Areas of Interest: Computers - Hardware Highlights

• My first computer, the TRS-80 was uneventful, hardware wise, except for the addition on the proprietary floppy drive system. The only "excitement" I experienced was when I abandoned the platform and wanted to save all my structural engineering programs I wrote for reuse in an IBM system. Since the floppy drive used a proprietary format I was locked in and the only way to reuse the programs was by re typing the code in an IBM system running a BASIC Interpreter. Fortunately, a friend of mine knew a guy who was a real geek and had developed an application for the exclusive purpose of transferring information between the Tandy proprietary system and the IBM standard.

• When I started my first job I was introduced to a couple of devices I never heard off before: A digitizing tablet and a Pen Plotter. For those of you who never used a tablet, think of it as a sort of mouse but with much more features. A mouse can only track relative movement. A digitizing tablet was able to track absolute movement. In other words, once you had calibrated the device, moving your pointing device over the same area always would translate into the exact same screen coordinates. In AutoCAD the tablet had several  purposes: It could be used as a cursor controller, a menu input device, or as a mapped tracement input device. This last application was most useful for Mapping applications such as Civil survey, Hand-to-digital drawing conversions, etc. I used it all three ways. While employed at my first job I had to map the whole Central America map, complete with topographical and other data using a 12" desktop model as larger, free-standing units were extremely expensive. When I purchased my first business system I got a 12" model with a 16-button stylus. Regarding the Plotter: The model I saw for the first time was a pen-based unit manufactured by Houston Instruments. It used single cut sheet and a carrousel of pens which were picked one at a time. Each pen was either a different width of the same color (normally black), or a different color (such as red for the grid on civil plan-profile sheets). At first I was mesmerized by the way a drawing was created; the paper moving back and forth (transversal to the plotter's long axis) while the pen rose and fell while displacing along the plotter's long axis. Dots, text characters, patterned lines and hand-free tracing (such as topography contours) took longer to complete than regular tracings. The average time for a normal D sized sheet was measured in tens of minutes. The expense of this device made it impossible for me to own one until several years latter, forcing me to use a service company.

• My first internal computer expansion came when, in order to boost the performance of AutoCAD, my breadwinner application which until a few years back has been a memory hog; I bought a memory card for my IBM AT-compatible computer. It was an Everex card which could hold up to 3MB of memory which could be configured as either, expanded or extended memory. Only "old" guys like me may understand what I am talking about. Old DOS (Disk Operating System) was designed to handle up to 1MB of RAM, 384KB of which was reserved for system peripherals and 640KB available for the OS and the applications. To overcome that limitation, engineers developed expansion cards and memory manager drivers. These applications, allowed DOS to address memory beyond 1MB indirectly. Computers using Intel 80286 16-bit processors can access both extended and expanded memory, while computers with Intel 8086/8088 8-bit processors could only access expanded memory. An acquaintance I had around 1988, who worked as tech support for a computer vendor, told me only half-jokingly that the difference between the two types is that extended memory grew vertically while expanded memory grew horizontally. Knowing that I wasn't his average tech support caller, he proceeded to explain to me the technical details. Not to bore you with the rather large explanation, suffice it to say that, indeed, extended memory grew vertically and expanded memory grew horizontally. I know, I know, that sound facetious. OK, in a nutshell, the extended memory manager allowed for the direct access of memory addresses beyond 1MB while the expanded memory manager had to use some of that 384KB reserved memory space to create pointers to the extra memory. Anyway, getting back to the memory card; the card came empty and I bought the memory chips, which had a design that resembled a caterpillar with pointy legs. Using special tools I inserted all the chips in place and configured the memory as Extended which was more efficient in terms of speed. All went well and I felt confident in my abilities to handle hardware setup; which was very good because in the bygone days of DOS, you had to know your computer like the earlier car drivers had to be also good mechanics.

• My initial forays into rendering happened at the same time I got my first Big Blue computer, the PS/2 35. This was also my debut to higher graphics. I started using Autodesk's Autoshade with Renderman which was capable of producing 24-bit graphics (8-bit per RGB color), meaning more than 16 millions of colors. Alas, my display system was 8-bit, capable of only 256 colors. Since at the time, 24-bit graphics was state-of-the-art and, since I also wanted a bigger monitor with higher resolution (another expensive proposition at the time), I had to compromise once again. I got a 17" NEC monitor and a Cobra graphics card which had a chip that emulated the look of 24-bit graphics using dithering algorithms. The resolution remained XGA-like (1024x768) but my perceived colors in shaded applications grew to 16 million (emulated); and I even got dual display configuration with the secondary monitor using standard VGA. Renderings also brought the need for a color ink-jet printer. It is not clear in my mind however, the exact point in time I got my first. It could had been while still using the PS/2 35 or more likely until after my PS/ValuePoint system.

• What it is clear, is that it was after my PS/ValuePoint system that I added to my arsenal of peripherals the long desired plotter and a color scanner. Since the plotter was a higher priority, I settled for a feeder type scanner similar to the systems used by today's pharmacies to scan prescriptions. Flat-bet models were too expensive... The recurring theme of my computer experience which still follows me today.

• While most peripherals I owned were necessary for my business, only the Pinnacle CD-R was acquired because of a customer's explicit request: One of the conditions of a service contract with this particular customer was that I was to provide an electronic library on CD-ROM. Up to that point in time (1996), I had already read about those devices on magazines and knew they were very expensive ($1000). Maximum speed was in the order of 2X and due to the nature of the process and the computer speeds those days, the burning task, virtually tied up the machine until the very end of the burning process. Only because I knew how lucrative the contract would be, in spite of my eternally strained finances, I went into debt without blinking an eye (the contract also required me to finance for up to 6 week, international travel reimbursable expenses, which forced me to find more line of credits).

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