Remembering 1976

The recent passing of Steve Jobs jarred open a lot of memories and emotion for me. While Jobs and I never actually met in person, our paths crossed numerous times and he had a profound affect on my life. Like many IT professionals my age, the late nineteen seventies was fertile ground for new inventions, creative thinking and imaginations spinning out of control. Steve Jobs was only one of the influential technology forces in my life at that time. Equally inspirational were Steve Wozniak, Allan Kay, Bill Gates, and Doug Bailey to name a few.

In 1976, I was an impressionable 10 year old living in British Columbia, Canada and had an interest in space, robots and fire trucks like any normal 10 year old boy. At the same time my uncle, Doug Bailey, was an ex IBM engineer who was also a curious inventor. Today we call people like him hackers, but back then he was just an engineer trying to figure out how some of this new emerging technology was going to affect people and work and lives. I was lucky enough to be hanging around his house one day when he was scavenging the keyboard out of an IBM Selectric 80 typewriter. He was building his own keyboard interface to replace the manual input switch panel on the Altair 8800. I remember asking how he knew that pressing a certain key could make a letter appear on the screen and he proceeded to explain binary and switch matrix logic over the next hour. I was hooked.

That summer Doug sold some of the first Apple I computers in white boxes as hobbyist kits out of H&S Micro Systems, his attempt to bring computers to the masses. The TRS-80, Apple II, and Commodore computers followed closely afterwards, along with a host of names no one remembers like Acorn, and Franklin. I spent part of the following summer visiting, hanging out at H&S, and generally ingesting all I could that was "computer". The place was abuzz with hobbyists looking for the next cool thing, talking about "Home brew" computers and the future. There was a whole new world evolving between the Home Brew Computer Club and Xerox Parc. Altair, DEC, Intel, IBM, Microsoft, Apple… it was anybody's game and people were writing new rules for it every day. When I look back on it now, it is hard to believe the revolution that was percolating around me.

The following year I sold one of the first IBM-PC's, complete with 64Kb RAM and floppy drive. The retrofit 10Mb hard drive (yes that was megabyte) was an extra $3000 so it was not a popular item. I don't have actual statistics, but at 13 years old I may have been the youngest computer sales person in Canada. That was about the time when the whole thing exploded. Everybody wanted to be part of the computer revolution. The TRS-80 in my bedroom was constantly in pieces and my soldering iron was always ready for the next home-brew project culled from the pages of Byte Magazine. With some inspiration from my brilliant uncle again, a modem was created and phone lines were hacked so I could rampage through BBS's and the emerging FidoNet. I made some interesting connections and friendships "on-line" in those early BBS's, some of whom went on to create or contribute to things like Netscape and the original MSN. If I had only known then what I know now about where those small projects were headed.

Today I look back in amazement at where we have come from and the changes that have taken us to where we are now. This week is my uncle's birthday, and while I was thinking about his contribution to my IT career path, I received the news that Steve Jobs had passed away. In a heartbeat, a flood of memories stored away by a 10 year old came rushing to the surface. I sometimes wish I had done more in a creative sense to dramatically change the IT landscape, but I am satisfied with the number of other 10 your old minds I have infected with curiosity. I try to seize any opportunity to help kids explore IT whenever possible, mainly due to the impact of curious, creative men like them. If I can influence just one young mind to greatness, then I think the journey will have been worth it.

Be Awesome. Change The World.