Back in the olden days

My first contact with computers came in 1977 or ’78 when I was in grade 5 or 6. Because I was smart, I got to spend a half-day a week in the computer lab at the University of Alberta with a half-dozen or so other “gifted” kids. I think about that experience a lot and wonder how it colored my later love/hate relationship with computers.

The computer lab consisted of dumb terminals wired into an Amdahl mainframe. I don’t remember the model number, but the U. of A. must have been on the bleeding edge of new technology at the time since I see that Amdahl came out with its first mainframe in 1975. I think it was in the Education building, but not sure. We got little pink cards for each program we worked with that contained our login name and the program name (I don’t think we had passwords). One program I remember working with was FUNDP, “Fundamentals of Data Processing”, which was a BASIC-like program. Maybe it was BASIC. I can find no Googlable reference to FUNDP, so I’m starting to think that FUNDP was just the course name, though there was no formal classroom instruction; we all went at our own pace. FUNDP (pronounced “fun dip”) permitted us to write scripts, take user input, and do some very primitive graphical manipulations (like place text in various places around the screen; this permitted one to create crude bitmap images with asterisks).

Then there was FRAND, a French language learning program. It was quite a fantastic multi-media experience, for its day. Before logging in you would take a reel of still images and an audio tape (it might have been reel-to-reel since cassette tapes were not in common usage yet) from a cabinet on the wall. Then you would sit down at one of the special multi-media workstations which were equipped with a TV-sized projection screen (apart from the CRT monitor itself) and an audio tape player. You would queue the image reel into the projector and the audio tape into its player, and then log into the FRAND program on your terminal. The projection screen would show an image, the audio tape would ask you a question, and you would register your answer on the terminal screen with a light pen. The whole mess had to be queued properly and started at the same time or it would be all out of sync, but once started I think that signals from the CPU would auto-advance the film and audio based on the user’s interaction with the program.

The conceit of this program was that you didn’t need to know any French, and that it would use only French to get you to learn French. So the question would be, “Qu’est-ce que c’est?”, you would see an image of a question mark, followed by an image of a grapefruit, and then the audio, “C’est une pamplemousse.” And in this way you were to learn how to say “grapefruit” in French.

I guess the people who wrote the program thought this was pretty clever, but I didn’t have a freakin clue what was going on. Getting the machine to work was an easy thing for me, but the content was beyond my reach: I couldn’t grasp that the machine was showing me a picture, asking me what it was, and then telling me what it was. My inability to grasp this simple device has made me very skeptical of science fiction stories where alien races are able to learn to communicate easily. If I was stuck in a cave with a sentient slime-creature from Zebulon Prime I would probably just eat it before learning how to communicate with it. So much for being “smart”.

It has also made me sympathetic of older people (and Mac users) who are unable to grasp the simplest computer-related concepts that I take for granted, like the difference between core and physical storage, or the meaning of instructions like “right-click on the Start button”, or the difference between “double-click on icons” but “single-click on buttons”. The makers of Windows think these things are obvious, and perhaps they are obvious to me and indeed most computer users these days, but I can understand how some people can (and do) have a blockage in understanding such things.