Model D Resurrected

Last weekend I made a pilgrimmage to visit my first computer, which has been sitting idly on a small desk in a dark corner of my mother in law's house for the last ten years. Would it run after sitting for so long? I had to know.

I had returned to the past to take a picture of my old Leading Edge Model D for this week's Tales from the crypt feature, which describes Computerworld editors' experiences with their first computers (the story of my Model D and photo appear halfway down on this page).

The machine, long forgotten, hadn't been turned on in at least 10 years. When it last ran it had MS-DOS 3.2 loaded on an aftermarket 10 MB hard disk drive, but would it spin up? Or would "stiction" take hold, leaving the disk stuck in the position where it last parked the heads?

After pulling the machine out of the conrner and connecting the cables back up I paused for just a moment before depressing the power button on the front of the case.

In an instant the green screen snapped to life. Soon the memory test began scrolling across the screen - twice through to 640K - the disk spun up and I had my C> prompt.

And I had been transported back to 1985 again. The boot process was faster than my XP laptop. Things were so much cleaner and simpler then.

I was delighted to see that several applications were still as I had left them. There was Microsoft Works 2.0 and an early version of Quicken with its very simple line and text-based interface. Despite all of the graphical improvements, "ease of use" improvements and the multitude of add on features that have come since, there was something pleasing about returning to those simple menus and fast, direct keystroke controls. The interfaces weren't pretty. But even today, those programs do 99% of what most users need from a word processor or electronic checkbook program.

In a way, these old programs are new again, their simple interfaces and streamlined options repacked in back-to-the-future Web 2.0 applications such as Google Docs.

On the floor undereath the machine was a box containing some new-fangled software: a "graphical" integrated software program called Ensemble. It was the beginning of integrated applications - and application complexity. It wasn't on the machine. I wanted to open the box, install it and relive the past some more. But it was getting late and my wife was waiting. It was time to go home.