A
Brief History of My Old Computers
I bought my first personal
computer in December of 1976, it was during the early days of
personal computing, when most of what was available had to be
assembled with a soldering iron. I had one of the first
computers (a Compal 80) that you could literally take home,
plug in, and use. Of course it only had 12 KBytes (!) of RAM
and the operating system was loaded off a cassette tape
machine...
Later I bought a larger S-100 bus box and put all manner of
circuit cards in it. When I finally sold it (for a Zenith
Z150 PC clone) I'd added 128 KBytes of (static!) RAM, a 6 MHz
Z80, two 8 inch double-sided double-density floppy drives, a
Diablo daisywheel printer (that I printed my thesis on), a
Datasouth DS-180 high-speed dot-matrix printer, and a hard
disk controller hooked to a 15 MByte hard drive. Lots of
capacity for back then (c 1983). It ran CP/M, then the
premier OS for micros. There's quite an interesting tale
about what happened when IBM went looking for an OS for their
as yet unfinished new 16 bit microcomputer. There but for
fortune would have been CP/M 16, and Bill Gates and Paul
Allen would still be living in Albuquerque, NM.
Around 1980 I traded the Compal 80 in for an Apple II+ and
had a lot of fun playing games :)
In 1984 I bought one of the first Macs. It had 128 KBytes RAM
and a 400 KByte single-sided floppy. It suffered greatly from
a lack of programming languages (you needed a Lisa to do
serious development work) and after upgrading the RAM to 512
KB I finally sold it. Other than buying a Mac SE a few years
later for my first wife, I didn't re-enter the Mac world
until 2002 when I bought an iMac G3 for my present wife. The
rest, as they say, is history!
Old
Polaroids of some of my stuff. Yes, that’s a KSR-33 teletype
- my first printer! Later I got a KSR-43 dot matrix printer -
pretty “state of the art” for back then. Funny but I can’t
find any photos of my Mac from 1984...
Here are a few fun magazine ads from the "early days" of
personal computing:
Apple I Ad from
1976:
SCCS Interface magazine
carrying the Ad:
Microsoft Ad from
1977:
Byte magazine the ad came
from:
Boy could I identify
with the guy in the hologram! :)