Since I received my BS in Computer Science in 1969 and my MS two years
later, I was at the forefront of those in the computer field. But I was not a
hobbyist as some were who bought some of the early home computers, often by
putting them together themselves. Rather, as a user of computers in business, I
lagged a few years until the initial bugs were worked out. But still I was an
early adopter once the home PC market began to develop.
Being an early adopter
I bought my first IBM-PC (actually the only one actually marketed by
IBM that I ever bought) some time around 1983. It came with 64K. I had my
choice of a single-sided or double-sided floppy drive (I chose the latter). I
also bought a color monitor, a copy of DOS 1.1, an Okidata 82 printer (with NLQ
(Near-Letter Quality) print capability), and a printer cable (everything was
unbundled those days). I paid about $2,200 for all of those – a hefty sum in
those days. For software, I purchased a copy of Volkswriter (*1), a relative
cheap package, but one that was far superior to IBM’s Easywriter and easier to
use than WordStar which had just come out. I also got a copy of WordProof which
was a companion piece that did spell/grammar checking. These were my primary
tools – remember that things like email didn’t come along until 10 years later
in 1993.
Over the coming several years I made a number of upgrades. First, I got
a second floppy drive and upgraded the memory from 64K to 256K (maxing out the
motherboard as I inserted the chips myself). Later I replaced one of the floppy
drives with a hard drive that stored a whopping 5M and upgraded to DOS 2.0 in
order to support it. Eventually I replaced that original IBM PC with a 286
machine from Northgate. Over the years I’ve had a continuing series of
machines, each much more powerful that the last, but interestingly the basic
price remained in the same range.
I’d like to take the rest of this article to give an overview of one of
the most significant projects that I was involved in that stretched the ability
of that first PC.
A major project
I was still operating that original PC, now upgraded with more memory
and a second floppy drive, in the winter of 1984-1985. A man who I’d gotten to
know over the prior several years (and who has been a good friend ever since),
Dick Gehman, was a missionary to Kenya. I used to pick up he and his family at
JFK airport every four years as they came home on furlough and then take them
back to JFK a year later when they returned to Kenya. In 1984 the Gehmans came
home for year and his task for that year was to work on his Doctorate in
Missiology – in particular on completing and submitting his dissertation to
Fuller Seminary in CA. Fuller’s standards at the time included a requirement
that the dissertation be typed on an IBM Selectric typewriter. Dick heard that
I had a PC and asked if it were possible to use this “new” technology to
prepare his dissertation. I agreed and printed out a sample document in NLQ
(with a new ribbon) and he submitted it to Fuller and asked if that printing was
acceptable. They said yes.
Starting in January 1985, and continuing for two full months, Dick
would come to my house each morning before I left for work. He had never used a
computer before and had no idea on how to do basic functions like starting it
up, saving his work, etc. I got the PC set up before he arrived. He brought his
lunch with him but basically spent the entire day typing. When I came home I
would save his day’s work. When he finished a chapter, I would run it through
WordProof and do a basic read through and edit myself, then print out that
chapter which he would take home to his wife for further proofreading.
Corrections would eventually come back to me, I would make the changes and then
print the final chapter.
African languages, Greek and
Hebrew
There was one major issue that I had to work through and that tested my
skills. Dick’s dissertation was on African Traditional Religion. Part of the dissertation
included some words from three of the tribes in Kenya that he worked with.
While these words used primarily Latin characters, some of the letters had
diacritical marks. These were not too bad to deal with. But the final portion
of the dissertation was a study on the biblical interpretation of some of the
subjects. For this, Dick would reference the original words in Greek or Hebrew
(the language of the New and Old Testament). But these characters did not exist
in any word processor of the time. So, what was I to do – other than leave
blanks in the document for them to be hand-written in later?
