| Author |
Message |
    
#9Dream
Citizen
Username: 9dream
Post Number: 291
Registered: 12-2002
| | Posted on Monday, April 14, 2003 - 2:24 pm: |     |
And check out that bargain price!
 |
tom
Citizen
Username: Tom
Post Number: 775
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Monday, April 14, 2003 - 4:21 pm: | |
I especially like to prehistoric-sounding marketing copy.
"tactile feel" |
bobk
Supporter
Username: Bobk
Post Number: 2887
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Monday, April 14, 2003 - 5:59 pm: | |
Heck at least it is a 386 and a much better deal than the first PC my company bought a couple of years before with a 286/10 processor for over $10,000 and then we couldn't figure out what to do with it.  |
Chris Dickson
Citizen
Username: Ironman
Post Number: 509
Registered: 8-2001
| | Posted on Monday, April 14, 2003 - 9:49 pm: | |
Also note that the price tag does not include the monitor or the mouse. I wonder what a mouse went for back then? |
musicme
Citizen
Username: Musicme
Post Number: 314
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Monday, April 14, 2003 - 10:34 pm: | |
Cheese.
Same as it ever does. |
moose
Citizen
Username: Moose
Post Number: 107
Registered: 6-2001
| | Posted on Wednesday, April 16, 2003 - 12:30 pm: | |
D'oh! |
swato
Citizen
Username: Swato
Post Number: 60
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Thursday, April 17, 2003 - 12:12 am: | |
Here's my first computer
 |
Kope
Citizen
Username: Kope
Post Number: 2
Registered: 4-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, April 17, 2003 - 2:27 pm: | |
my first computer was an old 8088 IBM clone. I went wild, doubled the memory to 30 megs in the hard drive. I forget the total cost, but it was 1984 and well over $2000. Dot matrix printer too. |
barleyrooty
Citizen
Username: Barleyrooty
Post Number: 604
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Thursday, April 17, 2003 - 10:18 pm: | |
You were lucky! I had a Commodore VIC-20 with 3.5K of memory and a cassette tape drive. |
AZ
Citizen
Username: Azaltsman
Post Number: 102
Registered: 1-2003
| | Posted on Friday, April 18, 2003 - 11:39 pm: | |
Yeah! Commodore rocks! I had a Timex Sinclair. I begged my father to get me a casette tape drive so that I can save SOMETHING. Then, came the C64, then C128 with GEOS. |
deborahg
Citizen
Username: Deborahg
Post Number: 545
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Sunday, April 20, 2003 - 8:43 pm: | |
HAHAHA! Love this thread. I had a Kaypro. It cost $1500, had a 6" screen (green on black), and was billed as a portable because it only weighed...wait for it...22 pounds. On a similar note, what was your first word processing system? Mine was Peachtext (basically do-it-yourself HTML), followed by WordStar. |
lseltzer
Citizen
Username: Lseltzer
Post Number: 1442
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Sunday, April 20, 2003 - 8:54 pm: | |
I worked on a Kaypro at a college internship. Don't you just miss CP/M? The first computer I worked on was a TRS-80 Model 1 Level 1 (the one with 4K ROM and RAM). The only mass storage was a tape drive that was utterly unreliable. The Kaypro was HAL by comparison. Of course, for the ultimate in pritiveness, how about the very first Apple I models which had no ROM BASIC, so the first thing you had to do when you turned it on was type in the 4K BASIC interpreter in hex. |
AZ
Citizen
Username: Azaltsman
Post Number: 103
Registered: 1-2003
| | Posted on Sunday, April 20, 2003 - 10:06 pm: | |
Lseltzer, are you human? You were typing 4,000 bytes in hex? I had it good with the Timex Sinclair  |
sac
Citizen
Username: Sac
Post Number: 769
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Monday, April 21, 2003 - 7:07 am: | |
My first computer was an Apple II Plus with 48K RAM - A major advantage over the prior year versions that had something like 8K! We thought that was amazing since only 3-4 years prior, when I was in college, the mainframe on campus only had about that much memory. (And that mainframe was one of the two or three largest computers in the city of Houston at the time.) My Apple also had TWO 5.25" floppy drives rather than only one. Wow! This was state of the art at the time (about 1981)
At some point I upgraded it to an Apple IIe and I had that computer for a long time ... until nearly 1990, I think. Then my mother used it for about eight years after I moved on to other computers. It sure went above and beyond!
