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Thoughts from a Clicker
IframView

Last week at one of my Zoom meet-
ings, someone asked me if I had ever
used IrfanView, an image viewer, and
editor. I replied that it was one of my
go-to programs about ten years ago.
This chance remark gets me thinking
about some of my computing experi-
ences over the years. Technology has
sure changed a lot. One of my first
computer memories was when I was
still in high school and UNIVAC was in
the news. No one had any idea what
the thing was good for. The census
used one to somehow make counting
the population easier. It was a different
world back then and nobody much
cared about a machine that was bigger
than the family car and needed a spe-
cial air-conditioned room.
One thing that interested me was the
Texas Instruments pocket calculator.
My daddy was a feed salesman and
the company that he worked for provided him with
one of these expensive machines. I remember him
getting it out to show us how he could add 2 and 2 The operating system of choice in those days was
without making a mistake. PC-DOS. There were many other ones, but the
home market was mainly CP/M or one of the DOS
When I joined the Navy, I had my first experience systems from Apple, Atari, or Commodore. In the
with using a computer. I got to run the keypunch early 1980s, a fellow you may have heard of buying
machine. If I made a mistake, a ship could easily an operating system called 86-DOS which was also
get 10,000 pounds of butter instead of 1,000. Back known as Q-DOS (for Quick and Dirty DOS). Bill
then, the Navy paid us in cash. In later years, our Gates later renamed it to MS-DOS for the company
paychecks were an IBM computer punch card. Now, that he founded.
most employers don't even issue checks. It's all
done electronically. I'm pretty sure that Microsoft is still in business to-
day.
In the late 1970s, computers started to catch on.
IBM was the company that created the home mar-
ket. Their 8086/8088 weighed about 30 pounds and By Tiny Ruisch
had a whole megabyte of random-access memory.
It blazed along at a speedy 4.77 MHz. Other com- Vice President,
panies that built computers soon started advertising
themselves as IBM compatible. If you worked for Cajun Clicker Computer Club
IBM, you were required to wear a tie. February 2021 issue
This is also the era when many of us hobbyists CCCC Computer News
started building our first computers. Zenith Heath
Kits were all the rage. They didn't work any better, www.clickers.org
but we were smarter because we built our own.

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