Michael Piper, Senior
If you asked me to list my hobbies and interests two years ago, the last thing on my mind would be vintage computing. The typical pathway into vintage computing consists of being old enough to remember using BASIC, a DOS prompt, and floppy disks, but having grown up surrounded by the Internet and fancy user interfaces, I had no idea that those things even existed. Instead, I found my way to vintage computing completely by accident.
To me, what separates vintage computers from modern computers is the amount of abstraction between the user and the computer. On modern computers, users have nearly no idea what the computer is doing, but in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, even kid-friendly computers needed direct RAM access by “POKE” and “PEEK” commands for full functionality. Thus my discovery of vintage computers began with getting closer to hardware. Learning Java and Javascript gave me insight into computer logic, but looking at lower-level languages like Rust and C made me consider hardware-level concepts like memory access and core threading. As part of some research that I assisted with last year, I had to access a computer cluster via a command line interface, which was a very DOS-like experience. Most recently, I started programming microcontrollers for projects, which is about as close to hardware as I can get – the term used for this type of programming is “bare metal” because there is very little between the programmer and the processor itself.
My interest in computers became obvious in the summer of last year, so my father and I traveled down to the Rhode Island Computer Museum to have a look around. I had just started watching videos about vintage computers, and so was excited to see them in person. We spoke to the museum’s owner about the computers on display and our experiences with computers and I typed a few DOS commands into an IBM PC, but the most exciting part was driving out to the storage warehouse and walking among the hundreds of vintage computers stacked up there. My father was interested as well: my grandmother worked as a debugger for IBM for a significant portion of his childhood, so he pointed out the paper punchcards, teletype, and TRS-80 that he grew up with. As we finished the warehouse tour, the owner reached into a shelf and handed me a yellowed and dusty computer. For whatever reason, he had decided to give it to me, and my exploration of vintage computers took a much more direct turn.
At first glance, the computer appears to be a keyboard mounted in a very large box. A silver label on the front marks it as a “TRS-80 64K Color Computer”, which led me to believe that the museum owner had chosen to give me the computer that my father had as a kid. Upon further research, this was not the case; instead I possessed a Tandy Color Computer 2. By looking inside I discovered that this particular one was built in the middle of 1984 and was a special model made for schools, so instead of using an analog television signal for video, it has an A/V out port which makes operating it a lot easier in the modern day. The computer comes with 64K of RAM, which is nothing these days, but it’s plenty for playing games made for the system back in the ‘80s. More importantly for me, it means that the computer comes with Extended Color BASIC, so I can write graphical programs using all nine different colors available.
Yes, there are only nine colors. No, none of them look very appealing. But that’s part of the allure of vintage computing: you make do with the extremely limited resources of the time. It doesn’t really matter that the maximum processor frequency is 6.7% the of the one in my graphing calculator, or that the display is only forty characters wide. Spending twenty minutes graphing a pale-orange sine wave on a bright green background with that old computer feels all the more fulfilling because of it.