Burn In 7: DJ Adams

This is the eighth entry in the O'Reilly Radar series about how alpha geeks got into computers. DJ Adams is a Jabber and SAP hacker, O'Reilly author, and OSCON speaker.

DJ Adams's Story

School was where I first discovered computers. It was 1977 or 1978, and our school initially had a teletype with a dialup connection to a minicomputer at Manchester University. There wasn't any computing on the curriculum; the device was just there to use if you were interested. I didn't really get a look-in because it was constantly in use by sixth-formers and I was a lowly first year. However a short time later the school took delivery of a PDP-11 from Systime, along with two or three VDU terminals (built from steel) and some paper-based terminals (one with a thermal printer and funky cassette mechanisms for local storage). I remember we also had some Hazeltine 1421 terminals - how I remember those details I do not know.

The Systime system ran CP/M, and any schoolboy who wanted one could get an account and spend time in the terminal room learning to program BASIC PLUS, and using system utilities like PIP. We even had disk quotas to take care of, and lots of other timesharing and multi-user stuff to learn about.

The first program I typed in and ran was "guess the roll of the dice". *I* *was* *hooked*. Mornings before school, breaktimes, dinnertime, after school, you'd likely find me and a handful of other social misfits in the terminal room.

A year or three later the school chemistry department took delivery of a Commodore PET. It was a bit strange, and none of us was really interested because it sat on its own in the corner of the lab and ... didn't seem to do much. We'd been spoiled by the fascinating multiuser CP/M experience. Similarly, a Sinclair ZX81 arrived in the terminal room, along with an old TV for a display. After a short while it was mostly used as a football or a missile. We looked down our noses at it from our PDP-11 cathedral.

Of course, to feed the addiction, I spent my pocket money on computer magazines - "Byte", "Computing Today" and "Your Computer" were regulars with me. I still have a few copies from the late 1970s. Byte was way out there, and had great writers; I remember Steve Ciarcia (and his 'Circuit Cellar', most of which I never properly understood), and Jerry Pournelle, a sort of forerunner of Dave Winer - *extremely* annoying but popular with the masses nevertheless. Of course, Byte was where I also got to know and learn from one of my all-time heroes Jon Udell. Byte - where did you go?

My first personal computer was an Acorn Atom. My parents bought it for me for passing my 'O' levels (my Grandma had tried to persuade me to choose "a good bike" instead, as computers were "just a fad"). This sealed my fate, and I spent night after night typing in programs from computer magazines. I say night after night, because I didn't have a cassette deck to start with, so I lost everything each time I turned the computer off. But I was happy to type and re-type. Quirky Atom Basic and 6502 assembler. And there lies the secret. I learned to program by reading other people's code. Typing it in from listings in computer magazines. Discovering code styles. To this day, my preferred way of understanding a system is to print as much code out as I can and then go and sit with it. Mostly in the bath. How often do you see code listings in computer magazines these days?

Anyway, I still have Issue #1 of "Acorn User" magazine. I threw the rest out a few years ago, and then saw copies in a retro shop near Warren St in London selling for fifteen quid each. Sickening.

So that's how I got into computers. To this day I have an aversion to [what most people call] PCs these days ... having started out on a PDP-11, through the Atom and BBC Micro era, playing briefly on all manner of minicomputers at University whenever I could (I read Latin and Greek so it was limited ;-), I ended up as a graduate at work on IBM big iron at an oil company in London - "proper computing". Even now I yearn for the times when writing JCL, programming ISPF and hacking Rexx scripts together was part of my normal working day.