💾 Profane Computation
[ca. 1982]
I was a lucky kid! My parents decided to buy an Osborne I portable computer in the Year of Our Lord 1982. There weren't a lot of home computers at the time, and they tended to be pricey. The Osborne, for example, cost $1,795 new, which is about $6,500 in 2026 dollars. My parents weren't rich (being full-time and part-time teachers), but they saved up for the important things.
Mom was getting her PhD and needed something to type her dissertation on, and apparently, this was the sensible option. We bought it, I'm somewhat certain, from a place called Grass Valley Computers at roughly 5993 Lindhurst Avenue in Linda. But it's odd because Grass Valley is a city rather farther east.
I said "portable" earlier, but it was really a "luggable" machine at 25 pounds. It had two 5¼-inch floppy drives that held 92 KB each and a 5-inch diagonal CRT black-and-white screen. And that heavy weight didn't even count a battery, which it did not have; wall power only.
Now, you have to understand that I've had an entire career in computing since then. I have a BS and MS in Computer Science, have worked in start-ups, megacorps, and video games, and now teach CS at my local university.
But in 1982, I was just starting and didn't know my computing ass from my computing elbow.
Mom had explained the basics of how to boot up the system and use the word processor (WordStar!). I'd asked about the floppy disks, and she told me they held programs and the documents you'd typed. If you didn't have a floppy disk in the drive, the document wouldn't be saved. And if you had one in there, it would.
(Mom was a trooper when it came to this new tech stuff. It wasn't her
natural environment, but she had a 3x5 cheatsheet written out with CP/M
tidbits such as how to use pip to copy a disk. She really helped me
get started.)
One day the Osborne was set up at the desk in my parents' room. I was in there happily typing away in WordStar. I'd draw ASCII art, like this caterpillar:
\/
(oo)()()()()()()()
""""""""""""""
Or I'd insert spaces or hold down the delete key combo (^H, I think) to move characters left and right across the screen as if I were playing a video game. I was only 11 or so and my imagination hadn't yet atrophied; a fake game was almost as good as a real one.
I feel like this was around supper time and Mom and Dad were out in the kitchen or somewhere. And I suppose I was in a mischievous trouble-maker mood. I checked over my shoulder, then turned back and typed:
shit
So subversive! So punk! So—
OH MY GOD—THERE'S A FLOPPY DISK IN THE DRIVE! I can only imagine the look on my face as I realized, with terrible certainty, that the profanity was saved forever. They'd know I typed that for sure! I frantically hit ^H to eliminate the offending characters from the screen.
What would happen when they found out? Why did I do that? I should have checked the drive for disks!
But nervous days passed with no ill effects. They seem to be unaware or didn't care. I breathed easier.
Later I learned that of course simply having a disk in the drive wasn't enough—you had to actively save the file for permanent storage—and that all my worry had been for naught.
Shit.