Chapter 5

Back in the van, Billy put the test reports in the door pocket, opened the glove box, and switched out the memory cards on his camera. Melissa drove the van the 600 feet or so over to the computer factory, with Billy in the passenger’s seat. The clock in the van said 11:26 AM; it hadn’t felt like almost 2½ hours had passed. At the factory, they found Megan standing outside the factory. Melissa parked the van, and both got out and walked up to Megan.

The factory was a one-story, overgrown brick building. The shingled roof was a mess, and was missing many of its shingles, but was structurally sound.  

“What are you doing out here?” asked Melissa.

“I don’t feel comfortable going in there. It looks dangerous.” said Megan.

“Feel free to stay out here. I’ll leave the van on. If you need anything, feel free to contact me,” said Melissa. “Billy, do you want to go in?”

“Absolutely.” said Billy, and Billy and Melissa walked toward the entrance.

“How bad is it in there?” asked Billy, over the walkie-talkie to David.

“Not too bad. The floors are fine. Really interesting stuff in here.” said David. Melissa opened the door and walked into the factory lobby.

“David says it’s not bad inside. You sure you don’t want to go in?” asked Billy.

“I guess I’ll give it a look.” said Megan, who walked into the factory with Billy. Melissa held the door for them. Inside, the plaster drop ceiling in the lobby had largely flaked away to the ground, its material accumulating like snow on the grey carpet. On the wall, behind a desk, the sign said “C an r C p r”; the remaining letters of “Commander Computer” were piled up on the floor. Melissa, Megan, and Billy went inside the main factory floor, a massive room, perhaps 50,000 square feet, with no ceiling. The roof was still there, if sagging in a few places. Pipes and ducting ran through the roof, hanging down in a few places. The concrete floor was mostly clear of debris, save for one 10-foot long piece of air conditioner ducting that had fallen. There were about 20 long tables, in rows about 10 feet apart, about chest high, with chairs by them and computer parts and computers in various stages of completion as far as the eye could see.

At the head of the assembly line on Row 1 was a pile of green silicon sheets, about 4 x 6 inches; down the line was a machine, which had the wiring pattern that would go on the motherboard. Further down the line was a station called “Motherboard Inspection”, with a magnifying glass, a completed motherboard, and a blue leather office chair that the inspector would sit in. Then, there were stations with boxes of computer chips and soldering guns. At the other end of the room, near the end of the row, were cases, stacked up against a wall; this is where case and motherboard were joined together, completing the production of the computer on one continuous line about 150 feet long or so.

Billy walked quickly through the aisles to David and Dirk, who were at the head of Row 1. Megan walked slower and more hesitantly, and Melissa stayed with her for reassurance. They reached the row two minutes later; during those several minutes David and Dirk looked at the adjacent rows, finding them to make the same type of computer as Row 1; Billy walked down Row 1, filming the entire row in one continuous shot before going back to the top of the row just as Melissa and Megan met up with them.

Together, the explorers walked down Row 1 together; Billy didn’t reveal what type of computer that the line made. As they walked by the chip boxes, Billy picked up a few MOS 6502 processor chips and looked at the dates. They seemed to be made at random times between January and March 1987.

The end of the line revealed the computer to be a Commander 64K, an extremely popular computer of its era.

“Cool, a Commander 64K. I had one as a kid. It was a lot of fun.” said David.

“I had a 64K too, in college. A lot of my friends did too. I didn’t know they were still making them in ’87, I’d moved on to a Commander 1000 PC by then. Remember coding in BASIC on the 64? I often would get computer magazines that had BASIC programs you had to type in yourself, because the disks you’d get at the store were a lot more expensive.” said Melissa.

“Typing in your own programs? Doesn’t sound fun. Anyway, why didn’t the crash test lab have any Commander computers?” asked Megan.

“Commander was a cheaper computer designed for the general public, at least from what I can remember. If you look in the houses, you’ll probably find a lot of Commanders left behind.” said Melissa.

“Makes sense that people would own Commander computers with the factory right here in town.” said Billy.

“Izzy was always a city that was big on technology. This isn’t even the only computer factory in town, there were a couple of others, for HBM and Helmintoller Instruments. Pretty much every piece of 80’s technology you could think of was made in Izzy. We had factories that built Atari video games under license, TVs, VCRs, the chips that went into computers. We even had our own internet service of sorts.” said Melissa.

“What was that like?” asked Billy.

“Was there X rated stuff on it?” asked Dirk.

“It was all text. It was called Izzy-Net, we could get the news and all kinds of information, send messages to one another, and we could even connect to Usenet and talk to people around the world. It was a dollar an hour to talk to people locally or get local news, but if you wanted to access stuff from the outside world it was 5 dollars an hour. It was free if you accessed it from the college campus. It came out in about 1983, I think. The first night I got access to it, not long after it came out, I was at a computer lab at Izzy University here in town. It was quite easy and intuitive to use, and about maybe 10 minutes after I first got on, I was chatting with a guy from France. We talked for four hours, until the computer lab closed at midnight and they kicked us all out. And Dirk, to answer your question, there were adult boards on there, but I never went to them.” said Melissa.

“How fast was it?” asked Billy.

