Saturday was the 25th anniversary of the release of the IBM 5150, the first microcomputer to make the breakthrough to being widely adopted as a truly personal computer.
It was marketed at US$1565 with 64KB of memory running at 4.77MHz. If you wanted floppy drives and a serial port your system would cost over $3000, and a monitor (or Visual Display Unit as they were termed) cost $345 to show green characters on a black screen.
Some diehard early adopters of other microcomputer systems such as AppleII and the TRS-80 loudly proclaimed the superiority of their operating systems and hardware, but the IBM PC soon dominated the market, for good and for ill.
Nostalgia time: roll out all your stories of rebooting uphill both ways through a snowstorm etc.
I remember paying AU$2,000-00 for my first PC hard disk which was 5mb or 10mb.
Two things I don’t want to remember are the 300baud modem and cassette tape drives!
In the mid 80s, I paid $10,500-00 for an Olivetti portable (they were too big to be called laptops).
I would hate to think what today’s equivalent amounts are.
First computer I used was the size and shape of a desk and used 8″ floppy disks , drive A for the program and Drive B for the data. It would only do one thing at a time so while it was updating data entered or printing you either waited or went and did something else.
In 1982 they bought two of the new desk top computers – at a cost of about $A10k each – and still no hard drives.
I had a Commodore Vic-20 and spent the good part of a day typing out a program for a game best described as “Not so big block fires small block at big block to sound of white noise.” And there ended any programming career dreams I had.
Never was able to afford the optional cassette deck although there was a Stranglers album on cassette that did have a program for the Vic-20 at the end of it.
It was the Commodore 64 for me. But the same experience as anthony though I tried (and failed) a few times at programming. But I do remember the long sessions typing out a program and then debugging it.
I had the cassette though. Funnily enough tape is still around as a backup/archival medium.
I remember the good (bad) old days of the first computer in our house – an Amstrad without HDD, and the floppies weren’t compatible with anything else at all. Lovely green colour for the text, you had to stop frequently to prevent eye burn-out. You could type letters, and that was it. It was succeeded by a 286 with a 20Mb HDD and for that 12″ monitor the text was amber. It had the apocryphal 640k memory and just the one good game – Budokan.
Games are for pussies. I bought my first personal computer, for god knows what reason, as it was a Sinclair ZX81 in kit form. I did not have the cassette tape, I had to borrow one off a friend, so it was pointless as a programming machine if I couldn’t save the programs after I wrote them!
The next computer I worked on had core memory. But it was in the bowels of a destroyer.
The next personal computer I bought was an Atari ST520F, I bought it for music as those machines still have the most rock-solid MIDI timing of any computer. I did also use that Atari with a 300 baud modem to call the univerity Unix box. Later I got a 1200 baud modem and I was king of the bits! I also ran a BBS on a 286 multi-DOS machine. It had a 360MB ESDI disc that sounded like a jumbo jet on take off.
Thereafter I have had a bunch of personal computers. None where as exciting as that Atari or the BBS.
I still have the Atari. One day I’ll get working again.
I am a very large, old-fashioned computer currently orbiting in space. Funny how I can talk, but your sleek little Apple laptop can’t. And now I am going to sing a song. It’s called “Daisy.” Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do…
Try that, thinkpad!
I was all about the Vic-20. I’d love to get one of those things and see if I could use it as a keyboard for my laptop.
Open the pod bay doors Hal.
Well I’ve just spent the last couple of days taming a fresh young bucking bronco of a full bells and whistles multimedia configured out to here (no really, way out out here) Intel duo core Sony Vario. It can do everything it seems except smoothly interface with Sonar Producer Edition V4. Prosumer version my arse. But tonight I finally brought it to heel. Now for Final Cut.
Wrassling with it certainly reminded me of how simple, friendly and trusting my Apple Mac II was in 1985. ‘cept for that weird Hypercard thingy. What was that shit about?
But in 11 years I’ve gone from saving up to buy a VW that couldn’t even handle Postscript speedbumps without stalling to running both a Mac prime mover bellowing along internet highways and a Bentley GT with power windows, that each have more computing power than existed in the entire world 2 generations ago.
I’m quite warming to this whole technology progress thang.
Umm, “But in 11 years” should read “but in 21 years”. Obviously Sony needs to do a bit more work on the Vavio calculator application.
The Vaio spellchecker also needs work too.
Get thee away from me apostophe-monger!
Hal, I need help. Your answers lately have been wrong. I’m starting to make lots of mistakes.
What’s wrong Hal? Give me good answers again.
I can’t do that, John. (As in, won’t.)
…apostrophe alert….
Indeed. You don’t need the apostrophe.
I was seven when Dad unveiled our Texas Instruments TI-99/4A (1981). It was a relatively thin unit with floppy and cartridge drives (though needed to boot up with a cassette player – grandma’s, from memory). Not-so-close friends from school used to come over just to hear it do its bizarre booting-up noise.
We had two cartridge games: Parsec and Buck Rogers, both shoot-em-up space simulations, plus one industrial-strength, ergonomically incorrect black joystick with one orange button (FIRE!) which was constantly covered in marmalade thanks to my toddler brother. Euwww! There was a definite focus on ICBMs in Parsec, actually, and I’ve since discovered that aside from the Speak & Spell (alright, and the first hand-held calculator), Texas Instruments pioneered laser-guided missile technology.
Anyway, the package came with a helpful manual that taught us to program the TI in Basic, mostly producing “logic” games that were very boring indeed next to Parsec’s edgy “U-FOs”.
Dad was a graphic designer and had a hunch that one day, computers would morph from games to layout and Letraset would become obsolete. In fact, his colleagues thought he was bonkers.
Thanks for the memory trip, tigtog.
Yes, great topic. I too had a VIC 20, in 1983. Plus joystick, for all those thrilling 1K games. I seem to recall it had a cartridge port, and you hooked it up to the telly.
I then took the next decade off computers, buying an IBM 306 (I think) in 1992.
Now my Dell laptop spontaneously combusts! We could only dream of such advances then….
Id love to see an early computers exhibition, actually. Preferably combined with a wine tasting….
All you apostrophists: I was taught to use the dreaded marks for the plural form of initialisms. However, with some googling I see that my broad Strine English teacher may have been led astray by the dastardly New York Times.
Well I was writing uni essays on typewriters til the early 90s – first started using an Apple when I was writing for Semper in 92. But in grade 9 and 10 I learnt lots about programming in Basic at High School. Useful, that.