Ten Years Ago...D.T. Joins The Mainstream (8-21-1993)

And now, David Tanny joins the mainstream, ten years ago today.

Huh? What could that be? Was D.T. crazy in 1993? Did he decide to listen to smooth jazz instead of hip hop music? No, it's not that. In fact, it has something distantly related to radio in the future, but at the time, it wasn't.

Back in August 1983, I bought my first computer: The Atari 800, which also makes a great video game console to play Pac Man and Star Raiders on it. It was also a computer, in fact, it had a full 64K or RAM, a 5 1/4 inch floppy, and an interface to save the BASIC programs and files to cassette tapes.

When I started moving the celebrity birthdays to the Atari in 1986, the master file was so big it had to be split over ten floppies at first. I didn't have the events yet, but that would come less than ten years later, but back then, I was busy collecting celebrity birthdays whereever they were mentioned in Entertainment Tonight, AP, UPI, and the World Almanac.

Eventully, the file ballooned to spread over 20 floppiy discs, and the job got so big that I ordered a Black Box interface for the Atari 800XL (another Atari computer), with a 32MB hard drive, and upgraded the RAM to 256K, and added a modem, about 300 baud, to access Compuserve and keep in touch with e-mail, which was, back then, not part of the Internet, but just a private dial-up service not unlike a BBS, which used to be the norm in the early 1990's in San Diego and other cities.

Back in 1993, most people used Compuserve and AOL to access e-mail, but the Internet was a year away from going mainstream with the launch of the World Wide Web for consumers. Eventually, the Atari 800XL 8-bit system, despite all the upgrades I gave it, was obsolete, and it was time I joined the...MAINSTREAM...Windows 3.1/DOS/IBM clone computers!

On August 21, 1993, I purchased an IBM clone from Radio Shack, which had 4MB of RAM, which I upgraded to 8MB, a 2400 baud modem, which I also upgraded to 14.4 baud the next year, a 100MB hard drive, which, yes, was upgraded to 435MB, a 1X speed CD-ROM drive, with five years to go before the first writing CD-R models would debut, Windows 3.1 run on top of DOS 5, which I upgraded to DOS 6.2, and QBASIC, which was run under DOS.

Fortunately, I had to telephone numbers in the same house, and to make a long story short, saving you all the technical stuff, which is better forgotten, it took me three months to transfer the celebrity birthday database over telephone wires (using Terminal programs) from the Atari to the IBM clone over a 300 baud line, which was the fastest the Atari could do (it also had a 110 baud speed, even slower).

After months of rewriting the Atari BASIC programs so that they became QBASIC programs, and reassembling the celebrity database, I had success in moving everything from the Atari to the IBM. My programs ran faster, I could access the dial-up faster, my hard drive was bigger, had more RAM, etc. I wrote several more QBASIC programs to compile several web pages for my websites among other things.

In 1997, I bought a faster computer with a 200Mhz MMX chip, a 28.8 modem, which allowed me to listen to Internet radio, which is necessary since local radio by then was out of innovative ideas to entertain, and streaming radio stations from out of town was the answer to exit homogenous radio here.

Nowadays, more RAM, faster Internet speeds, a faster CD-ROM, Internet radio via your computer, which didn't exist in 1993, and other upgraded features are the norm of today's computers, but with Windows XL making it difficult to run QBASIC programs, not to mention, dangerous to use, I'm sticking with Windows 98 for now. My OS is obsolete by virus-writing standards.

Ten years of being mainstream with Windows, and that's as mainstream as I'm going to get, in fact, it's a necessary evil if you want the most compatability with other systems you have around the world.

Timelines - Computer in D.T.'s House

RAM: 1983:64K. 1988: 265K. 1993: 4M. 1994: 8M. 1996: 16M. 1997: 32M. 1998: 96M. 2000: 192M. 2003: ?

Speed: 1983: 4.7mhz?. 1993: 486SX-25MHz. 1997: Pentium MMX-200MHz. 2000: Athlon 800MHz. 2003:?

Modem speed: 1983: 110baud. 1989: 300baud. 1993: 2400kbps. 1994: 14.4kbps. 1997: 28.8kbps. 1999: 33.6kbps. 2000: 40kbps. 2002: cable modem.

CD: 1993: 1X ROM. 1997: 16X ROM. 2000: 48X ROM, 8X CD-R, 4X CD-RW, plus DVD.

Floppy drive: 1983: 5.25 inch/360kb. 1993: 3.5 inch/1.44mb. 1996: 4 inch ZIP/100mb. 2000: CD-R/650mb. 2003:?

Cassette drive: 1983: ?. Not part of IBM system in 1993.