Remembering Computerland and Silicon North: tech from a bygone era

Accompanying this column is an advertisement that ran in a Vancouver newspaper, The Province, back in June 1980. I still have the full page from that paper. The burgeoning computer field at the time had led to a small part of Vancouver, centred around Broadway and Fraser, being dubbed Silicon Valley North. Today, there is no evidence of it remaining.

Although the business featured in the ad, Computerland, was located further west along Broadway, it was essentially part of this Vancouver technology strip, extending to Burrard Street, where the region’s first Apple reseller, The Byte Shop, was located.

Anchoring the Broadway and Fraser part of the strip was the Radio Shack Computer Centre, a business focused on the now long-gone TRS-80 computer lineup, which was quite prominent in the early 1980s.

In any case, look closely at the advertisement here. By the way, I have one of the computers pictured in the ad, still in its original box. Notice the problem? The text of the ad is all about the newly arrived Apple computer systems and their potential for use in business settings. However, the picture is most certainly not an Apple computer.

One more observation. Notice the days and hours of operation of the store. There is no mention of Sunday. At that time, commerce in Canada was still subject to the then-largely unenforced Lord’s Day Act.

Pictured here is the CBM (Commodore Business Machines) version of the then-popular PET (Personal Electronic Transactor), a considerably more expensive unit. When combined with a floppy disk drive, typically sold as a duo box, and a printer (made by Seiko but branded by Commodore), you were looking at around $5,000 – quite a sum in 1980. Commodore became most famous for its Commodore 64 personal computer, a machine adopted by hobbyists and gamers alike.

My own Commodore CBM, dual-disk drive, and printer have been boxed up since around 1990, although they were mostly unused after about 1984. Might they still work? Old electronics often have capacitors that leak and fail over time. This may well be the case with my units. Commodore has long since vanished from the tech scene, although there have been various, mostly half-hearted, attempts to revive the name.

That said, I also have an Apple IIc from around 1990 that still works just fine. Its screen is a little flaky, perhaps from a failing capacitor, but otherwise it works just as it did when new. It is accompanied by a large box of 5.25” floppy disk software from various manufacturers, consisting mostly of educational applications and games. It even has two boxes of untouched, shrink-wrapped Kodak floppy diskettes. Ask yourself where Kodak is today. Then remind yourself that Apple is now a company with a market cap in excess of US$3 trillion.

By the way, when the IIc was introduced in 1984, it was priced at around US$1,300. In current dollars, that would be around US$4,000. No doubt there are old computers to be found in closets and basements throughout Vancouver. Perhaps a handful are rare, especially early examples from Apple.

Until relatively recently, we could visit a wonderful computer museum in Seattle where pretty much every machine could be touched and used as it was in its heyday. Unfortunately, the Living Computers Museum has now been liquidated by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s family.

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