Probably get SF deviants all excited now........
I started with a TRS-80 that had 4K of memory.
Had an Apple II Plus at home and a “Trash-80” at school.
Check the 300 baud modem. I’m so old that I used computers that worked at 110 baud (one start bit, 7 data bits, 1 parity bit, two stop bits - 10 characters a second). How long would an internet page take to load at that speed?
Except for printing, I iPhone does everything in that catalogue. But I don’t print much stuff anymore.
Bttt! I have to show the kids this. :)
A few years ago, I attended a sort of yard sale put on by a local computer club.
I actually found a few items I needed. My computer was old enough that the memory sticks they were selling for 50 cents each, worked in mine.
One thing I noticed as they were still setting up tables was a 300 baud modem, still new in the box. It had a price of several hundred dollars but the guy in charge told them to mark it 50 Cents too. He said if that was too high, to just give it away.
Still kicking myself in the ass for being a high schooler at the birth of the PC craze and not understanding the potential.
Just bought a 32GB memchip for my camera for around $40 ....1TB backup drive for my laptop for $79.
Remember when they offered the TI-994A for only $99. I bought one and actually was learning to program. It also had a pretty good black jack program.
I gave it to my daughter and gave up on them for a while. She on the other hand got pretty good with computers and she still is.
The TRS-80 made the Fortran IV language I learned in college obsolete.
The Fortran IV language made the Wang card reader I programmed in 9th grade look stone age. I programmed the equation for a slope on that Wang. Y=mx+b.
I really used that Wang, no bs.
http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/wang360.html
Then I went to the dark side and became a fracking oilman. What a fallen angel story.
http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/catalog_directory.html
They have the years between 1940 - 2003
Writing assembly language for the Motorola processor was simpler and much more straight forward I quit using BASIC altogether.
Wish I had one right now in my "play-box". I'd wear it out.
Use to wait impatiently for each new incoming copy of "80 Micro" magazine.
Pulled my copy of “TRS-80 Assembly Language Programming” (second printing 1979) from the bookshelf above the computer just now - learned to make a white dot move from one side of the screen to the other with machine language - exciting stuff in 1980....
the TRS-80 model II was the first computer i programmed. i would go to the local radio shack and code on it after school.
the store owner loved it, as i helped sell computers (it’s so simple, even a kid can do it!)
my first major program was a lunar lander type game. i was 12.
my next major piece was on the franklin ace 1000 (the first computer i owned). a rotating cube (not bad for a kid that hadn’t been exposed to trigonometry and only knew mechanical drawing and geometry). after that, i made a dynamic dungeon crawler.
to this day, many people i interview cannot do basic file operations. hell, most cannot implement strlen (auto-fail in my book)
Thought you might enjoy this thread.
Those were fun times. (Except Jimmy Carter was prexy....)