Ah, the good old days. Printing out on greenbar. Black and Green screens. DOS programing to do simple calculator work. Swell.
Ah, the good old days. Printing out on greenbar. Black and Green screens. DOS programing to do simple calculator work. Swell.
Seems like in tech it’s never good to be first, you always want to swoop in later once the market has been defined. Also IBM seemed to have a talent for getting the key strategy wrong, for the most part.
IBM always made the best keyboards — computer or typewriter. The click was as perfect a typing tool as ever invented.
When God was President. That use to drive my lib father crazy, I would call Reagan God, and it would drive him nuts. lol. Hey, I was proven right.
IBM also gave us Ross Perot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80
TRS-80 was Tandy Corporation's desktop microcomputer model line, sold through Tandy's Radio Shack stores in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first units, ordered unseen, were delivered in November 1977, and rolled out to the stores the third week of December.
$5000? I recently bought a new laptop for work. For that same $5000 I could buy a computer with 6 GB of RAM, 600GB Hard Disk and an i5 processor. Then I could buy another 7 of them.
When I look at those prices I am even more impressed that my high school bought a dozen of them for computer programming classes.
I had a PC class on college on a 5150. The textbook came with a single floppy disk that had a word processor, spreadsheet and some other program on it. No hard drive. Needed to save everything on anotehr floppy, hence, two disk drives
I bought one of these as my second computer (an Atari 800 was the first). My family thought I was crazy to spend that kind of money for something so useless as a "personal computer".
I taught myself programming on it, and it led to a career as a software developer. All in all, a good investment.
We had the dual floppy version of Lotus 1-2-3 at the phone company back in 1983. The boss made us check the ledger math by hand to make sure the computer was doing it right.
I bought one. Upgraded to 256K which was good enough to run Lotus 123 on a RAM Disk and later added a hard drive. Lotus 123 was lightning fast. This was a time when applications were optimized for size and speed.
My first computer was a Tandy, not a TRS80, it was after that, I don’t remember the model #. It had the keyboard and processor as one unit and had an 8088 processor with a Turbo button that would allow you to run at 7 MHZ, wow, what a screamer. It had 16 colors as opposed to the PCs 4 colors and had a built in sound card with volume control on the keyboard. It also had one of the new 3.5 floppys AND a 5.25 also. I learned how to program on it and eventually I got a job teaching networking to people, both Novel and MS. I remember my first big hard drive, it came on my brand new 386, 25 MHZ screamer, and was 80 MB. I remember thinking I would never run out of disk space.
I think the first real “personal computer” was the IBM 5100, which ran BASIC and APL out of ROM. The machines based on the 8088 were simply more affordable.
My first PC was a PC/XT clone from Taiwan I called a “Chingao.”
(My first computer of any kind was an MP-68 kit from Southwest Technical Products, which I built in 1976.)
The “370” series PCs were interesting. They executed the IBM System/370 instruction set (partly by emulation). The CPU was designed by Motorola based on the MC68000, retargeted to the S/370 instruction set. Motorola’s internal name for the chip set was “Cascadilla.”