A Brief History of My Old Computers
I bought my first personal computer in December of 1976 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 player...
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! :)
