Have you noticed a rather curious thing in the trade magazines lately? All the ads are for hardware and, except for Microsoft products (and not many of them either), practically nothing else. And the bloated sizes of these new packages are simply awful. What happened to the old days of fascinating software packages and simple operating systems?

I remember...

in the summer of ‘87 bugging Walt, a TPCUG member, to let me try out some stuff I'd read about in his copy of the DOS manual. This was before I had my own computer. He had a KayPro. With an 8088 processor. No hard drive. Just two 5.25 floppy drives. With 640K of memory and a floppy disk drive with 360k bytes of whatever. It was a big step up from the Commodore that he had contemplated as his first computer.

But can you imagine - having to put a disk in the A: drive every time you loaded a new program? You see, DOS back then didn't keep but a portion of COMMAND.COM (the heart and soul of DOS) in memory. It had to read the rest of itself from the floppy disk so's it could do something. So every time you wanted to do something in DOS or load another program, you had to put in the DOS disk in the A: drive, then replace that disk with the program disk of the application you wanted to run. You see, you kept the B: drive for your data files.

Then some people would make use of some of the "power" tools available to them in DOS. They would create a virtual disk of 60-70k bytes in memory and put COMMAND.COM, and a few other vital routines up there on the virtual disk. What a breakthrough! No more popping of the master DOS disk just to switch to another program.

Sure you sacrificed some memory but programs back in those days usually got by with just 512k of memory. Now that included the program and whatever space it needed for work files. As for DOS, it used just a pittance of memory; the full COMMAND.COM was under 24k. Just how big was DOS? Version 3.2 (476k bytes, less than 60 files) took up 508k bytes on a floppy.

Oh yeah, back then there was no such thing as buying a box of pre-formatted floppies; no siree, you formatted your own floppies! One nice thing though, since there was no hard drive, there was no need to run backups on your software. 'Cause you loaded a fresh copy each time you ran the program. Now for the data files, some of the scaredy cats did make back-up copies.

Walt was running an integrated package called "Ability". It had a word processor, spreadsheet, database, and a crude telecommunication package. I can still see that dismal green background on the CGA screen. But it did the job. He wrote letters, had a database of addresses, and used a spreadsheet for his household budget.

How many of you remember the 9 pin dot matrix printers of back then? Today, they look pretty awful but then, they were the cat's meow! And the CGA screen with lines running through the text on the screen? You did have eight colors you could use; but only four at a time. You had to switch to a new monitor mode whenever you wanted to change the color "set".

Disk files were remarkable. One box (ten disk capacity) held all your programs and another box held all your data files. However it wasn't long before you expanded your program library. Nor were all the programs legitimately acquired. How many of you had a utility program that would allow you to bypass the copy protection that almost all of the commercial software vendors used to stop just such pirating? F'sure, we all learned to install from a copy of the master disks and never used the master disks to install software. Further, it was gospel that you never, and I mean NEVER bought or installed version 1 of anything. But then, that's still true! Of course the Xerox machines got a good work out making copies of the instruction manuals. None of that "modern" (read: cheapskate) method of putting the manual on disk/CDs.

Then there were all the goodies out there known as shareware. Sad to say, many thought this meant freeware. There were even software houses that issued catalogs and marketed shareware programs (People's Choice comes to mind) that did a thriving business. Plus, who can forget the little programs listed in many of the trade magazines. PC Magazine was famous for that. You copied the code and then compiled the program using DEBUG. Heaven help you if you keyed in the wrong data. Since most didn't know what the code stood for, users were very careful and double checked their data before running it through DEBUG.

One of the things many of our members looked forward to was the Library maintained by our user group. Some one would bring in a "lunchbox" computer and we'd crowd around making copies of shareware and freeware programs. The "lunchbox"? That was a portable computer that had a small cathode ray screen (7"-9"? monitor) and a couple of disk drives. Later, they had hard drives which made copying easier. That lunchbox PC was a far cry from today's laptops and notebooks. And it was HEAVY!

But things change, everyone soon got into the habit of upgrading equipment to handle all the new features of the new upgraded software. Make you wonder (like the question about the chicken and the egg) which came first: improved hardware or improved software. But that's another story. Stay tuned.u