128k Tandy Color Computer 3
Now, I have a custom tower with a six-core processor and 10 GB of RAM. It's astonishing to think of how far we've come in a short period of time.
Posted on 05/26/2014 8:48:14 PM PDT by Extremely Extreme Extremist
You’ve got to be kidding me!
Kids are kind of obnoxious.
I’ve seen these same kids on other videos with the same kind of cutsey-coolkid reaction to old phones, walkman, etc. They’re obviously acting and are picked for their coolness/diversity factor. They sure have zilch for technical aptitude or intuitiveness.
My dad had an Imsai 8080 when I was a kid. A casette tape stored a program something like 1 or 2k in size. You entered each byte by manually setting 8 switches to the bits of each successive byte, and then hit a button for “enter.” This was in the early 70’s, IIRC. That was the cutting edge of technology at the time, and we were one of a very few to have a personal computer at all at that time.
ZX81 was my first hand me down from my pops. This was the first computer I had that wasn’t made from a plywood frame.
128k Tandy Color Computer 3
Now, I have a custom tower with a six-core processor and 10 GB of RAM. It's astonishing to think of how far we've come in a short period of time.
When I was those kids’ age (8/9), that Apple computer was state of the art (around 1982/83). We actually had to write programs back then if we wanted to do anything (I just played a floppy of “The Oregon Trail” repeatedly). Just to have access to such a computer was a privilege.
I had a Texas Instruments computer at home which used cassette tapes for disks (for storage). Shocking how primitive that all is now, and how spoiled those kids are today. We may be better technologically speaking today, but we certainly aren’t in other cultural and moral categories.
Bill Cosby told us to go get a TI-99/4A back in the early '80s, and out we went to get one.
Man, you had it made. I was still playing Hamurabi in BASIC on the TRS-80.
Reminds me of an old New Yorker cartoon of a guy changing a flat tire on his station wagon, looking up at his kids and saying, “Don’t you understand? This is really happening! I can’t change the channel!”
Just sayin'
Heh. I think I may have tried that one out at some point. Those early computers were unbelievably expensive. I remember we got the new Commodore Amiga in 1986 and it was over $2,000 (which was state of the art). $2k almost 30 years ago is several times that now (somewhere between $4,500 to $7,500).
Of course, my parents never did allow me to get a phone modem, because they thought I’d turn into Matthew Broderick. Gee whiz, I only wanted to play “Global Thermonuclear War” (or “Leisure Suit Larry”).
I know a guy that interviewed with some Silicon valley company “way back when”. He bought a computer and programed it off some magazine (maybe the same program?) before the interview. That was his entire computer experience going into the interview - but he could answer “yes” when they asked “Do you have programming experience?”. He got the job! He retired from Microsoft 8 years ago at the age of 48.
I played the Oregon Trail II in Computer class in grade school. I still remember that I always chose to play as a doctor, they had the 2nd most starting money and their settlers were less likely to get sick.
Parents in the ‘20s and 30’s probably thought their kids were spoiled for having electricity. Haha.
WOW. I graduated up to an old IBM XT clone after the Atari. I gutted it, and installed a x386 board, different power supply, 4 1MB, 20 pin SIMMS, and a 20 MB, 5.25” hard drive and controller card, serial card for the mouse, 16 bit color video card, and a 9600 baud USR external modem. Wedged it all in there with pieces of Styrofoam. Wires were hanging out of places where there shouldn’t have been, I’ll tell you that. Jammed a 3.5” floppy into where the old 5.25” was, got an IT friend at work to give me a set of DOS 5 and Windows 3.1 floppies, and with a couple of days of tinkering, I was the terror of every BBS in my area code. LOL
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