The solution lay in the fact that the Okidata printer supported what
was known as downline loadable fonts. Basically, I could design my own characters/fonts
by creating a bit pattern stored in binary, then send them to the printer to be
stored in its local memory. Then when the printer was asked to print the
alternate font it would pull it from its memory and use the bit pattern to fire
the individual pins in the printhead. There were some limitations, such as you
could not fire the same pin twice in a row as it needed time to reset itself as
the printhead moved across the page, and the character could only be as large as
a typical character (as I recall it was 9 bits high and 11 bits wide), but
otherwise you had free rein to program the firing of the individual pins in
the printhead.
I looked in an encyclopedia for the shape of the full Greek and Hebrew
characters, then built a file with a corresponding set of pin firings for each
character (essentially a text file with a bunch of X’s corresponding to the firing
of each pin on a separate line and a column for successive firings). I then
constructed a program in BASIC that would read this text file of X’s and build
the bit patterns that would be sent to the printer. I thought it was a pretty
elegant solution.
When you selected the “alternate font” in Volkswriter (kind of like a
modified shift key), it would put the font on the screen in color. The
correspondence was that a lower case “a” (which would show on the screen in red
background) was going to be transliterated into a Greek alpha, but an upper
case “A” was going to be transliterated into a Hebrew alef. For Dick, this was
going to be pretty easy, he would just shift into alternate font mode and type
the equivalent Latin characters for each Greek character (alpha, beta, gamma,
delta, etc.) or the upper-case equivalents for Hebrew characters (Alef, Bet,
Gimel, etc.) Since Greek and Hebrew do not have lower/upper cases there were no
conflicts. I printed out a full alphabet for Dick and he made a few corrections
to my character shapes based on how he wrote each character and I simply
adjusted the pattern of X’s in my text file and reprocessed it until I satisfied
his criteria.
This was a real good test of my computer skills – learning the
capabilities of my printer, designing a solution that included a readable input
(patterns of Xs) and building a program to translate that readable input into
the bit patterns that the printer required.
Finishing the dissertation
Dick is a very serious writer. The finished work was over 600 single-spaced
pages which he took to CA with him for his dissertation defense. The committee
he met with had a number of changes that they wanted in it, which mostly
involved cutting out some portions. But the finished project needed to be
printed and also needed things like a table of contents, and an index. Dick
returned the marked-up copy to me (via insured mail), together with
rubber-banded strips of paper that contained all the things that he wanted to
appear in the index. And by strips of paper I mean little strips – basically one line high with a word/phrase and page
number on each strip!
I had some major work to do in order to produce the finished product. I
first typed up all the strips of paper into a document, then sorted the lines
of the document by page number. I made all the textual changes from the marked-up
document. I then printed the main body of the dissertation (I’ll call it a
book, because it was going to be one before it was done). This meant a
continuous print job that lasted nearly 24 hours. I built an overall document that
did an “include” of each of the documents that were part of the overall book).
I was sufficiently skilled that I could go from floppy to floppy as each
chapter finished (as I recall it took 7 floppies to store it all). I was also
able to periodically pause the printer and put in a new ribbon (so that the
final print quality would not show any fading as the pages advanced). But once
that 24 hours of printing was done, I had more work to do.
First, I had to look up each of the index entries to find out what page
number the reference had moved to (remember that if there are significant
deletions, then the page numbers are all going to change)! I then sorted the
index document by reference word/phrase to get it in alphabetical order. When
the same word was indexed in two or more places, I manually combined the lines
into one with multiple page numbers listed. I then printed the index (starting
the page number of the index on the page after the last chapter. Finally, with
all the page numbers known, I could insert the page numbers into the table of
contents – the last piece of the puzzle to be printed.
It took several days to complete the project – but I was thoroughly
invested in the finished work. I mailed it back to Dick in CA (again by insured
mail). He had copies made and bound. As a token of thanks, he presented me with
a copy of the finished work – my sole pay for my contribution in both time and
expertise to his dissertation. But, unlike many dissertations, this one did not
just sit on a shelf gathering dust. It became the basis for three books that he
later published, some of which are still being used now some 35 years later. I’m
happy that I was able to be a part of this project!
Notes:
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