Bringing Your System Home

By Peter J. Schuyten
The New York Times

June 30, 1980

It is late in the afternoon and I am making my way uptown in a cab, the oversized box containing my personal computer wedged into the seat beside me.

After several weeks of visiting computer stores to investigate the bewildering array of different products on the market, I have taken the final step in coming to grips with this newest of home technologies, and invested $1,333.80 in my own personal computer, an Apple II. Now I am about to find out whether the investment was worth it.

As things turn out, my initial investment is only the beginning. While the off-the-shelf programs supplied with my system are fun, they quickly wear thin. Then too, using an audio cassette recorder to load my programs into the computer is slow and tedious. But the power of the computer itself is awesome and has served to whet my appetite for more sophisticated software and hardware - all options, all at extra cost.

For all the planning that goes into buying a personal computer, there is nothing quite like the anticipation that goes with actually bringing one home and using it.

Although the store where I purchased my Apple II offered to set it up for me, I chose instead to go it alone, with only the manual as my guide. After all, as purchased, my system came with only the barest of accessories - a power cord to plug it in, two videogame controllers, or ''joysticks'' as they are known, and cables to connect my computer to the cassette recorder. In addition, my system comes with an assortment of pre-recorded software programs that are designed to entertain and intrigue me, while gradually easing me into the mysteries of computing.

A word on deciding where to set up a computer at home. Although its possible to make an inventory of everything from your record collection to your favorite recipes on the computer, neither the kitchen nor the living room is the best place for one of these machines. Nor is any room where there are apt to be distractions. Computers - at least in the beginning - require full concentration. So pick an area with lots of space and the least likelihood of disruptions.

Getting It to Work

Hooking up my computer was relatively easy, taking no more than 20 minutes and a minimum of mechanical aptitude. But getting it to work with my home television set was another matter.

I had elected to save some $200 by not buying a separate television monitor to use as a display screen with my system. Instead, I purchased a $40 device known as an RF modulator that permits my computer to work with my home receiver.

Now, I discovered, my aging but still serviceable television set, while perfectly adequate for viewing television programs, is apparently not up to the demands of displaying computer-generated graphics, characters and symbols. When given an instruction, my computer emits the characteristic beep that tells me it has understood the message, but the screen, by contrast, goes from blank to an unreadable melange of blurry images.

To the uninitiated, a problem with a personal computer can be particularly frustrating since it is not immediately apparent whether the problem is you or the computer. After numerous adjustments to my set, telephone calls to friends who own these machines, and finally a visit to the computer store, where the modulator was tested on another set, it became glaringly clear that it was my receiver, and not the modulator, that was the offending member.

Another Investment

It was time, therefore, to make another investment. Since a color monitor, which cannot pull in over-the-air televised signals, costs nearly as much as a television receiver, which can, I decided to buy another receiver.

A week - and $500 - later I was ready to begin again, this time with technicolor visions of all the splashy graphics, complicated displays and animated pictures my computer was going to create on my new set.

Instead, what I got was ''ERR,'' beep, ''INSUFFICIENT MEMORY IN 172,'' beep and ''ILLEGAL QUANTITY IN 90, PRESS ANY KEY TO STOP,'' beep.''

This is a computer's way of complaining about the material being loaded into it. In some instances it was the program's fault, in others, my own. In large measure, however, many of my problems stemmed from a phenomenon that computer users refer to as ''the misery of cassettes.''

Inexact Process

Loading a program from a $40 cassette recorder, as opposed to a $600 disk drive, is a painstaking and, at best, inexact process, consuming half a minute or more.

Although the instructions in the manual for loading cassette-based software are simple enough - rewind the tape, start it playing, type ''LOAD'' on the keyboard, and then depress the ''RETURN'' key - some programs do not go in smoothly.

For one thing, the cassette recorder must be set at just the right volume level for the computer to pick up, or ''read,'' the programmed instruction on the tape - actually a stream of binary computer ''bits.'' If the volume is too low, the computer will miss some of the information; too high, and the signal becomes distorted, in much the same way that music on an audio record is distored when it is played too loud.

''Canned'' software, as the pre-programmed tapes are sometimes called, can, however, be entertaining, instructive and even absorbing - when they work.

One, called ''Finance,'' for example, informed me that it would take 51 months to pay off my MasterCharge bill, while another, ''Lemonade,'' tested my entrepreneurial mettle in running a lemonade stand. There, depending on the weather and other computer-generated variables, I increased or decreased my profits by predicting the number of glasses I would sell, the price I would charge, and the cost of the campaign I ran to advertise my lemonade stand.

Still other programs - actually computer videogames - kept me occupied knocking bricks out of a wall, driving a race car at Le Mans and playing endless variations of computerized ping pong.

Flawed Cassettes

The laughter stopped, however, when I encountered flawed cassettes and programs with errors in their ''instruction set.''

A professional programmer acquaintance, who is long familiar with personal computers, once said that the software written for the Apple II by independent software companies -many of which operate by mail order -ranges from ''very, very good to absolutely abysmal,'' and that it would not take me very long to find out ''just how bad abysmal can be.''

Not only are flawed programs the bane of the personal computer industry, but they quickly take the joy out of computing for the new user.

Then too, other deficiencies associated with the personal computer become apparent almost as soon as you start using the machine. The keyboard on the standard Apple II, for example, produces only capital letters - disconcerting to the experienced touch typist. Moreover, the computer's 40-character column width -as opposed to 80 characters for most typewriters - seemed confining.

But to the serious user these are petty annoyances rather than major obstacles, and there is enough that is fun, impressive and even astounding about these machines to make you forge ahead.

GRAPHIC: Illustrations: CHART OF DIFFERENT TYPES OF COMPUTERS