|
Dave Ross
Supporter
Username: Dave
Post Number: 4576
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Monday, April 21, 2003 - 9:52 am: | |
April 1977. $970. |
shoshannah
Citizen
Username: Shoshannah
Post Number: 115
Registered: 7-2002
| | Posted on Monday, April 21, 2003 - 10:06 am: | |
My first word-processing experience was on a Wang mini-computer workstation in 1986. I was amazed that I didn't have to press "return" for the text to wrap around. What ever happened to Wang anyway? |
Dave Ross
Supporter
Username: Dave
Post Number: 4577
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Monday, April 21, 2003 - 10:26 am: | |
I think An Wang invented the magnetic drum (hard drive) and sold the patent to IBM. With that money he founded Wang Computer, but it foundered after his death in 1990. |
luanda
Citizen
Username: Luanda
Post Number: 24
Registered: 2-2002
| | Posted on Monday, April 21, 2003 - 11:33 am: | |
But his daughter Vera designs ok clothes |
zag
Citizen
Username: Zag
Post Number: 10
Registered: 12-2001
| | Posted on Monday, April 21, 2003 - 11:37 am: | |
I started with the infamous Apple ///. You could load Advanced VisiCalc and still have some memory left over to actually put numbers or formulas in the spreadsheet.
How about some of those great old printers. On my Epson you had to move the dip switches to change between compressed and regular print. |
shoshannah
Citizen
Username: Shoshannah
Post Number: 116
Registered: 7-2002
| | Posted on Monday, April 21, 2003 - 11:44 am: | |
How 'bout those daisy wheels? |
mgl
Citizen
Username: Mgl
Post Number: 46
Registered: 11-2001
| | Posted on Monday, April 21, 2003 - 11:03 pm: | |
I had an Atari 800 and then graduated up to the IBM PC Jr. |
Phil
Citizen
Username: Barleyrooty
Post Number: 624
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Wednesday, May 7, 2003 - 9:41 am: | |
Headline: French company Infogrames to rename itself to....wait for it....
ATARI !! Ticker symbol ATAR
(Not sure if this should go here, or under breaking news, or under politics of war!) |
greenetree
Supporter
Username: Greenetree
Post Number: 1623
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Wednesday, May 7, 2003 - 2:05 pm: | |
On my first job, I got the old computer, the dumb terminal with continuous feed paper instead of a monitor. I typed on it like a typewriter & submitted stuff to the mainframe. I remember that's how I found out about the Challenger explosion: a simple sentence broadcast by the IT department came typing across the paper at the time of the explosion.
In 1988, I had to get a $20k grant to upgrade my work computer to a Compaq 386, with a 60meg hard drive, 8meg RAM, and 13 inch monitor. I even got a Laserjet II printer with it. At least I think those were the specs...
I'd forgotten about daisy wheels & the way the letters used to snap off! |
Tom Reingold
Citizen
Username: Noglider
Post Number: 63
Registered: 1-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, May 8, 2003 - 9:40 am: | |
The story about Wang that I remember was that management -- it might have been Mr. Wang himself -- heard that the salespeople were making more money than they were. So he capped their commissions so that no one beat the top salaries. That removed all the incentive for the salespeople to work, so they stopped, and the company quickly died. The moral is obvious.
My first computers:
IBM mainframe running MVS/Wilbur with a 300 bps connection at home, 1200 at college
VIC-20
TRS 80 model III
Actually, my first experience with the mainframe was with punchcards. This was all at Hunter College in NYC, starting in 1982. I got a "late start" having been a music major at Boston University from 1978 through 1980. Clearly, I changed my mind about that career!
|
woodstock
Citizen
Username: Woodstock
Post Number: 133
Registered: 9-2002
| | Posted on Thursday, May 8, 2003 - 11:48 am: | |
My parents are moving from their house in Queens to an apartment in Manhattan. In clearing out the basement, we found many parts for my previously donated Apple ][+ (I remember paying a couple of hundred bucks for a floppy drive bought out of some guy's apartment in NYC), as well as an Okidata dot matrix printer. Remember when printing speed was in CPS? We also found my old Atari 2600 game station, with about a dozen games. Talk about memeories.
But he real find was an old Royal typewriter. Pre-electric. Seems to be circa 1950 or so. |
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