SF Weekly, September, 1998

 

The Dead Programmers Society
Steve Bolland

 

For vintage computer collectors, machines that measure memory in KB are A-OK

Most geeks don't live like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison or some San Francisco hipster. Most geeks live like Paul E Coad.

Go to Coad's garage, beside a modest -- OK, ugly -- apartment complex in Mountain View, and you'll see all the trappings of suburban life: a sleeping bag, cooler, several bikes, an oil-stained, flattened cardboard box on the floor.

But you'll also see a huge, very blue minicomputer. A couple of alien-looking proto laptops. Multiple Tron-era PCs. Stacks of 20-year-old computer magazines and floppy (floppy) discs. More random detritus from the dawn (or at least the early morning) of computing.

Coad is a collector of very weak, often dead, ultimately useless machinery. And like other collectors of vintage -- ancient -- computers I've talked to, he animates when he talks about his gear.

Stop No. 1 is the minicomputer, a Data General Nova 3. It has a nine-track, reel-to-reel tape drive and roughly 64 kilobytes of memory, and it could serve eight users, he tells me. It developed programs in COBOL and featured switches and lights that could be manually toggled to modify memory. Its CPU isn't a microprocessor, but a board with about 100 integrated circuits. It cost $25,000 new in the late '70s. It's also roughly five feet tall, weighs between 250 and 400 pounds, and its tape drive has keys that read "Wrten Test" and "Hi Den."

Coad boasts that it was still in use somewhere in Silicon Valley until the early '90s. He bought it for $100, and it's got a broken breaker switch. Otherwise, he says of all his dead machines, "I'd be firing 'em up all the time. I want to run 'em."

In fact, he adds, he sometimes uses a 10-year-old Sun workstation, borrowed from his collection, at his programming job. "Even going back to '81," he says, "you can use [a Sun]."

Coad's a lover of $5 relics, once-high tech that's now laughably low-. He spews data: Xerox created the graphical user interface, but tried to sell it as a word-processing system. A Radio Shack TRS-80 with 16KB of memory cost about $1,000, but $2,000 with a floppy drive. The Osborne 1, the first affordable "portable," weighed 26 pounds. The Gavilan portable, which looks like a '50s sci-fi fantasy, was a "spectacular failure." This guy clearly knows his stuff.

Yet ... why? Coad shrugs and explains that he's "a packrat by nature." Later, he admits to falling in love with computers as a kid in the late-'70s, and becoming a programmer soon thereafter.

But there are lots of computer lovers, and few of them love machines that count memory in kilobytes.

If Coad was friendly but a little shy, Sam Ismail is downright ebullient. He's also the right guy to explain this odd passion, having organized the Bay Area's first Vintage Computer Festival last year (the second is this weekend in Santa Clara).

Ismail says the number of vintage computer collectors is growing, predictably -- and ironically -- with the Internet. The CLASSICCMP (Classic Computers) mailing list, he says, has about 200 members; he also points to a well-traveled Web site called Haggle Online and the newsgroup alt.folklore.computers (Coad had mentioned ba.marketplace.computers). The Bay Area, of course, is a center of the scene; Ismail guesses there are "more than 50, maybe around 100, perhaps even more" serious collectors here.

But online isn't the best place to find these geeks. They also network in places that are ultimately more appropriate: the swap meets, thrift stores, and recycling centers where their finds languish mostly unappreciated.

They also buy directly from owners who often will sell their machines for their actual value, that of scrap: Ismail brags that he once bought 1,500 pounds of Hewlett Packard equipment for $200.

Of course, Ismail also tells of an online auction of Altairs, a mid-'70s innovation that, along with the original Apple, is a rarity among vintage machines: It's actually worth something, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars.

Ismail, like Coad, thinks a speculator market in vintage computers could develop; it's just not there yet. Most old machines are still too recent, too laughed at, and too many are stashed in closets and attics. The Altair and Apple I are rare, milestone machines. But there were millions of Commodore 64s in use only a little more than a decade ago. They can't be rare enough to have gained value as collectors items, and they're far too far behind the technology curve to actually be used.

These realities matter not to people like Ismail. They simply love -- love -- their classic computers, or at least some specific subset of them. Coad's in the market for more Sun machines; Ismail knows of a guy who only collects DECs. He also knows a man in Portland, Ore., who's filled his two-story warehouse with mainframes.

Ismail's own collection is more diverse, but almost as large: "I have a three-car garage and it has a pool table and then just computer crap, to the disdain of my wife," he says. "It's really piles and piles of crap." He's currently looking for a new space for his 300-plus machines.

He raves about various computers, but his most telling anecdote is this: He recently rented the 1983 movie WarGames just to check out David Lightman's (Matthew Broderick's) IMSAI 8080, a machine manufactured in San Leandro in the late-'70s. The movie used an already-antiquated model, he explains "because they wanted it to be that David was this hacker who cobbled his computer together from spare parts he got from the dumpster.

"You think about the power you have on your desk," he says. "You have more computer power than existed in the world in 1970. That's one of the things for me that's alluring. It was so recent a time, yet it seems so far away."

But not so far away that it elicits much nostalgia, or much formal effort to preserve its legacy.

But there is Kip Crosby. Crosby is the ultimate collector: He's devoted his life to saving old computers as part of a nonprofit called the Computer History Association of California.

The CHAC is actually a dozen or so container units in a South Bay warehouse (Crosby won't say exactly where). Which makes Crosby something more than a collector, but something less than a curator. Still, he's about as authoritative a local computer history expert as you're likely to find. (Boston's Computer Museum has opened a historical archive at Moffett Field, and there's always the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, but the latter doesn't focus on history.)

During our conversation, Crosby launches into a 20-minute soliloquy on legendary designer Seymour Cray and the relative merits of silicon and Cray's holy grail, gallium arsenide, as computing semiconductors. It's the sort of thing only a serious geek could love, but Crosby could make anyone at least like it.

Crosby worries about the future of computing past, but not as much as he used to. Other museum efforts are being mounted, he says, and the rise of "roving bands" of amateur collectors means lots of hardware will be saved from the "scrappers," even if the companies themselves (when not already out of business) often don't care about its fate. He's more concerned with what he calls the "stories" of Silicon Valley, and he's trying to record them in an infrequently published magazine dubbed The Analytical Engine.

Not that he's neglected simple collecting, or not-so-simple. "It is a little bit different if you're an organization than if you're a private collector," he says. "If you're an organization, you tend to get phone calls in the middle of the night. And you tend to meet people in Silicon Valley parking lots at sunset, and you tend to make strange handshakes."

Meaning, apparently, that devotion to computers you've used for years is one reason to treasure them -- even, it appears, to defy your careless employer and engage in shadowy pseudo-Deep Throat maneuverings. Crosby gives me another reason for the dedication to obsolete hardware: hacking. It seems many collectors love to piece back together dead hardware, to hack the very machines hacking was invented on.

"From five years ago," Crosby says of the collector scene, "things are very different. Things are boiling over."