Online: The Wonder Years: 1977 - 1979

The Wonder Years: 1977-1979
By Bill Louden (c) 2008

After over a decade into the Age of the Internet, it's hard for many to imagine online before the web. And having spent more than a few years online - some might say even from before the dawn of this new age - I thought I would start my first "blog" with recollections and commentary of those early years.

From a TRS-80 User Group

In 1977, Tandy Corporation introduced the TRS-80 personal computer. Three thousand were initially produced for Radio Shack; but with then 3,500 stores, no store was allowed a "demo" unit; they were to be sold by catalog only.

I have been selling retail consumer electronics for nearly five years by then, and as a Radio Shack store manager, I thought I could sell these pre-fab "computers," as well. I had previously experimented with some of the DIY computers at the time, building an IMSAI computer as a hobby one might build a short-wave raido.

But the TRS-80 was different; it was already assembled and 'ready-to-go.' At the time, Apple had recently announced a pre-assumbled personal computer and Heathkit had a computer in kit form. So, I personally bought a TRS-80 at $599 to put on display. My wife, Sher, and I had some serious discussions at what I was squandering our money on -- and I was not even going to bring it HOME!

My TRS-80 arrived in a week; it was a TRS-80 Model 1 with 4K of memory, a cassette tape recorder as its storage device, and a black and white monitor. My unit was serial number #10. I put it on display in my store and began learning BASIC.

I became the de facto"expert" in Ohio and the Midwest almost overnight simply by the fact that I had the only unit on display in the Midwest. I sold nearly two hundred units by the beginning of 1978, mostly to Bell Labs engineers in Columbus, Ohio, and one to an engineer at a then small company called CompuServe, and one to a lawyer from Chicago who flew in just to see it.

By March 1978, Tandy knew it had a hit new product and announced some additional add-ons: a 16K memory plug-in and a 110/300-baud modem. In June of 1978, I formed COTUG, the Central Ohio TRS-80 Users Group. It was mainly a vehicle to help sell more computers as well as learn from my customers at Bell Labs what it all meant.

I called it selling by "regurgitation." When a Bell Labs engineer would exclaim that the TRS-80 had a clock frequency of 900 nanoseconds, I would tell that to my next customer and how good that was. Eventually I learned what those technical terms actually meant and later built my second computer - an Altair - as a hobbyist myself. By mid-1978, I became proficient on the computer and had written a few programs, including a golf country club member’s tracking program, and a Ride-Share Zip-Code Matching program used by the City of Columbus during the 1978 bus strike.

The COTUG membership grew to over 500 by the end of 1978. We held monthly meetings at my home, where 50 to 80 of these ultimate computer "geeks" would show off their latest programs or "home brew" add-ons. One Bell Labs engineer brought in a large two by 3-foot plywood board filled with diodes. The first TRS-80 could only display capital letters, so he build his own lowercase generator - a sort of hand-built ROM (read-only memory) device. Another brought in a TRS-80 that was modified to display eight colors -- some three years before Tandy actually produced its first "Color Computer."

In the interim, I had built my Altair and had acquired my first "professional" computer, an old DEC PDP-8 that a Bell Labs engineer was discarding. The PDP-8 had to be booted manually by entering in the "bootstrap" codes one sequential step at a time. Its output was a Paper Tape reader: no video.

By the Fall 1978, most members of the COTUG user group had modems and we had built some early programs that could transfer files from one TRS-80 to another; including one program that could even remotely control another TRS-80. At the time, one of my customer's - CompuServe engineer Russ Ranshaw -- came to me and suggested that COTUG use our modems to share files on their DEC System 10 mainframes in the evening to test out an idea he had to let PC users tap into mainframes at night.

We eagerly accepted the opportunity to connect, and what we found was a hacker's dream. Most of CompuServe’s programs were written either in Fortran-10 or a language called 'XBA' for extended basic. It was very similar to the TRS-80's BASIC. I remember how amused and excited we were to find that many of CompuServe's programs were on-line in their source code form. Dave Morr of Bell Labs built a screen-capture program that allowed us to capture any text that would come across our screens. We used his program to "download" many programs from the CompuServe mainframes by simply "LISTing" them while online.

Programs like Startrek.xba, Empire.F4, spacewar.xba, Adventure550.F4 and many others were "downloaded" in text form and we converted many of them run on the TRS-80. In essence, we helped CompuServe refine their security levels as we "broke their system" many times. We gave away these converted programs via BBSs and via a pc-pc (now called peer-to-peer) file sharing systems.

CompuServe – Early Beginnings

CompuServe was founded in 1969 as a computer time-sharing service, by Harry Gard, Sr. and Jeff Wilkins. Note that in 1969 the government project APRAnet began. Arpanet is widely credited as the beginning of online, yet it was not until 1983 that the first .COM domains were allowed. In my opinion, it is arguable which came first in 1969: CompuServe or Arpanet.

In the early- to mid-1970s, CompuServe began to concentrate in several vertical time-sharing markets. One such market was the Insurance industry, where CompuServe developed an extensive database of product goods detailing manufacturer retail prices, replacement cost calculations and other data used by insurance companies.

An outgrowth of this database came from a company known as Comp-U-Card, which offered a membership-based consumer shopping service, called Comp-U-Store in the 1970s. Initially, it was used internally by Comp-U-Store telephone personnel. However, by 1981, CompuServe developed this database into the first on-line shopping product. Columbus, Ohio-based CompuServe was an early networking technology pioneer drove the initial emergence of the online services industry.