The Pioneering Days of Software Installation on Personal Computers
The history of personal computing is a testament to the evolution of technology over decades. One of the earliest obstacles faced by early users, particularly those who worked with the Commodore PET in the mid-1970s, was the method by which software was added to hardware. This article explores the intricacies and challenges of installing software on early personal computers, focusing on the challenges faced with floppy disks, cassette tapes, and the early adoption of hard drives.
The Early Days: Commodore PET and Cassette Tapes
The first computer I worked with was a Commodore PET that my school purchased in 1978. It had 8 kilobytes of memory, a little over 8000 characters, no hard drive, and used an cassette tape to store programs. An audio cassette tape. In fact, when we opened the cover, they had just taken an off-the-shelf tape player and literally hacksawed off the back half with the speaker. A digital-to-analog converter turned the computer's memory into audio tones on the tape.
We didn't need to load up the operating system; it was embedded in the BIOS but of course, couldn't be upgraded in any way. When you turned the machine on, it loaded up the OS and left you at a command prompt. To load a program from the cassette, you entered a command, pressed play, and waited. And waited. And waited. This was very slow storage. God forbid you tried to store more than one program on the cassette because then you had to time how long to press the stop button to save a second program.
This lack of storage convenience meant that if you wrote a program that required some kind of database, you had to read that in from the cassette as well #8212; in full into the 8 KB. There was no way to do random access on a cassette tape, which made managing and accessing large datasets a challenging task.
The Evolution: Floppy Disks and Early Computers
Fast forward a few years to the IBM PC, and the process didn't significantly improve. With the advent of the first portable floppy drive, you still had to boot the entire operating system from the first floppy. This took a few minutes, and then you loaded the program you wanted to run from the second floppy. The process was a far cry from the user-friendly interfaces we see today. The lack of a built-in hard drive meant that additional software and data had to be physically inserted on a floppy, and the process was often slow and tedious.
The manual for this setup was thick, with multiple volumes detailing every action and process. This complexity mirrored the technical challenges of the day, where each instruction and each program had to be handled meticulously. In the era of the IBM PC, the concept of a graphical user interface (GUI) was still in the nascent stages, and users had to input commands meticulously to get the machine to do what they wanted.
The Gradual Advancement: Integration of Hard Drives
Two years later, we got our first hard drive. It was the size of a shoebox, had a capacity of 5 megabytes, which seemed extraordinary to us at the time. When you powered it up, it sounded like a 747 taking off. The integration of a hard drive was a significant leap forward in terms of storage capacity and speed. However, the initial twenty minutes of the machine turning on to initialize the hard drive's firmware were still a significant delay.
The advent of hard drives brought about a more stable and accessible form of data storage, although the process of managing these early hard drives was far from user-friendly. Unlike the ease of digital storage we experience today, early hard drives required manual formatting, a process that was often fraught with errors and required specific technical knowledge. This made it challenging for the average user to manage and maintain their data.
Conclusion: Reflections on Early Computing
The early days of personal computing were a period of significant technological advancement and user frustration. From the limitations of cassette tapes to the cumbersome process of booting up machines with floppy disks to the introduction of hard drives, the technology of the 1970s and 1980s paved the way for the digital world we know today. The challenges and limitations of these early machines are a testament to the remarkable progress that has been made in technology since then. As we look back, it is also a reminder of how far we have come in making computing more accessible and user-friendly.