VCF1 — Douglas Coward — Software Preservation An Overview

Douglas Coward — Software Preservation: An Overview

Vintage Computer Festival 1.0

Sunday, October 26th, 1997

Doug Coward began programming in 1973 while attending college: "The fun part of programming in RPG was punching the 300 cards for the one program of the semester. Because no more than two people at a time were allowed in the computer room with the Univac main frame (because of body heat), we didn't get to see our programs run; we just received a print-out of the results. In our BASIC class we punched a paper tape on a ASR-33 teletype and when our turn came, we dialed up the Department of Highways computer and fed our paper tape into the same ASR-33 to run our program."

After a 6 year vacation in the U.S. Navy he purchased his first personal computer, a MicroAce kit for $169 mail order. While working at the AMF Electronic Research Lab in 1982 he acquired the first piece of his collection, a PDP-11/03 he purchased from the lab. In 1984 his first programming job was a hacker's dream, breaking the protection on commercial Commodore 64 software for a "try before buy" service called "Master Line". Six months later the company had started a Commodore only on-line service called "Quantum Link". Two years later they added an Apple II service called "Apple Link Personal Edition". Much later the company would change it's name to America Online.

Doug moved to the Bay Area in 1987 and began writing video games. His computer collection took off when he realized what a treasure trove the Bay area is for a computer collector. Doug's collection consists of more than 110 different models of personal computer and has in the last five years expanded into home video game systems, robots, calculators, and slide rules. You can visit his collection on the web at The Museum of Personal Computing Machinery.

Vintage Computer Festival 1.0 took place at the Alameda County Fairgrounds in Pleasanton, California on October 25-26, 1997.

The last minutes of this presentation were not recorded due to a technical issue.

Vintage Computer Federation (http://vcfed.org) is a 501(c)3 non-profit educational organization existing for and led by computer history hobbyists.

Tapes digitized by Kevin Savetz (http://twitter.com/kevinSavetz) in September 2016.