[norwaypinesavage]

I'm not so sure about older. My first PC at work was an IBM with two of the 5-1/4 drives, and NO hard drive. It would boot to a hardware BASIC interpreter, if there were no floppies in either drive. My first PC at home also had two of these drives, but a 10 meg hard drive. I couldn't afford the extra hundred bucks to upgrade from 10 meg to 20.

Before that, I used an Intel 4004 processor in a recording system to measure driving conditions. It used a Texas Instruments CRT monitor (emulating a teletype printer) and two cassette recorders to store files. The 4004 was Intel's first commercial processor. It was the precursor to the 8008, which became the 8088, the first PC XT processor.

Even before that, I used a DEC PDP-11S, one of the first real mini-computers. It had a whopping 4K of core memory. Core memory stored data on tiny doughnuts of iron with three wires running through the middle of each. The wires could detect and set the magnetic state of the doughnut, whether it was magnetized, or not. There were 50,000 of these doughnuts in the core. Each had three wires strung through the middle, hand wired by humans. The core was a cube, about six inches on a side.

The bootstrap loader consisted of 17 instructions, each entered bit by bit using switches. This loader commanded a paper tape reader (teletype again) to run and enter the programs. Messing up the software, which happened many times, usually meant overwriting the boot strap loader, which would then have to be entered bit by bit, over, and over, again. Fortunately, the core memory would (usually) remember its magnetic state with the power off, so powering off would not erase the programs loaded in memory.

[greeneyes]

I have no idea about the inner workings of the first computers I used nor the one I just bought.

At work, we had an IBM which used two floppy disks and had a modem. It was maintained by our tech department in a shared computer area. That was late 70s or early 80s.

I had a software program that called banks all over the USA and pulled up balances and transactions so that I could manage the cash for about 100 domestic and international accounts.

A few years later we had Lotus 123 and the info was downloaded and transferred to the spreadsheet. I bought my Tandy several years after I had been using the computer at work, so that I could keep personal financial records, and the kids could play games.

[greeneyes]

All I can say is, the large floppy’s preceded the 3.5” hard disks on the computers we had at work, and the computers that were available from retail sources where I lived.