{"id":8422,"date":"2016-07-07T00:01:11","date_gmt":"2016-07-07T07:01:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=8422"},"modified":"2016-07-02T11:47:40","modified_gmt":"2016-07-02T18:47:40","slug":"the-day-i-wanted-to-compute-outside","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=8422","title":{"rendered":"The Day I Wanted to Compute Outside"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was a warm summer day. The sun was high in the sky. I was hot inside (no air conditioning), and the outside deck was so inviting. So rather than say in the dimly-lit apartment, I prepared for my first computer adventure outside. Ho-boy! It was going to be fun.
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\nThe year was probably 1984, way back when I owned a TRS-80 Model III. A “laptop” computer hadn’t yet been invented. Portables were available, like the clunky Osborne and Compaq. Even those machines sat on a desk, inside, anchored to a power supply.<\/p>\n

The place I lived was an illegal dwelling unit. It was an apartment constructed above a long commercial building located in an industrial complex. The place still exists; Figure 1 shows the Google street view of the location.<\/p>\n

\"Figure

Figure 1. Google street view of where I lived back in 1984.<\/p><\/div>\n

My father rented the illegal dwelling unit as temporary lodging while his home was being constructed elsewhere. Anyway, it’s where I lived. I had set up my TRS-80 in my room, but I wanted the freedom to compute outside.<\/p>\n

The illegal dwelling unit had a deck out on the roof of the commercial building (see Figure 1). That’s where I experienced my first time using a computer outside.<\/p>\n

I dragged an electrical cord outside to ensure that I’d have power. Then I set up a table and chair. O, I was so brilliant! I even wired up the modem so that I could boast to my online buddies that I was typing outside on a sunny day. What a silly, idiosyncratic thing for a nerd to do!<\/p>\n

Everything was perfect. I might have even set out a diet Coke. Then, I turned on my TRS-80 Model III.<\/p>\n

One thing you have to know about the TRS-80 computer is that they didn’t really have monitors. No, that CRT came from a Radio Shack Black-and-White TV that never sold. It was designed for watching insipid television, not for reading text, coding, or whatever else I did on my TRS-80.<\/p>\n

Eventually, I did replace my TRS-80’s wretched monitor with a nice amber monitor. It was very nice, but either way the end effect would have been the same on that day: The screen was impossible to see.<\/p>\n

Outside it was just too damn bright. I turned up the monitor’s brightness all the way. Nothing. I even tore up a cardboard box and framed the front of the TRS-80 so that the box worked like a hood. Nope. Nothing worked. Unable to see the monitor, I gave up on my first attempt to compute outside.<\/p>\n

Even though I failed, the lesson stuck with me: If you want to compute in sunlight, you need a specific type of display. You see the same effect today when you try to use a phone, tablet, or laptop outside; the screen is difficult to see. And back in 1984, with that garish black-and-white TV set monitor on the TRS-80 Model III, it was near impossible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Things don’t always go as planned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8422"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8441,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8422\/revisions\/8441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}