I just read an article in the Register by Austin Modine about the end of CompuServe. Many of the current internet user are probably wondering what the big deal is. My grandchildren never heard of them. They have also never heard of an acoustical modem, dial-up connection or 300 baud but those of us who were there remember the pioneer days.

I had bought a Radio Shack Tandy TRS-80 computer with 64K (that is about 0.064GB), no hard drive and a converted black and white television set for a monitor. No color and no lower case letters and no graphics. We stored data and programs on an audio tape cassette, when it worked. There was no program you could buy. You either wrote the program or got one from a friend.

The first spread sheet I remember was VisiCalc. It could not sort or adjust column width. No real control of print out. I had to write programs to sort and make all adjustments to printout, including page breaks, sub-totals and sorting. Our first word processor was Electric Pencil followed by MultiMate which ported Wang to microcomputer (PC). MultiMate was published by Aston Tate who also published the first popular database program for PC, Dbase.

Lotus killed VisiCalc and Excel killed Lotus.  MultiMate was done in by Word Perfect who couldn’t make the transition to Windows thus turning over the field to Word for Windows by Microsoft.

Dbase held on for quite a while. I switched to RBase and used it for many years. RBase was also done in my Windows as were many software publishers. Windows is a very tough environment to adapt to having started with DOS, CPM or Unix. For one thing, it was the first operating systems that forced programmers to use graphics. We spent a disproportional amount of time trying to get our programs on the screen and attractive. In the beginning, Windows programming tools were primitive. That is not the case today, with Visual Studio 2008; Microsoft has given programmers a great tool.

Sorry to have digressed, but losing a program and service that was there when it all started, opens a flood gate of memories. I am sorry that those who are starting with computers today missed the experiences we pioneers had. I also miss the linear memory addressing of Zilog 80!

Say Good Night Gracie!