I had to look that one up. I vaguely remember that thing. I was pretty young at the time. In 1982, for christmas that year, my parents bought me a C-64, 1541 disc drive and a dot matrix printer that would fly like the wind. Stuck a 300baud modem on it and within a year I was in trouble for hacking into the local real estate board. My mother could never understand why I would run that thing for weeks on end with it dialing phone numbers around the clock. Ahh the good 'ol days.
Wasn't allowed a modem, perhaps for the best looking back! My Atari 400 rocked, nothing like punching out basic on a membrane keyboard.... we've destroyed this thread....
My early 80's IBM clone had two 5" floppy drives. The OS ran on one, and the program on the other. And since it had that huge amount of RAM (640), I ran a virtual drive which was as fast as a hard drive. My machine today does not run much faster or do much more. Computers have not really gotten much better, they are just more complex and don't let you code/hack very easily. I still have one of those IBM word processors with the dual 12" floppy drives. My next door neighbor gave it to me.
Yes... thread is toast. Sold my C64 for an IBM xt clone. First hard drive was 20Megs! Cost me 500bucks! In school we used 5 1/4" floppy discs like hard currency. Yup.. 640K was the standard FOR YEARS!
I was an Atari man until the mid 90s I had an Atari ST i bought in 84 for 1100.00 it had 3 meg of ram a windows type OS that could direct access up to 8 meg of ram, a built in 3.5 " disk drive. the IBM type machines didn't even com close to its abilities until the Pentiums came out. and the OS didn't match it even remotely until XP. The problem was that the later after market production software. IBM took control of the production software because of its name. Art B
$1100 bucks was a lot of scratch back then. Almost 3k in todays duckets. IBM spotted the software issue early and thats what made them rich. They grabbed control and screwed all the little guys right out the back door. Remember the Amiga? How crap that thing was AMAZING. It's ability to multi task was impressive back then. But the issue was software for it. I had to take the pill and succumb to IBM. Back in 1993 I had a very wealthy and weird spanish room mate that had a box of floppys marked Chicago on it. So I took it and installed it on my computer. Not sure who he knew, but it was Windoze'95 !!!!!! Back then, it was a thing of beauty compared to 3.1 and I owned it free of charge! I was a computer science major at the time at Riddle and all we had were Sun microsystems. And they expected me to WRITE code??? I was screwed before I even had a chance.
My first word processor was a manual Typewriter. Man wood that thing fly when I was all jacked up on coffee.
I had a dot matrix printer back in the day that would take your hand off if you weren't careful! That sucker would haul some serious ass. Watching it was as mesmerizing as watching chirps scrapper. Puts me right to sleep.
Colecovision Adam was my first "real" computer. I learned to code on it, write papers and play video games. It was great..... for the time
My first computer was the Osborne 1 which contained a Z80 processor. It came with Supercalc, a spreadsheet program that pre-dated Lotus 123. The next computer I bought had an 8086 but it didn't run Windows 1.0 very well. Now, I run a Windows 10 machine with an emulator so I can run Windows 2000 along with all the software such as Visual Basic 6. I spent a fortune on computers over the years and I regret it.
These days the latest and greatest is outdated within 6 months of original release. Sometimes quicker than that. These days I'm not sure if it's the "Keeping up with the Jones" crowd or the "Me Too" group that has to have the latest and greatest toys on the market.
My first was a Commodore 128 in the late 80's. I lost interest as I really didn't have much application for it and the DOS operating system was less than intuitive so I sold it along. I didn't own another computer till the mid nineties. Even then I was a bit disinterested, but circumstances seemed to require it. It's a much different world now though, that's for sure. Pete
