Content

Tony Waltham

Graham K.Rogers

Bruce P. Barden

Craig Emmott

George Mann

Bill Thompson

James Hein

Marc Holt

Mike Basham

Neshan Dias

Pee Kay

Ping Na Thalang

Geoff Long

Thiravudh Khoman

Wanda Sloan

Nick wilgus

Pioneer Spirit Still Drives Innovation

He was most enthusiastic about how these microcomputers would change the world. And so to fill in my "newly-found" free time - and since he was going to Singapore the following week - he suggested that I should give him around 5,000 baht for a kit with the Apple II chipset that he could pick up for me at Sim Lim Tower.

I must confess to having been a little sceptical, but he promised to toss in a free motherboard that he could obtain from his PCB business connections (yes, the PC "clone" industry had started here, even back then). It was hard to say "no", and so soon I had a full-time job on my hands for several evenings soldering in the IC sockets for the memory and controller chips. But there it was on the kitchen table: my very own unbranded "Apple" computer - which worked perfectly without a case for the better part of a year while I figured out what to do with it.

There was a limited selection of games (LodeRunner, Falcon, etc.) and - looking back - some primitive "business" software. Then, you could always "roll your own" program in AppleSoft BASIC.

Post Database Editor, Tony Waltham got into the hobby of computing almost by accident. Then he discovered that some of the tips in the Bangkok Computer User Group newsletter were worthy of a wider audience, and two computer pages, the precursor of Post Database, first appeared every week in the sister newspaper, the Bangkok World, in 1985. Two years later, Post Database was born as a pullout section of the Bangkok Post that appeared every two weeks, but it wasn't until January 1989 that the decision was made to go weekly - on a trial basis. It has never looked back since, but it does just that with this anniversary supplement today, when Tony asked some of Post Database's regular contributors to look back at how computers had changed their lives, and how they believe they are likely to change your lives too....

No one was making any noise about pirated software in those early days, for the only way to get any program here was to find a copy of it in one of the few shops that catered to the hobbyists of the time. Indeed, this situation persisted until the mid to late-1980s, when I recall Lotus becoming very vocal about piracy and that was when BSA lawyers began to make whistle-stop visits, offering angry sound bites. The Apple II architecture was truly great and I remained a PC-agnostic for many years. I even shunned the Macintosh, which was probably a mistake - but I really couldn't afford one then, either.

I never liked the Apple II OS or much of the software that ran under it, and I was a rapid convert to CP/M, that turned out to be a predecessor to DOS (and in many ways superior to early versions of MS- or PC-DOS). The CP/M operating system would run on my Apple with a plug in card and coupled with another 80-column display card (thank goodness for open, extensible architecture), I could run "real" programs including WordStar and dBASE II, both of which later made the jump to the IBM PC environment.

I also made my first hook-up to the original Bangkok Bulletin Board System (BBS), BUG Board, from my home-brew Apple II with a 300-baud modem. I had purchased this second-hand here from a user group flea market and connected it to my Apple Super Serial Card.

At first, no communications software was used (I didn't have any), since at 300 baud (bits a second) you could comfortably read messages in "real time" - that's at the speed that they appeared on the screen. And I could control the serial card from the keyboard.

If all this sounds a bit primitive and awkward, it was. We had to hunt down the parts, such as the serial card or a clone of the "Z80" processor card (the original was manufactured by Microsoft, no less), using our own resources - asking friends, often those newly-found friends who shared an interest in this new hobby.

Trips to Hong Kong and to its Golden Shopping Arcade for parts and software were put to good use, as were my early excursions to the Comdex computer show in Las Vegas.

Trips to the USA then were opportunities to visit computer-owning friends who also had computers - and modems with connections to bulletin boards there that were rich in the latest shareware.

I remember coming back here with a bunch of floppy disks, stocked with the latest versions of Procomm and Telix along with many other exciting shareware programs that, before the era of the Internet, relied on goodwill and volunteerism in order to propagate worldwide.

Indeed, the same spirit that created the bedrock on which the global PC industry is based also built the Internet and only recently have commercial interests predominated - sometimes not with the best of outcomes. Take software for example. There have been some excellent programs, both shareware and commercial software, that have been clear leaders in their field in terms of both features and performance - indeed, so much so, that they did not need any more "enhancements".

The Toys

1983: Apple II clone, built from a kit with 48K of RAM and one floppy drive, later expanded to dual floppies, a 127K RAM card. 300 Baud modem. Today: AMD 700 MHz Athlon, 128MB RAM, two 20GB hard disks, V56 modem, 17'' monitor. CD-R and CD-ROM drives. On-line experience: A pioneer BUG Board user (Bangkok's first BBS) since 1985 and active at many, especially War on Virus. In 1990 established Thailand's first multi-line Wildcat! BBS, Post Database BBS, and was SysOp for around seven years until a hard disk crash spelt its retirement - just as the Internet had mostly eclipsed dial-up BBSes. First global email experience around 1990 with GEnie, and in 1994-1995 a granted a guest account by CompuServe. First Internet experience: Guest access at Thammasat University server in 1992 to test international email. Signed up as volunteer user of Nectec's trial Internet services in 1994; Internet Thailand subscriber since service began in 1995.

But, staying with the same version for more than a few months would spell doom for PC software since the competition would roll out new releases with incremental features, while the old (and almost perfect products) would be ignored in the product shootouts in PC Magazine and PC World, often quickly falling into obscurity.

Similarly, excellent user-supported shareware tended to be ignored as a matter of policy by these powerful arbiters of opinion who carried a lot of weight since the number of PC users in America was then doubling every few months or so.

But the pioneer spirit that created the PC market and the Internet as we know it today is still driving innovation. Mostly this is now focussed around web sites and services as well as on Linux and other open software products, even as large companies and their lawyers wrestle and engage in intellectual jousting for their share in of an ever-growing banquet of commercial products.

And this is how it will be, there will be innovation, there will be the early-adopters or enthusiasts, then the masses will come (many dragging their heels - while the kids just love the new stuff), followed by the big corporations and their lawyers.

Indeed, the rise and sublimation of Napster represented this phenomenon in a microcosm.

But the innovations that inevitably lie ahead promise to make the previous 50 years seem insignificant by comparison. Take the following two predictions:

• By the year 2010, we're going to see a one million-fold increase in the amount of information on the Internet - Director of Internet technology and strategy at IBM, Mike Nelson.
• During this century we're not going to see the equivalent of 100 years of innovation, but the equivalent of 20,000 years of progress - Ray Kurzweil (in his 2000 PC Expo speech)

Sit back and enjoy what technology will provide and, if you have the time or the inclination, roll up your sleeves and dig into it a little. You should find it rewarding, too.