“It wasn’t bad, actually. Since it was all text, the amount of data was small. It was a bit slower than texting on a modern phone if you were chatting. Getting a newspaper article or something like that did take a while though.” said Melissa.

“How many of the people in Izzy had computers and Izzy-Net?” asked Billy.

“Computers, probably a good three-quarters of households had a computer of some kind, quite a few people even had a main computer and maybe a cheaper or older computer for the kids. Izzy-Net, I’d say maybe 20 percent, but it was spreading fast. You have to remember, we could get this stuff cheaper in Izzy than they could in most places because it was locally made.” said Melissa.

“David, did you ever use Izzy-Net, or CompuServe, or any of the early internet services?” asked Billy.

“Could you knock it off, Billy?” asked Dirk. “You’re asking too many questions.”

“Remember, this is supposed to be a learning experience. Asking questions is good.” said Melissa.

“No, I was too young to use Izzy-Net, I didn’t get to use the internet until about ’94. We got AOL then.” said David.

The explorers proceeded to explore the remainder of the large room. On rows 7-12 were hundreds of completed computers, all ready to be boxed up. At the ends of the rows were boxes piled up on the tables, and several dozen boxed computers, all ready to be shipped, against a wall next to a large loading dock door. The computers were all still clean and looked to be in operable condition. All were tempted to take one. Dirk reached for a boxed Model 1000 PC.

“Don’t you dare.” said David.

The explorers looked at the other rows, finding similar production lines to the 64K line they saw earlier, only these lines made models called the 1000 PC on 3 lines, 1500 PC on two, Dostim on 3 and Dostim Plus on 2.

“These were more expensive computers than the 64K, so they didn’t sell as many. When I got my 1000 PC, I cross-shopped Dostims. The Dostims were about the same price as the 1000 PC but didn’t have IBM compatibility. My 1000 PC was $1,399 at Lechmere, the 64K’s would have been going for probably $200 then. I brought it home on March 7^th, 1987, just three weeks before the volcano.” said Melissa.

“Whoa, 1400 bucks. That would be about 3 grand today. Oof, sorry about that.” said Billy.

“It’s fine, that computer would be long out of date anyway.” said Melissa.

“I could grab you one out of here.” said Billy.

“I can just buy one myself, there’s probably thousands around.” said Melissa.

“Maybe we could get the one out of your old house.” said Billy.

“You can have it if you want, but I don’t need it.” said Melissa.

“I’ll have to think about that. By the way, Dostim is Uzbek for ‘friend’. That’s why they named a computer that.” said Billy.

“Interesting.” said Melissa.

The explorers looked around the rest of the building, finding no more computer manufacturing floors, only some offices. They decided to look at the big corner office, which had belonged to the factory manager. This room had a plush red carpet and a plaster drop ceiling; though about 80% of the plaster was still attached, there was a small hole in the roof at the very corner of the building. The large windows were intact, but their view was only of overgrowth. A slit, a few inches wide, had formed in the walls directly under the hole, and a few leaves poked through the slit, but the remaining 95% of the room, about 20 feet square in size, was in remarkably good shape for its period of abandonment. The explorers reasoned that with the hole, the room would quickly deteriorate over the next few years.

There was a large, ornately detailed wooden desk against the right-side wall, with a chair that sort of looked like an Aeron chair behind it. On the desk was a name plate that said Timothy A. Karaglanis. Seeing the name, Dirk started scanning his EMF meter.

“I’m pretty sure Tim is still alive. He’s a family friend.” said Melissa.

“Seems like an interesting guy.” said David.

“Do you want to meet him?” asked Melissa.

“Yes.” said David.

“Me too.” said Billy.

“All right, I’ll shoot him a text. He’d be glad to meet both of you.” said Melissa.

 Tim’s desk still had a fully upgraded Dostim Plus computer on it, though it was yellowed almost to the point of being brown, with an equally yellowed 20-inch monitor on it. There were no pieces of paper on the desk, though there were 3 stacks of about 3½ inch floppy disks, about 50 disks in all. Most of their labels suggested they had run-of-the-mill business data on them, but there were a few games and tech demos mixed in. These were more treasures that needed to be rescued, but they’d be safe in this room for the near future.

“That computer could really use a retro-bright.” said Billy.

“What’s retro-bright?” asked Melissa.

“It’s a process where they take the plastic pieces from a computer that’s yellowed and expose them to peroxide and UV light to make them their original color again. There’s several ways to do it, but you can’t just pour peroxide on an old computer and put it in the sun. It’s an involved process, you’d have to go on the Internet to figure out exactly how to do it. It’s ironic that sun causes the yellowing, but you can use the sun in combination with peroxide to reverse it. I don’t actually retro-bright stuff, that takes someone who knows what they’re doing with computer repair.” said Billy.

“Amazing that people figured that out.” said Melissa.

On the left side of the room were several bookshelves, with hundreds of old programming and computer books on them. They included rare books on long-dead programming languages from ABC ALGOL to Z++, manuals for computers both common and rare, and books on all types of software. It seemed that every book printed about computers up to 1987 was in this very room.

All the explorers decided to peruse a few of the books, making sure to be gentle with the aged paper, except Dirk, who luckily didn’t do any damage. After a few minutes, they put the books back and headed out for their next location.