My first computer THEN

Way back in 1984 I was a design engineer in my own consulting firm, drawing widgets on a drafting board. I had a background in the servicing of mainframe computers, and had been watching the development of what were then called microcomputers. I started investigating the possibilities of doing CAD (Computer Aided Design) on a computer with the aim of improving my own productivity. 2D CAD was just beginning to appear on micros, but I wanted 3D or nothing.

I found what I needed, in France, a system used in Aircraft design. IT ran on a Unix mini-computer, and cost $500,000! Unfortunately my budget didn't have that many zeros. Or actually, all it had was zeros. So I decided to write my own (having never written any sort of software, I had no idea what was involved, but I did have the confidence of youth!). I decided on a computer, a TRS-80 model III (affectionately called a trash 80 by many) with a whopping 48K of RAM, two 5" floppy disks and optional "high resolution graphics"

This computer plus a printer/plotter which "drew" characters and graphics with a ball point pen refill cost $2600. I had to take out a bank loand to buy it, and convince my wife that it would be a good investment. It turned out to be the best investment I have made so far in my life.

The computer had a 12" monochrome screen. When I turned it on withe the TRS-DOS disk in the floppy, I got this on the screen:
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I typed a lot of stuff including swear words with no result other than "syntax error". At least I think that is what happened. Remember this was nearly 30 years ago...

I went back to Radio Shack and bought a book on TRS-Basic programming. After going through the book and most of the exercises in it, I began to catch on, and wrote some simple engineering calculation programs. These were nothing you couldn't do with an HP programmable calculator, but it turned out the computer was much easier to program and test.

After 6 months of programming in my spare time, I had a workable specialized 3D CAD program, which did only one object at a time, and plotted the result in 3 ortho views plus a perspective, with the "ball point" plotter. I would then trace the result on my drafting board to make a finished drawing. It sounds absurdly primitive now but a drawing that used to take a week took 4 hours, a 10 to 1 productivity increase.

My "business plan" was non existent. I had a vague idea that a powerful tool, which none of my colleagues had, would give me an edge and so my income would increase. However a problem immediately surfaced. I made the mistake of bragging about the productivity increase to some clients. The response was, "Wow, with these great tools you will be able to do the work for much less money!"

Not quite what I had in mind.