August 11, 2001
By NANCY KERCHEVAL, Daily Record Business Writer

When Bob Roswell’s college roommate at Yale presented him with his first abacus, he rushed out to get a “how-to” book so he could learn the ancient art of calculating on the beads.

“I decided I would learn how to use this. I bought this book and I found out the book didn’t work because there is such a thing as a Chinese abacus that has five beads and two and this is a Japanese abacus with four and one. So we have a multi-thousand-year history of incompatible computer systems,” said Roswell, the co-owner of Hunt Valley-based SystemSource, previously known as Computerland franchise No. 201.

Roswell knows well the battle among computer-makers as each strove to grab the biggest chunk of the PC market. It was only 20 years ago, in fact, that IBM introduced, on Aug. 12, the 5150 Personal Computer that would knock the wind out of Apple, Commodore and Radio Shack, which had been the first to experiment in the burgeoning marketplace.

Roswell became “a computer geek” at Yale where — in the late 1970s — computer sciences was a small department unlike that at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which also had extended an offer of admission.

Through the ensuing years, he collected computer-related items, so many items that his wife was extremely pleased when he opted to create the Computer Museum in his northern Baltimore County office.

“It’s been a hobby of mine. When I kept it in my house, it was not conducive to a marriage — especially after the kids came,” he said. “Since it’s been here, my clients come and say, ‘I’ve had this in my attic and can’t bear to throw it away,’ so I’ve gotten a lot of donations.”

Everything works

Everything from the abacus to the Palm Pilot can be found in the museum, located in two rooms of the building. The most frequent visitors are the students who attend technology classes at SystemSource.

They wander during their breaks through the museum, which also displays a Macintosh monitor that was converted into a fish bowl and an early Heath Kit HERO robot that fishes in the goldfish pond.

Nearly everything is functional, although some of the older products can be stubborn at times and demand that the operator do things in precise sequence or they just won’t work. Roswell has the touch to put everything into action.

Early calculators took up large amounts of space on desktops without doing much. “There wasn’t much going on in calculators until the 1880s,“ Roswell said. “That’s when a mechanical calculator was developed. It only adds and subtracts.”

By 1910, the calculator could tabulate totals and subtotals and print out the results on tape, he said, demonstrating all the while with a click on the keys. Forty years later, the analog calculator came along with tubes that allowed it to multiply and divide.

A giant slide rule hangs on the wall — an item that Roswell says is familiar only to his employees who are over 44 years old. The rest are clueless about the mathematical machinations surrounding the use of the slide rule — a staple for math and science students before the advent of the personal calculator with its long menu of mathematical functions.

One of his favorite toys is a calculator that debuted in the 1930s and remained in use until the 1960s. To multiply, for example, there is a repeat key that is held down for the duration of the calculations.

The steps needed to complete the calculations not only take a significant amount of time, but are quite noisy as the metal components tally the computation.

“In the 1930s, a computer was a person who used a calculator like a typesetter was a person who set type. Now you think of a calculator as a machine or a typesetter as a machine. This was a computer’s calculator,” he said, pushing a series of keys to multiply and then divide and finally move the decimal point before reaching the solution to a problem.

Electronic calculators would not come into vogue until the mid-1960s. Today, the same functions found in the 1965 Wang Loci-2 that cost $10,000 nearly four decades ago can be found in a hand-sized $6 calculator.

Rarely collected

In the 1980s, hard drives with 132 megabytes of memory “weighed as much as you do,” he said, pointing out the hard-disk collection.

Roswell has the first hard drive “we ever sold. The customer gave it back to us. It had six megabytes of memory that sold for about $5,000.”

“A lot of people collect things like that plastic [toy] computer, but few ever kept things like these hard drives,” he said. Passing by, the hard drives keep getting smaller until they are palm-sized and weigh only ounces.

Strolling past an I-MAC monitor that has been converted into a goldfish bowl, Roswell picks up a bunch of punch cards and places them in an IBM 129 sorter. Punch cards were still being used as late as 1978. A slim metal rod was used by the operator to place through the holes to ensure the cards with similar properties were sorted into the right bins.

