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MY first computer was a Mac 512. It had 400K disks and you had to swap them out all the time to run MacWrite, MacPaint, and MacDraw. I really upgraded and got a whopping 20MB external hard drive. Went from that to a Mac SE30, a II something or other, a couple others, then the soccer ball i-Mac, now the big screen i-Mac I just got. Had a hand full of laptops too, the last one was the blue clam shell Mac.
For my work stuff I have a few Dell laptops and really hate them and Windows.
I got my first computer in 1991. It was a custom built system with a dos-based OS that my father's friend created for me. One choice would keep me in his home-created OS that allowed me to play a large mass of DOS-based learning software. The other choice would allow me to meddle in Windows 3.11 - of which my father made the claim that "windows was the future". Haha.
This custom built system was made for my Fourth Birthday.
1980 - Radio Shack TRS-80 color computer with cassette tape drive and eventually, 64K of RAM. Once I moved that up to the 5-1/4" floppy drive, I thought I was really living well.
I got my first "real" computer on February 11, 1995, a Packard Bell desktop with a 486 66 MHz processor, 4 MB (yes, 4 MB) RAM, a 420 MB hard drive, 2.4 kbps modem, and a 2X CD-ROM drive. It also came with a 14" monitor, and my dad bought a cheap little Canon B & W "Bubblejet" printer along with it. I say "real" because I was become more and more into computers at that time and we had gotten a few ancient (even by the standards of those days) machines...a "Laser 128" and even a VIC-20, which I believe was broken, before my father shelled out the money for the PB machine at Sam's Club.
The computer began to fail after a little over a year of heavy use and was completely gone by the beginning of Fall 1996, when my father bought us (ehem....me) a much-improved machine of the same make, which lasted me a good (well, miserable at the end) five years.
I got a turbo xt in 1985. It was one of the fastest available at the time for less than a fortune. It had a green screen monitor. The control was dos and a menu. Best new toy I EVER had.
Ten years later, as I was planning to refit it for word processing when the newer system shut down (90 wasn't a problem for it, 78 and the others shut down) the keyboard failed and couldn't be replaced. I watch movies and tv on the computer now, and music, and the graphics are nice but really for 99 percent of what I do my old trusty turbo xt would do.
My husband had several Raido Shack Model 1's running for quite a while, but he mostly used the model 3 as his backup. Only space limitations shut them down. We had a bbs and the bbs ran on the model 3 and a stack of extermal linked drives.
At school I remember punch cards. I dropped typing since I spent more time in the computer center punching out those cards. At the end of the semester we had a party at the beach and with a fire pit. Whoa do they explode when you toss them in a fire. Especially a box of cobol programs.
I remember the first modem was 300 baud. Didn't need to scroll anything to read it it was slow enough. The 600 baud was awesome but the 1200 baud one was lightning fast. Thats where you could begin to post pictures. It just too long to dl them to see them before. And single user at a time bbs's like one we had. The thing was it was probably more fun. You were odd an it impressed everyone if you could use one. People thought I must be good at math since I was working as a programmer. Never good at math, but could write, run and debug assembler 360 and read a data dump too. Now, its the people who don't who are odd but they are relics.
We also had a sysops group and knew in person the other sysops and some of the users when boards were purely local. I remember the first nationwide and then international nets, like I-Link, and fido and Relay Net. Most boards had a local section then and mirrored the nets mostly.
Overall while systems do more things, I don't think they have improved. Just got cheaper and more disposable and more overbuilt so they die much sooner. I'd love to know how to build my own.
Last edited by nightbird47; 01-10-2013 at 10:33 PM..
I got an Apple //c id '88 or '89, then in the early '90s started getting 286s and 386s and 486s from thrift shops. All those lovely people having to have the Latest and Greatest, giving away perfectly good computers. First one I actually bought new was an Emachine PII, and it's sort of still working - it's been rebuilt and added onto so many times it isn't even funny. Now it's a PIII with 2 hard drives, a 100mg Zip drive [because I have so many files on Zip disks], a R/W CD, a bunch of things attached by USB spider webs... it's strictly what one would have to call custom-built. Lots of printers, too. All those same lovely people who donated to thrift shops donated color inkjets, laser jets, various Epson and Lexmark printers - every time one ran out of ink, I'd buy another one. $2.00 to replace a printer was a lot cheaper than buying more inks of whatever kind. I liked the //c best and it was one tough little cookie, still ran like a top when I finally threw it away a few years ago. But when Claris stopped supporting the old Appleworks, and my job required a PC, I just switched. Now Corel has done the same thing with WordPerfect, they won't provide technical support for anything but the two latest versions. My all-time favorite is WP 6.1, though the earliest I had was 4.0 for DOS. Interesting how software manufacturers won't provide support unless you have their latest offering.
I think I'm running WP 13. Its still doing fine, even if they have one or two more versions out. I never liked Word. The thing about Word Perfect is they are always backwards compatable. I could take a manuscript in v 5 and it would still work. Never liked how microsoft didn't do that. And I can convert to Word if someone needs a version like that.
I do remember being SO glad when they switched to regular dos commands (like cntl/shift to center) from their own. The one thing all the versions I've used with the trackball is its ultra sensitive to the single/double click used wrong. But it does have very good recovery setup.
We used to buy used printers from people and fix and resell them. Sometimes something was installed upside down. I still miss the nice crisp letters from a typekey type printer, even if it was noisy and slower. Not any slower than pulling paper jams out of the lazer printer every twenty or so pages when it over heats.
We got an TI 99 4A in 1982. Actually my brother in law gave it to us as he moved onto something newer. You talked with it in Basic. We got some kind of home PC around 1990 I think. I remember we bought Treasure Mountain and Math Blaster and Reading Rabbit for the kids and we had Commander Keen and some basic word processing...
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