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What’s your favorite PC memory from 1988?

By James White (Intel) (13 posts) on August 25, 2008 at 4:18 pm

This weekend I went to my high school reunion. You can probably guess the year I graduated.

In high school, I was fortunate enough to own a Macintosh SE. It even had an ImageWriter II printer, which could print graphics! (Screech, scr-scr-scr-screech, screeeeech.) I remember using SuperPaint to draw a little map of Afghanistan for a report in my Global Issues class. SuperPaint was maybe the first paitning program that would let you do both raster and vector images on the same canvas. I labeled the capital, Kabul, and other cities. I even drew in some bumpy mountains with my mouse. I put the map in the report with various clippings from National Geographic and other printed sources. I have to admit that the total quality of the work didn’t seem all that impressive to me, but I think the teacher was so flabbergasted that portions had been printed from a computer that she felt compelled to give me an A.

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Comments (6)

August 26, 2008 12:46 AM PDT UX-admin

Favorite "PC" memory from 1988? It has to be picking my jaw off of the ground looking at those IKARI + Talent, Hotline, and North East Crackers intros on the cracked games, and wondering how they did that. In 1988, I was fortunate enough to own a Commodore 128D, and since that system was three computers in one (C= 128, C= 64 and a Zilog powered CP/M), I could switch into C= 64 mode. The intros on the cracked games impressed me so much, that I learned the MOS 6502/6510 assembler, and started working on reverse engineering the crackers' intro code (this, in the scene lingo was dubbed "recracking"). It was truly an awesome journey, because 1988 was one of the best years for the demo and the cracking scene. Some of the greatest masterpieces of C= 64 intro code, music, and art came out in that year. Competing on who could code the shortest, fastet depack routine, or who could code the shortest link routine (nothing to do with linking on UNIX, it was actually a relocation routine) was an absolute thriller! Check out the intro screenshots from some of the most famous intros of that era: http://www.docsnyderspage.de/_page/flash1.htm I wouldn't trade that experience for the world. Those were truly phenomenal times, when only those that truly cared about computers and computing were involved.

August 26, 2008 8:12 AM PDT James White (Intel) Total Points: 1,070 Status Points: 570 Brown Belt

Wow! I had forgotten all about those game crack intros. Before my Mac I had an Apple IIe and saw lots of them there, too. (Karateka, Skyfox, Lode Runner... games I haven't thought about in decades!) Thanks for sharing!

August 27, 2008 8:51 AM PDT Kannan Mettupatt... (Intel) Total Points: 5 Registered User

I still vividly remember my first intro to DOS virii via "Cascade", back in '94. I was in my 10th grade then and was trying to teach myself all the DOS functions (remember INT 21h?) using TASM4. I was typing a program from the classic book "Advanced MSDOS programming" (Ray Duncan) and suddenly the letters started falling in my Norton Editor (NE.com)! Only later I learnt that the virus trigger date was around 1987/88 and fortunately (!?) somebody had reset my machine date to 1987!!

September 5, 2008 5:42 AM PDT MJ Fischer

In 1988 I was a PC technician in an IBM shop and we were pushing many IBM 80268 computers running at 6MHz & 8 MHz. I was approached by a group of engineers who wanted 286 computers that would run 20MHz because they were seeing these in the “Computer Shopper” magazine. I asked my boss if we could build the requested computers and he told me “NO 286 computers cannot run at 20MHz, they will fly apart”. I paused for a moment, then asked, well do you mind if I build these on my own..? where he mistakenly gave me permission. That launched the first of many computer & technology businesses that I have owned ever since. I would say that 1988 was a very interesting year..!

September 5, 2008 7:05 AM PDT Steve Hochschild

In '88 I had just been hired as Novell's first product manager for email. While there were certainly many, many email systems in place at the time, our task was to take it to the masses. I went all around the country trying to talk people into trying out this new form of communication for business. We coined slogans like "Real time enough" and "The immediacy of a phone call with the convenience of a memo". In spite of these, email became fairly popular... Another good memory was sitting in a meeting trying to decide what the term API really meant. The issue was whether or not we wanted to get into a p*ssing contest with Microsoft over who had more APIs, so we had to decide how we counted them. Did Btrieve have 42 function calls making up a single API, or did we want to count that as having 42 APIs? We decided on a non-enumerated approach, thankfully...

September 6, 2008 4:04 PM PDT John McInnis

Back in '88 we designed a complete turnkey system using 286 boxes and SCO Xenix. We had 4 Wyse terminals running various frontend apps and were scrambling to improve memory and speed - both in short supply. We were on the bleeding edge back then - bootstrap updating via dialup; uucp links, daemons, and slip trap debugging (oh my). Hardware evolution was rapid back then ... Ah...souvenirs...

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