The IBM card sorter of 1959 could sort 1,000 cards a minute after someone had hand-punched them, Roswell explained. But it could only sort by one piece of information in one column per card. Workers would be in rooms with 300 machines that created a cacophony of sound.

While IBM is credited with kicking off the PC revolution, Altair, a calculator company facing bankruptcy, actually came out with the first computer when company founder Ed Roberts decided he could take an Intel chip and develop a computer.

“It didn’t do very much. When you turn it on, you could input programs using the front panel switches. Eventually, Bill Gates took the basic programming language Microsoft Basic in ROM in 1975 and hooked it up to a teletype that could start programming,” Roswell said.

Meanwhile, Bill Millard and Ed Faber of IMS Associates had been selling software to automobile dealers for use on their $100,000 mini-computers. They soon discovered their software also worked on the Altair, sold in a kit for $680, Roswell said.

“They wrote new software, went to get more Altairs. But they couldn’t get them. It was a best-seller and Ed Roberts, who was a genius, did not have the talent for ordering parts and shipping. So Faber and Millard built the first clone of the PC — the IMSAI.”

Similar to the internal workings of the Altair, the IMSAI offered a better look with a more colorful front panel and switches that were easier to maneuver. But when a copyright issue threw a hitch in their sales, Millard and Faber shut down the manufacturing end of their business and started a chain of computer stores under the name Computerland which, when it opened in 1981, was designated one of the distribution channels for the IBM PC.

IBM, with its flashy marketing tools and its reservoir of dollars and technical genius, was the first giant among companies to achieve success in the computing industry. RCA, Xerox, Rockwell all tried, but failed. “They just never got it quite right. Their computers were sort of toy computers. They were missing whatever it took to make it easier to use a computer than doing the problem on paper or a calculator.” Roswell said.

Roswell points to the Xerox 820-11 that preceded the IBM PC by one month. He said it created a stir in the industry until its repair record was documented. It failed about every 10 hours. “It worked worse than my senior project,” Roswell said.

While IBM actually predated its own successful 5150 with a 5100 in 1976, the $20,000 machine never caught on. It was programmable in Basic language, and the work could be saved on a tape, but its five-inch diagonal screen was hard on the eyes.

The 5150, with a $2,000 base price and a $4,000 tag when fully equipped, had memory expandable to 64K, displayed a crystal-clear screen, positioned the typing fingers in a more natural position, and, above all, offered repair parts and a real human voice when a customer called for technical assistance.

“IBM really did do it the best. IBM was a bigger company, but when they started the personal computer division, they separated it out and let the people do things right,” Roswell said. But because the company already was embroiled in an antitrust suit, it chose not to make the PC design proprietary; therefore, it was susceptible to clones. Compaq would soon move in and take dominance in the PC field, only to lose it to Dell.

Near his example of the IBM 5150, Roswell picks up the original IBM “Think” pad, a small tablet with information inside for replacement parts. He bought it for $3 from eBay.com. IBM would name its future laptops the “Think Pad.”

Apple v. IBM

Apple, meanwhile, could have won the battle, Roswell said, but the Apple II with its 80-column clear screen and upper and lower case letters was not a reliable computer. The Lisa, a $10,000 commercial machine that was the first to use a mouse, was rushed to market and didn’t find success until it was downsized into the Macintosh.

If IBM had any faults in its strategy for its PC, it was in marketing. While it distributed through the 200-plus Computerland franchises, it also had two product stores of its own — one on West Pratt Street in Baltimore where T. Rowe Price is today. However, it sold only IBM products.

Therefore, Roswell said, it sold $55 IBM cables, while other computer stores, like Computerland, sold identical cables for $10.

But even with its jump-start as an IBM distributor, Computerland was not destined to make it in the retail world. Within 10 years, most of the Computerland stores were closed except for two in Baltimore. Roswell said the competition was violating his store’s franchise agreement, and there was a disagreement over dividing up the territory.

So, 10 years ago, store No. 201 became SystemSource, which today offers training classes for clients as well as systems engineers to keep computers running at their customers’ sites, including Black & Decker and McCormick.

By the way, anyone can tour the Computer Museum by visiting the company’s Web site at www.syssrc.com. And if the boss isn’t watching, take a moment to walk down memory lane and play a game of Pong, one of the first computer games for the masses.