope launched — A new eye in space.

• 1991 – Linux kernel released — Open-source software movement begins.

• 1991 – World Wide Web goes public — The internet becomes accessible.

• 1993 – Mosaic web browser released — Web becomes user-friendly.

• 1995 – Windows 95 released — Mainstream adoption of GUI computing.

• 1997 – Wi-Fi standard established — Wireless networking arrives.

• 1997 – DVD format introduced — A leap forward in media storage.

• 1998 – Google founded — Internet search redefined.

• 1999 – Bluetooth 1.0 launched — Wireless devices start talking.

📱 2000s: Mobile, Cloud, and Genetic Milestones

• 2001 – iPod launched — Digital music takes off.

• 2003 – Human genome mapped — Biology enters the digital age.

• 2004 – Facebook founded — Social media begins to dominate.

• 2005 – YouTube launched — User-generated video goes viral.

• 2007 – iPhone released — Smartphones revolutionize computing.

• 2008 – App Store and Airbnb debut — Mobile and sharing economies take root.

🤖 2010s: AI, Automation, and New Interfaces

• 2010 – iPad released — Tablets become practical and popular.

• 2010 – Siri released — Voice assistants enter daily life.

• 2015 – Tesla Autopilot launched — Semi-autonomous driving arrives.

• 2017 – iPhone X with Face ID — Face recognition and AR in your pocket.

• 2019 – 5G rollout begins — Next-gen wireless infrastructure.

🌟 2020s: AI, Space, and Post-Pandemic Innovation

• 2020 – mRNA COVID-19 vaccines deployed — New vaccine era begins.

• 2021 – James Webb Space Telescope launched — Seeing deeper into the universe.

• 2022 – DALL·E 2 and AI-generated art — Text-to-image AI emerges.

• 2022 – ChatGPT launched — Conversational AI hits the mainstream.

• 2023 – Apple Vision Pro announced — Spatial computing begins.

• 2023 – GPT-4 released — Multimodal AI with image and text capability.

• 2025 – Humanoid robots enter commercial trials (projected)

• 2025 – Quantum computers surpass 1,000 qubits (projected milestone)

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Got all of that? There WILL be a quiz. (Nahh, just kidding…)

From here on out — until I run out of personal recollections of how the world has changed, that is — each LifeBits post explores a way that my life intersected with modern technology.

Thanks for joining me on the journey! Since this is the first of many posts, be sure to hit that subscribe button below to be notified of all future fun. You can subscribe for free or choose to support this crazy effort at cataloguing our past by becoming a paid subscriber. Either way, it’s going to be an interesting ride.

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