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When I started upper secondary school as a sixteen year-old in 1988 my school had some original IBM PC/XT computers in a room. I think there was perhaps 16 computers. They also had a room full of beautiful 1982 vintage Commodore PET-like CBM 710 or CBM 720, the only PET-compatible series that had a real serial port (foreshadowing here). These, I think, were only used for typing practise.
Taubuem CC BY-SA 3.0. Taken from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cbm710_ta.jpg
The PETs had a MOS 6509 @ 2 MHz (a version of 6502 which could handle some extra memory), probably 128 or 256 kiB RAM, a green monochrome monitor and, thankfully, 80 column text. Fanless case! Nice working environment.
The PC/XT's were Intel 8088 based. I don't remember how much memory they had. Max was 640 kiB but I doubt they had that much. Probably 256 kiB. They had amber monochrome screens and, I think, Hercules graphics. They also had hard disks, probably something like 20 MiB, and a floppy drive. They had a noisy fan.
There was also a small room with a character terminal hooked into an RTTY decoder and a radio. I don't know why this was here and we usually didn't have access to it.
For some inexplicable reason there was also a small room filled with Commodore 64! It was almost always empty. No one used them, not even for playing games.
The IBM PCs had Turbo Pascal 3.0 which was a really nice, incredibly fast compiler, even on the slow 8088s. The PETs had some form of BASIC in ROM but I don't know if they had any other development tools.
The PCs were not networked but they had some kind of printer sharing going on. There were two matrix printers attached.
Coming back after the summer holidays after my first year I was surprised that the school had decided to buy 16 new IBM PS/2 and connect them in a 3Com 3+Share network (Ethernet or Token Ring? Can't remember.). The PS/2s were probably model 30 (ISA bus like the rest of the PC market) or model 50 (with MCA, IBM's proprietary new extension bus). They had an Intel 80286 @ 10 MHz, 1 MiB RAM, 20 MiB hard disk, 640x480 colour screens, 16 colours. Their one saving grace was the wonderful Model M incredibly clicky buckling spring keyboard.
The introduction price of the PS/2 Model 50 was $3,595 in the US. This was probably much more in Sweden, especially since there was also a ~23% sales tax.
The 3+Share network had a central fileserver, probably the 3Com 3Server, although it might have been just software on yet another PS/2. I never saw it in person.
The 3+ e-mail solution was not used, only the file server and the printer server services.
I think I heard that all of these things had costed about 1.5 million SEK, which would be about ~3.1 million SEK (~300 k EUR) today.
I was furious. So much money wasted. I had a *nix box at home, a Luxor ABC 1600, which gave me a wonderful taste of multi-tasking and multi-user stuff, although it was a bit slow. This was also the time I had started dialling into terminal servers of the Swedish university network (SUNET) and experiencing Real Computers.
SUNET in those days was a friendly place. On many computers when you first connected to them it said "Welcome to XXX! If you don't have an account, login as GUEST." or something very similar. SUNET in -88 was mostly DECNET and had recently also gained TCP/IP. I was mostly on the DECNET side of things so I experienced VAXen, a few PDP-11, and when I could get access, the wonderful DEC-20 (PDP-10 with TOPS-20).
Another nice thing at the time was that if you called the minicomputer companies and asked for hardware descriptions some of them would actually send you entire hardware manuals, even if you were a spotty teenager with no computer budget. Thank you, DEC!
I got so mad about the whole thing with the PS/2s that I actually wrote a little program just to mess with them... It was a simple thing. I just modified AUTOEXEC.BAT to start my program the first thing it did. The computer would display "WELCOME TO YOUR NIGHTMARE!" in huge letters in garish colours and starting going "weeee, wooo" with the bad speaker. At the same time it would start ejecting page after page on the network printer.
I heard that once during a class the teacher in panic turned off the printer and then turned in triumph towards the class, only to have the other printer start spewing papers instead. Everyone laughed.
I don't know who ratted on me, but one day the guy in charge of the computers (Hi, Tore!) stood waiting on me as I was about to enter a classroom. He asked the teacher if he "could borrow Michael for a bit" and dragged me away to his small office. When we sat down he said:
- I know you're the brain behind these Nightmare Gangsters!
Wow, there's a good name for a band! I denied everything, of course, but he saw through me and started asking technical questions about computers instead. There were no gangsters, of course. It was just me.
Later, Tore had the genius idea to ask me to write a program for the school library. He wanted it to be possible to dial in to the city library computer to search for books. He wanted a simple terminal program that automatically dialled, logged in and let the student do their thing and then automatically disconnect on inactivity. Would I be up for writing something like that? Hell, yes!
