Seattle, a computer hub in 1983?

I really can't attest to too much, but my dad was feeding punch cards into Boeing computers back in the early 70's. I had my "photo" printed with alphanumeric characters at the Pacific Science Center in the mid 70's and my cousins/uncle were dabbling with a TRS-80 in the late 70's. I used to call "Chester" the Bellevue Community College computer on the touch-tone phone and listen to a variety of audio programs. In 1983, our family was learning BASIC on an Atari-800.

That David went to the local university and talked with people in a computer sciences lab there is right in line with Seattle in the day- especially for a computer geek like he was. I find his setup at home to be pretty expensive and a bit over the top for a typical suburbanite in 1983, but not completely unbelievably so.

I never got the impression that Jim and Malvin were "cutting edge" in computer development inasmuch as they were simply computer geeks who may have dabbled in security and ways of circumventing it. It's quite possible that they were involved in the collegiate/military/industrial complex of computer technology (like those crazy kids in "Real Genius" making lasers).


My "#3" key is broken so I'm putting one here so i can cut & paste with it.

I'm sure there was at least three people in seattle that owned computers. Why call it a hot spot?

It wasn't unusual in 1983 for a college to have a computer room like that. I remember the first computer room tour I got was 1984 at a small law school. I suspect it would be less likely later because much of the stuff you needed that kind of hardware could be handled by a desktop. I didn't start college until the late 80s and by that time workstations were moving in and the minis moving out.

Around 1971-72, I frequented a computer lab at the University of Washington in Seattle that looked almost exactly like that in the movie (could have been the same one as they showed for all I know).

The Seattle-area has a long history of computer science and development. I've worked as a software developer in Seattle since the late 1970's and it has always been a large industry for the area with Microsoft and Amazon.

In my associations with Silicon Valley, I've always found the folks there a bit arrogant in their feeling that computer and software innovation could only originate there.

The computer industry was not fledgling in 1983. Heck, that was boom age for the most part. IBM mainframes were still king, but mini computers from companies like DEC were becoming increasingly powerful and being used in more or more places. This is also the time when workstation class machines started coming out from companies such as HP, Apollo, and Sun. Microsoft was already rising to prominence at that point. By that time the IBM PC was over a year old and starting to become dominant.

Microsoft's headquarters are in Redmond, WA. That is not that far from Seattle. IN 1983, there was no computer company in the world as hot as MIcrosoft, as they were making DOS the hottest thing in the industry, were less than one year away from the launch of the MAC, for which they wrote the bulk of the hot software, and were just short of the rise of the IBM PC and the PC clones.

Silicon Valley is what was talked up the most, but the real movers and industry creators drove to offices in the Seattle area.

Boston? Austin, maybe.

In the movie Hackers Johnny Lee Miller's character was supposedly the best hacker ever known and he was a Seattle native, also when I watched a film about Apple it stated that Bill Gates' hometown of Seattle was the center of the computing universe until Steve Jobs brought glamour and rockstar style cool to the industry and San Francisco became the new capital.

I think Seattle has a big place in the history of computers, especially in the late 70's and early 80's. Also in Terminator canon Skynet is based in Seattle.



Ya Kirk-loving Spocksucker!