Jun26
OooO! Dual floppy drives! I remember when that was a big deal. Made coping disks a helluva lot easier and was the first time I had a “storage” drive on a computer. My very first computer was a Tandy/Radio Shack Model III all in one computer. With a whopping 64Mb 64Kb of memory and a 64 character green display, I was the hit of the PC nerds. I also bought a 300 baud modem (I was lightning fast man!), a wide-format dot matrix printer (so you could do spread sheets… which I never did) AND a daisy wheel printer! I was set for life! Or about two years.
And remember, never format your A:\ drive. Sucks.
It’s pretty sad, but I had a 300 baud modem and 5.25″ floppies in 1991. Of course, I was 12, so it was a hand-me-WAY-down.
Hey, those old PCs were built like brick shit houses… they’d still be working today if it weren’t for all this fun stuff like the internet… I bought my computer for writing manuscripts (thought I’d write the great American Sci-Fi novel… I was wrong) So it did my family budgeting, typed my papers and I even joined CompU-Serve and did some chatting on the BBS systems back in the day. I’m old school…
I have some very fond memories of BBS systems back in 1991-95. Back in the day you knew everyone you were chatting with was in your local area, and you could actually hold real-life get-togethers to meet them all. And of course playing games like TradeWars 2002 and Legend Of The Red Dragon was pretty awesome too. They could do amazing things with just text and ANSI graphics!
“With a whopping 64Mb of memory”
Really? Sure that isn’t 64KB?
LOL! Your right. It was only 64Kb… I’m so use to writing Mb it’s an old habit! Corrected thanks to you!
Weren’t you the lucky one? My first computer was a BBC model A with, wait for it…16K memory and a tape drive input. That’s it. I added another 16K at huge expense and bought a stand-alone single floppy drive but Jesus, anyone got about half an hour to wait for a program to load? Oh, it’s still like that now…
My first computer….one that I actually owned…was a KIM, Keyboard Input Monitor. It had 1K of RAM that had been expanded to 2K. It had a teletype as an output device, and it could beat me at chess! Those were the days, 8 bits…8 inch floppies….no hard drives yet.
In 1981, Bill Gates supposedly uttered this statement, in defense of the just-introduced IBM PC’s 640KB usable RAM limit: “640K ought to be enough for anybody.”
And we all know how that has turned out