I wrote the program and it was in use many years after I had left. The genius of Tore was to steer me towards a more creative path than messing up his network. I didn't understand it at the time, but this was a brilliant move.
Me and some friends did some experiments with the network anyway. The authentication in a 3+Share network was entirely client-side! Changing a single byte in the client made you admin. We created a new read/write file share called FREE and used it for our own shenanigans. Tore must(?) have seen it but didn't delete it!
The one time Tore said anything remotely about the FREE volume was when I was trying out a multi-user adventure I had written and used the network drive as the IPC mechanism. Every copy of the MUD I started absolutely hammered the FREE volume with reads in a busy loop and everytime any of my friends in front of the computers running the MUD did anything (move, pick something up, say something in a room, anything that changed the world) it wrote it to the database which was immediately picked up by the others. It must have sounded terrible in the room where the file server stood, which was also Tore's office.
Tore came running out of his office, scanned the room for the culprit, locked eyes with me and stormed towards me.
- Michael! Are you doing something on the network!?
- Er... Well, I have written this text adventure program... Would you like to have a look?
- No! No matter.
And he rushed off again. I hurriedly gestured to everyone to kill the MUD programs. He never mentioned it again.
Of course, the main reason my school bought PCs at all was AutoCAD. I can understand that. But if they just had to buy PCs, why not buy PC compatibles? I never got a satisfying answer. "No one has ever been fired for buying IBM"?
So... What would I have done if I had anything to do with it? Some rough requirements:
DEC at the time had a product called Pathworks (earlier known as PCSA which it was still called in VMS). Pathworks allowed you to use a VAX as a file and printer server for a bunch of MS-DOS PCs. Pathworks was both some MS-DOS software and VMS or Ultrix software on the server side.
I'm biased towards Ultrix, of course, but VMS would have also been acceptable. Even better would have been a BSD and that was actually available even for upper secondary schools/highschools, not just universities. However, considering that we would like to use something to net boot our PCs and act as a fileserver it's likely the DEC offering was the way to go.
Hardware:
Workstations: DEC themselves introduced a 286-based fanless VAXmate in 1985 and later followed up with DECstation 200 and 300 (with fan). There were other diskless and sometimes even fanless options from other companies, including the 3Com 3Station 2/E.
There were some quite good terminal programs available for MS-DOS, including Reflection which could both work over LAT and emulate graphics terminals like DEC VT340 and the older Tektronix 4014. Kermit could emulate VT320 and could translate between character sets. Might be preferable compared to the Pathworks terminal, perhaps?
Photo of DEC VAXmate, taken from the site below.
More nice photos of the VAXmate
VT320 terminals had support for the Latin-1 (ISO 8859-1) character set. Kind of important for Swedes to be able to use Swedish. I don't know if the Pathwork terminal client supported Latin-1. We would probably have some kind of converter program to convert between PC/Latin-1 (and PETSCII?) available anyway.
Cheap terminals might also mean we could have a special terminal room for employees. I don't think it would be possible to give every employee a terminal, unfortunately.
Silent VT320 terminals would have been preferable compared to re-use the noisy PC/XTs for extra seats but could obviously not run CAD.
On the other hand, perhaps we could re-use the PETs? They had vanilla serial ports, after all. I don't know if this would be a good idea and what terminal programs existed. Worst case we would have had to write our own. That would probably have worked.
On the extreme side, the programmable AT&T 630 MTG terminals introduced in 1987 would have been absolutely marvellous:
Photo of an AT&T 630 MTG terminal book cover
You could download programs over the serial cable on them and run locally on their 68 k CPU. You could also use up to seven ordinary terminal windows. They sold for less than the PS/2s above. I don't think any commercial CAD was available but, damn, that would have been nice to use. It's far more realistic to go with some diskless 286 for CAD and some VT320 or other character terminals for extra non-CAD seats, though.
The disk space on the VAX is a problem. We had ~1500 students. Not all of them even had access to the computers, though. The students in the shop classes didn't use computers at all, as far as I know. The students that did have access, perhaps 300, were expected to keep their work on diskettes. If I had the money I would definitely use it on more disk space and increase the quota for users.
Being able to dial in to the VAX would be a huge difference. Allowing e-mail or setting up a BBS would have been fantastic, even if it was just local. If we had run Ultrix perhaps we could even get a UUCP connection to a university and even have networked e-mail? Again, space would be a problem, but perhaps we could get another hard disk after a while?
All in all, this would have been a much better system than the one we had for real.
mc,
Pungenday, the 70 day of Discord in the YOLD 3188 (2022-05-23)
