My Computer History - Sun, 7 Nov 2021

Prompted by this week’s Saturday Night Genealogy Fun Genealogy post by Randy Seaver, I thought I’d like to document this in a blog post.

1971: As I entered high school (grade 10), my super-smart neighbor and friend who was two grades ahead of me recommended I follow his lead and get into programming at school. The high schools in Winnipeg had a Control Data Corporation (CDC) mainframe and our school had a card reader and printer that connected to it.  We learned FORTRAN and I had fun with my best friend Carl writing various programs. See: 25 Years of Delphi

1974: My friend Carl and I both wrote computer programs to play chess. In Grade 12, we had our programs play each other..This was covered in both of our city’s newspapers. Carl called it a contest between brute force and finesse. See: The Beginnings of a Chess-playing Program and BRUTE FORCE vs FINESSE.

1974: I took Statistics at the University of Manitoba and mixed a few Computer Science courses in as well. Hundreds of students would stand in line to use the keypunch machines (the older KP-26 and the newer KP-29 models) and then stand in line at the card reader and hand their deck of cards to the person whose job was to feed the cards into the card reader. We’d then walk past another person who was separating the fan fold paper coming out of the printer and then placing each of our outputs on the pickup table. If our coding had an error, it required standing in line at the keypunches, retyping the cards that needed fixing and repeating the process.

1975-1977: Fortunately, dumb terminals were becoming available at the University. These were Cathode Ray Tubes (CRTs) that simply acted as an  interface to the University’s mainframe. What that accomplished was to store the programs on the Mainframe, so no more computer cards!

My first genealogy program was a Script Document Processor utility on my University’s mainframe. It used markup similar to HTML to specify how to make everything look, and included features to create a table of contents and an index of names and an index of places.

In what remaining spare time I had at University, I also continued to work on my chess program.

I worked as a summer student for 3 years at Manitoba Hydro, our electrical utility in the province. They liked my FORTRAN knowledge and my math/stats skills and I got to work on cleaning up the code of some of their mainframe programs to help design Hydro Towers and place the Towers optimally along their route.

1977-1978: My Chess program Brute Force was accepted into the 8th and 9th North American Computer Chess Championships. The 8th took place in Seattle, Washington, and the 9th took place in Washington, D.C. We would use modems to relay the opponent’s move to our home computer and wait for our programs response which we would then physically make on the board for it. See: .Computer Chess - A Memorial to Brute Force

1978-1980:  I completed my Masters Degree in Computer Science at the University of Manitoba.

1980- 1988: I was hired full-time at Manitoba Hydro after I graduated and worked my first 8 years as a programmer and systems analyst working on various engineering projects and models. Our company had its own mainframe, and we developed engineering systems in FORTRAN, one in PL/I and one in Pascal on Apollo Computers which were UNIX-based minicomputers that were awesome!

1988:  At Manitoba Hydro, I accepted a position in the Load Forecasting Department. This was my real introduction to PCs. The company had been using 286 computers up to that time. One of my first tasks was to justify to our Division Manager the purchase of what would be the most powerful computer in the company: A Compaq 386 20 Mhz computer for $10,000, a 300 MB hard drive for it for $10,000 more, and the Operating System and Software for $5,000 more. We got the computer and I started developing our Department’s Customer Information Database on it. We used a database called PC-FOCUS developed by Information Builders which was a fantastic program.

1990: My use of PCs at work for the past few years gave me an wanting for one at home. It wasn’t until about 1990 that prices came down to something reasonable and I purchased an IBM PC 286 no-name clone for about $2,500. I think it was a 12 MHz computer with 8 MB of RAM and a 20 MB hard drive. 

1992-1993: Hard drive capacity was growing fast. I upgraded in 1992 to a 60 MB hard drive and in 1993 to a 260 MB hard drive.

1992-1995: I tried various genealogy programs. The one I liked best was Reunion for Windows. I used it until 1997 when Leister sold it to Sierra who were developing it to be released under the name of Generations. I became a Beta tester for Generations. Sadly Generations was purchased by Genealogy.com and simply dropped it, supporting their own Family Tree Maker program instead. My last entry of my genealogy data into Generations was in 1999. I never updated my genealogy data again until 2018 when I started using MyHeritage and Family Tree Builder. See: So How’s My Genealogy Going

1995: Upgraded my system board finally to a 386 and 8 MB of RAM.

1997: I had to upgrade my computer by buying 16 MB more RAM for $99  to get to 24 MB RAM and replace my 260 MB hard drive with a 2 GB hard drive for $360 so that I could upgrade from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95.  See: Computers 23 years ago

1999: Purchased a new computer with an Intel Pentium III at 600 MHz running Windows 98.

2006: Purchased an HP Media Center PC, 3 GHz, 1 GB RAM. See: Wednesday, January 11, 2006. Two days later, my old Windows 98 computer died: See: Saturday, February 4, 2006

2007: Upgraded my computer to Windows Vista: See: Sunday, June 3, 2007. Surprisingly, I never had the troubles others had with Vista. Worked fine for me.

2009: Purchased a PC with an AMD Phenom 9650 Quad-Core CPU and 7 GB RAM running 64-bit Windows Vista.

2010: This was the tech I had at the time: What I Do

2014:  My current computer was now five years old. See: When Is It Time To Get A New Desktop Computer. So I purchased an HP Envy 700-209 with an Intel i7-4770 Quad-Core with 12 GB RAM and a 2 TB hard drive running 64-bit Windows 8.1. It was 3 times faster. I bought and installed a 240 GB SSD (Solid State Drive). See: Setting up a Solid State Drive with Windows 8.1 – I also bought two identical HP Pavilion 23tm (23 inch) monitors which I love and have been using ever since and I hope they never die.

2019:  Never tried Python before, so I had a bit of fun with this:  50 Years, Travelling Salesman, Python, 6 Hours

2020:  My HP Envy died. See: When Everything Fails At Once. I replaced it with a HP Z420 Xeon Workstation with 32 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD and a 2 TB hard drive for $990 with 64-bit Windows 10 installed on the SSD drive.

Today: I’m very happy with my current Xeon computer. However, I’m very disappointed that it does not meet the minimum system requirements for Windows 11. The CPU is not supported and it only has TPM 1.2 and not 2.0. I’ll likely wait to see if Microsoft loosens the requirements a bit to allow my machine to upgrade. If not, I’ll probably wait until the end of life of Windows 10 in 2025 and buy a new computer that already has Windows 11 installed.

Also: Today, Nov 7, 2021 is my 19th blogiversary. My first blog post was 19 years ago on Nov 7, 2002. And this post is my 1200th post!

Those of you who see me on Zoom will see this background behind me. When I’m on Zoom, I’m actually sitting at this desk with a blank wall behind me. My HP Z420 desktop is at the back left of the desk and you can see my two HP Pavillion 23 inch monitors. In front of my desktop is my Epson DS-860 scanner. Behind it is my Epson WF-4740 printer. Above my desktop on the wall is my Boomer and her Friends calendar.