25 YEARS OF HOME COMPUTING

Front view of the PowerPC 7600 w/ CD-ROM & floppy drive slots.

Rear view with audio & video ports, including S-VHS and composite video ins.  Very handy for the times.  Of course there's the massive SCSI slot and free slots for additional cards for audio & video upgrades.

It was the beginning of March 1997, 25 years ago this month, that I got my first proper home computer. After spending a decade watching the technology advance and occasionally managing to get my hands on it for brief forays into amusement, I was finally financially able to invest in a decent setup so that I could “beam myself into the future”.

 

Up to this point, I’d only ever dabbled with computers my friends had. My first was an Amiga system I got to play with for a while back in 1988. My friend got it to do video and animation and we played around with its graphics apps and speech synthesizer, which we made say some very awful, rude things. After starting my job in 1994 at a call center for the local phone dating service, my work hours gave me a chance to tinker with their office computers while I was occupying my downtime between customer service calls. My curiosity with the office computers occasionally resulted in some panicked moments when I put in the wrong command and sent the network into a tailspin, but I was fortunate in that it was never anything that a good reboot couldn’t solve. I learned enough about them that I was able to diagram their phone messaging system to a degree that I ended up getting transitioned to working with their software developer, diagramming his code, which helped me learn a lot more about computing. A friend had also given me an old Macintosh to play with in 1996, but it was so outdated that I couldn’t do much with it and barely used it. I think I only managed to write a computer based I Ching program as my sole accomplishment on that machine. So at this point, I had a rudimentary understanding of DOS and Windows based operating systems. It was a good foundation to start with.

 

When it came time to pick a machine for myself, my decision was completely driven by my desire to use it as a creative tool. I wanted to use it for music, video, graphic design and creative writing. With that as my principal criteria, after talking to a few arts based people working with computers, it quickly became apparent that a Mac was gonna be my best bet. Now, any of you PC zealots out there, I’m gonna stop you right now because I don’t wanna hear any PC vs Mac arguments. This is not about that. This is just history and how I made my choices.

 

At the time, Apple were on the ropes as a company. They were toying with allowing clones on the market and had not done anything significant in the computing world for a few years. The iMacs hadn’t come out yet and there certainly were no iPhones or iPads or iPods, which were years away. Buying into them was a big risk as they were seriously on the verge of folding as a company. Even Steve Jobs was on the outs at that time, but my gut told me to take the chance anyway as I had a line on a dealer I knew personally who’d get me a good price and I also had friends promising me they could hook me up with oodles of top end cracked software. Macs were also kinda left alone insofar as virus threats, so this all added up.  I ended up going with a pseudo-clone, the PowerPC 7600. It came loaded with cool hardware interfaces build right in like S-Video, composite video and slots to add audio cards for music production. I got the computer, monitor, keyboard and, pretty soon afterward, a scanner for graphics & disc burner so I could author CD-Rs.  Once I got it all home, the big job was to set it up and start learning how to put it to use. At that point, Mac’s OS was at version 7.6 and was about to jump to 8 before the end of the year, I think. On the one hand, the basic architecture of the OS was pretty simple to understand, but that didn’t mean I didn’t spend many hours pulling my hair out trying to tweak things to sort out issues and conflicts.

 

This was the age of “Extensions”, components of functionality which were introduced to facilitate certain features specific to individual applications being used. Pretty much every app you installed had an Extension or two or more that was needed to make it work. The problem was that Extensions didn’t always like each other and having too many loading up during the boot-up process could risk things going snaky very easily. And it wasn’t always easy to figure out where the conflict was because some Extensions might get along fine until you introduce something new and then, suddenly, they’re causing the computer to crash during startup. It could make watching the boot-up process a real nail-biter as you’d see each Extension load, one after another until something would go sideways and you’d end up with your head in your hands again, broken and hopeless.

 

Those first few months, I’m sure I wiped my HDD about a dozen times just to start with a clean slate and try to figure out where I might have gone wrong. There were times when I would literally be in tears from the frustration of not being able to figure out what the problem was. My GOD, I cursed that box some days. I cursed it straight to HELL! But I also learned... A LOT, and I was able to troubleshoot just about any problem without having to rely on service techs to look at what was going on. Again, that was the nice thing about the architecture. If you had half a brain, you could figure this shit out on your own without having to call in the pros. Eventually, I got a feel for it and, as newer OS versions came along, the issues started to lessen as they introduced safeguards and troubleshooting tools to help with the problems. That meant that I could actually start using the computer to do some fun things.

 

Of course getting it online and connected to the internet was a huge step forward for me, but that didn’t come without its issues either. My first provider was a joke and I ended up dumping them for another one after going crazy trying to get the damn thing connected via that stupid phone based modem. Dial-up was a complete hassle and slow as molasses in those days, so time spent online was limited and you had to be patient as even loading a damn JPG could take several minutes. It was a huge relief when the TV cable company introduced high speed internet that freed up your phone line again. That was a game changer for sure.

 

Creatively, the first things I did with that computer were graphic design experiments. The earliest documents I can find in my backups are some image files from March 10th & 11th, 1997. I’ve included them here so you can have a look. I was trying to come up with some designs for a couple of Mysterons albums and these were initial experiments. This machine never did become too useful for anything beyond photo manipulation and internet use. I did a few things with music & video on it, but they were pretty primitive. The software that would run on this machine wasn’t too sophisticated, so I could only really do a bit of editing of stereo files and maybe a bit of layering and run a virtual synthesizer or sound generator.

 

I was starting to come up with ideas for a new cover design for The Mysterons Hotdog, Pop 'n' Clown CD, which was going to be repackaged for distribution by a local label.  This is dated March 10th, 1997.

 

This was the first cover concept for The Mysterons Wiki Wiki album, which was just at the conceptual stage at that time.  I got the title from watching Hawaii Five-O as it was something Kono always said when he wanted something done quickly.  This is dated March 11th, 1997.

The earliest song I composed on it was an ambient piece called Tuktoyaktuk, which was created by taking some elements from a Mysterons song and mutating them with an audio editor and then adding in a voice recording I snagged off of a radio show that Barry was listening to. I can't recall how I got it recorded. Maybe he'd recorded it on cassette, I think, but I just recall hearing this woman going on about visiting Tuktoyaktuk and immediately realizing I had to sample her. It wasn’t until I got a Mac G4 tower in 2000 that I had a machine capable of running the Logic Pro DAW, which allowed me to get into true professional digital multi-track recording and production.

 

For a first computer, my old 7600 was good start for the times, but I was glad to get a better one when I did as that completely changed the game for me as a creative tool. That old PPC was a good warmup act though and got the bug firmly in me to want to do more. It’s just hard to imagine that a quarter century ago, all this computer stuff was so new and strange and we had no real idea what it would become, both good and bad.