And So It Began

[bill_sheehan]

Thirty years ago today, a career was born. I bought my first computer

Comments

[pink_halen]

I remember those times. My first computer was an Apple ][, Not an E, Not a C, Not a G, Not a Plus. I still have it in storage.

We've come a long way. The early days were like tinkering with a Model T engine. Now there are some many parts that I'm afraid to open the hood.

[bill_sheehan]

At one point I had collected all the computers I had ever lusted after. An Apple II Plus. An Osborne 1 (with aftermarket fresnel lens to magnify the 5-inch screen), an Osborne Executive, and the rare post-bankruptcy Osborne Vixen (by which time nobody cared about CP/M and Osborne died the true death). I had the Compaq and the IBM Portable and a few others of its ilk, a NeXT Cube, and a few other odds and sods.

I consigned them all to Pete's Rubbish Removal when we finally got rid of that house. Ancient computers are fun to tinker with, but when you've got them running, what have you got? An ancient computer running obsolete software that can't even access the Web. Not even the NeXT Cube, which the web was invented on.

There's no room for them in my condo, so out they went. But it was fun while it lasted.

[greenquotebook]

I remember those days! Early 80s, going in early to help my junior high school computer teacher boot a classroom full of Apple 2E machines, one at a time, using the single floppy disk drive we had. It was a huge deal when he secured funding for a second drive. Remember plotting graphics using graph paper with numbered rows and columns? HLIN, VLIN, PLOT. Numbering your lines and having to renumber the whole fucking program if you ran out of line numbers and needed to insert something? Then running the program and waiting for it to break so you could locate incomplete loops or if/then statements that got screwed up with the renumber

[natevw]

Wow ;

I left the East Coast in....1970 (?) and all my old HCS Chums managed to get in the ground floor @ DEC etc.~ IIRC most of them began unloading trucks , doing Q.C. Checks and other menial tasks but managed to self teach themselves computer tech and all are gainfully employed using computers .

Me , I never was interested in computer games and I still don't Ken WORD Et Al .

They're great though , I can do so much more work thanx to Windows and other cool programs .

-Nate

[liddle_oldman]

I finally had to deep-6 my DEC Rainbow,even though it had the high-end 10 MB hard drive. However faithfully backed upmy files were, if that machine had bit it, I would have never been able to reload them on anything else. (In fact, my DBase III file of my library had to be retyped into Excel, the old monochrome monitor balanced on top of the newer one.)