Crazy about old computers

MORE THAN 120 items are in Steve Baer’s home “museum.” MIKE SHEARER photo

COVE — To say Steve Baer is a computer enthusiast is insufficient.

“I was a nerd and a geek before it was popular,” said Baer.

Although he now lives in Grande Ronde Valley instead of Silicon Valley, Cove instead of Redmond or San Francisco, Baer continues to live and breathe computer technology, and his keenest interest is not in what’s newest in computers, but what’s oldest. 

“You have to learn from the old stuff,” he said. 

A visit to his “museum,” as he calls the one room in his Cove home where he stores his most valued computer relics, is quite an experience.

Baer, a self-styled comic and high-energy fast-talker, excitedly points out a scanner from the 1960s (“the first that came out”); a Sony portable TV from 1967 (“the first portable”); a 1960s Astatic Lollipop microphone; Motorola’s first police monitor for sending data; Compac’s first portable computer (“it weighs 40 pounds”); and early computers with no keyboards and no hard drives.

“This is a Harris Receiver,” he says, “like the ones they used in the state department or the Marines. And this is an Altair 8800 from MITS.”

MITS is Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems, and the Altair 8000 is considered by many to be the first personal computer, dating back to 1975, practically the ice age in personal computer technology.  

“This is an Apple Lisa,” he says, pointing proudly at one rather modest-looking computer. The Apple Lisa was the first commercial computer with a graphical user interface. Officially, “Lisa” stood for “Local Integrated Software Architecture,” but it was also the name of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’ daughter.

“I’ve got two of those,” Baer said of the 1982 icon.

“I’ve got some pretty rare stuff,” Baer added modestly. And he’s been collecting for 40 years. 

He calls the 1907 Underwood typewriter in his living room “my first computer.”

He says he has about 120 items in his “museum,” and that doesn’t include the hundreds of items stored in his garage, items he trades regularly at computer swap meets.

He earned a bachelor of science in broadcasting and a bachelor of arts in market research from San Francisco City College and San Francisco State University. He worked at Zetron, Gnostic Concepts and Texas Instruments.

He said he worked on the marketing trials for the first cellular phones around 1980 and recalls research discovering that the original price tag of $4,000 proved to be most attractive not to doctors and lawyers, as they expected, but to pimps, the only ones who could truly afford the price back then.

It all started, though, back in San Francisco in 1967 when, at age 12, he got his first CB license so his father could communicate with workers in his upholstery and manufacturing company.

Baer has been a “ham” ever since.

“Ham” is a colloquial term for those who use the once-popular amateur radio technology for private recreation and emergency communication. 

But Baer acknowledges he’s a “ham” in the other sense of the word as well. Not only did he once appear on The Gong Show, but he is also a third cousin of Max Baer, Jethro from “The Beverly Hillbillies,” whose autographed picture hangs in Baer’s computer “museum.”

Baer delighted his wife of six years, La Grande Public Library Director Terri Washburn, with his stand-up comedy routine on a cruise they took, and Baer writes comic songs.

He is looking for someone to record a song he wrote while he was recovering from medical problems that left him disabled. 

The song is sung to the tune of Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction,” only in Baer’s spoof version it is “Eve of Infarction.”

Baer said he has trimmed 100 pounds off his former 285-pound weight and has enjoyed living a healthier life since then. 

“I’ve found happiness with every job I’ve had,” he said, but he has just as much enthusiasm for his new interests. 

He recently found and purchased, from its original owner, what is known as a 1964 1/2 Mustang with its original paint job.

The 1964 1/2 was an enormous hit when introduced to the public on April 17, 1964, at the New York’s World Fair. It was followed only six months later by the 1965 Mustang. 

Baer drives it in parades, most recently the Christmas parade. He says he feels a sentimental attachment to it because “it was made in San Jose, where I grew up.” 

But his major enthusiasm of late is setting up a radio dispatch center at the Eastern Oregon Fire Museum in La Grande.

Baer, a museum volunteer, has contributed all of the equipment to be used in the display at the museum entrance. The museum, at 102 Elm, is currently open by appointment only by calling 541-963-3123. 

On Friday, Baer showed the dispatch equipment and the museum to Volunteer Firefighter Chris Coats of Spokane and Cove resident Sandy Coulson. The three were on their way to an Amateur Radio Emergency Services Swap Meet in Rickreall near Salem, where Baer sells and buys electronics. 

Baer said he goes there, and to other similar swap meets (“The Dayton Hamvention in May is the biggest”) to buy, sell and exchange information with other ham, computer and electronics enthusiasts just like himself. 

“I know everybody there,” he said, smiling. “I sell and hope to get enough to buy more.”