Throwback Thursdays: Exchanging Data in 1991

For today’s throwback, I’m jumping back to an article I came across in the September/October 1991 edition of The Genealogical Helper magazine from Everton’s, written by L. Earl Colley out of North Syracuse, New York.

When Mr. Colley wrote this article in 1991, he was a 74 year-old World War II veteran, and had already been retired for over a decade after spending 30 years as an electrical engineer at General Electric (GE) (circa 1950 – 1980), so he had literally seen computers go from vacuum tubes to transistors, from room-spanning behemoths to somewhat-affordable personal computers that could fit on a desk, so it’s a fantastic perspective. From what I’ve read in his obituary, and elsewhere, he was able to help a lot of genealogists through his work at a Family History Center of the Church of Latter Day Saints. 

Thankfully he would live to 91 years old before passing away in 2009, so he saw computer genealogy truly come into its own, and the problems he faced in 1991 had (mostly) long since gone away. Still, even in 1991 he was optimistic, writing that “Genealogists can look forward to a glorious future of huge amounts of data available to their computers.

In the article, he describes the difficulties in exchanging genealogical data with other genealogists, both in terms of hardware and also software. I’m going to quote just some the hardware aspects, because while I wasn’t doing genealogy research at the time, I was having to exchange a lot of data with other people or to move documents to computers that were connected to printers, and it was not always easy. We used Ye Olde Sneakernet, aka physically moving data by copying it to a floppy on one computer and then physically walking (on your sneakers) that floppy to another computer (or driving it across town). Your bandwidth was measured in part by how fast you walked or how fast your car moved through traffic!

At the time of this article’s writing, GEDCOM 4.0 had been standardized, and Personal Ancestral File 2.2 was out, but I’m not sure if that’s what the author was using (he mentions genealogists tended to buy the same genealogy software that their friends/family were using). When he talks about “Industry Standard” computers, I’m going to guess he’s referring to IBM PC’s and PC-compatibles, especially given that they were the main computers still using 5.25-inch floppy drives at that time (sorry Apple II users and Commodore 64 users, I know both 5.25-inch-based computers continued to be used into the 90s, but Macs and Amigas were replacing those). 

These were just a few excerpts I found interesting, because I faced these same problems.

More and more often, I get letters from genealogists who are computer owners, and it is becoming disconcertingly evident that al computers are not created equal.

At the time he wrote the above, the following computer platforms were commonly used, and transferring data between them could be a serious problem (sometimes insurmountable):

  • IBM PC/compatible, running DOS, CP/M, Windows 2.1 or Windows 3.0 (which had just been released the previous year)
  • Apple II-series family
  • Apple Macintosh (Mac)
  • Commodore 64, Plus/4, Commodore 128, Commodore PET
  • Tandy TRS-80

And those platforms above were just the ones that had genealogy software advertised alongside Mr. Colley’s article. There was also the Sinclair line of computers, as well as Atari’s line of computers (both of which had genealogy programs written for them). That also doesn’t address the fact that while GEDCOM 4.0 was out, many computer programs continued to ignore it and transferring data between different programs could be a nightmare.

Several years ago I chose to base my system on the Industry Standard computers. I am glad I made that choice, because most of my correspondents seem to have made the same decision.

If the user of an Industry Standard computer needs some of my data, it is easy and quick to copy the data to a flexible disk. It costs only a few cents postage to mail the disk. My correspondent gets the disk in the mail, inserts it in a compatible computer, and can immediately use the data.

To help the correspondent who does not have a compatible computer, I must slowly print many pages of data, package it in a large envelope, and attach a considerable amount of postage.

BBSes (Bulletin Board Systems) were a big thing in genealogy, but still not quite “mainstream” in 1991, and not quite as easy as dropping a GEDCOM file into an email.

A correspondent recently wrote that her computer was not compatible with my Industry Standard machine. She has a friend who has a computer that can read the disk format written by my computer. The friend wil read my data and post it to a subscription service via a telephone modem. My correspondent will then read the data from the subscription service, using her telephone.

I have not yet heard the result. I think it wil work, but such a hassle!

And it wasn’t just about physically getting the data to somebody through the mail or over a telephone line, it was also about what kind of floppy disk drive you had:

Some of the newer and more powerful computers are being sold with either or both sizes of disk drives in a high density format. My 5 1⁄4 inch disks wil hold about 360,000 characters of data. The same size disk will hold about 1,200,000 characters in the new high density format. My 31⁄2 inch disks wil hold about 720,000 characters. The same size disk will hold about 1,400,000 characters in the new high density format. Eventually, I expect to need to install new disk drives that can use the high density format. Otherwise, I will limit the number of genealogists with whom I can exchange computer data, although most computers that write thehigh density format also have the option of using the double density format.

Floppy drives were serious business (and the floppies could be quite expensive at times) because for each size, as he mentions, you had two densities, and well, just to give younger people a perspective – your typical smart phone takes photos that would not come close to fitting on even the high-density floppies mentioned above. Upgrading required you to buy a new floppy drive and take apart the computer – there were no USB interfaces. At that time, DOS-based genealogy programs were limited in terms of data to what could sometimes fit on a single floppy (some programs had the ability to span genealogy databases across multiple floppies).

Finally, I love this quote that ends the article:

Genealogists can look forward to a glorious future of huge amounts of data available to their computers. But, for the present, we must choose our computers and software wisely so that we can efficiently share data among ourselves..

I love the optimism (which would prove to be true), and given the rapid pace that computers and software advanced from the mid-to-late 80s through the early 1990s, it had to seem like a “glorious future” was truly on the horizon, although it would take a few more revisions of the GEDCOM standard and some advances in genealogy software and telecommunications before we reached that future (not to mention the widespread adaptation of CD-ROMs).

I’ll try to get permission to post the entire article, because I think it’s a great snapshot of a moment in time for genealogists just as things started to drastically improve.