Click here to read my prompted post about old computers!
You’d never believe this, but it’s snowing again. So, since nature is being a dick, allow me to share the depths of her dickdom. All of these pictures are from the CDOT website. To be fair, at least it’s moderately pretty dickdom, and not in my immediate area. Where I sit, it will get cold, but that’s about it.
Write about your first computer.
The TRS-80 Pocket Computer 1 (the “PC-1”). When I was a kid in the 80’s, there were a few different camps in the computer world. You had the Apple kids, the Commodore kids, the TI 99/4a kids (and you were a true nerd kid with a computer called that). I was in an extreme minority camp, the Tandy/Radio Shack camp. I think the Atari kids merged with the Coleco Adam kids, since there was safety in numbers.
This thing had a whopping 1.4 K of RAM, and could save data on cassette tapes, if you were lucky. You can operate it like a conventional calculator as well, but where’s the fun in that? This had BASIC on ROM, but it was very limited. 7-character string limit, for instance. Arrays of anything were painful.
Eventually I moved up through the Radio Shack ranks, and at point, owned a beast like this:
I had the expansion unit with 3 drives in it, and the picture doesn’t really do it justice how BIG this thing is. Those are 8 inch disk drives that stored a whopping 160 kB each. And they pulled amps! The light on my desk would flicker during disk accesses, which were loud and violent.
The Night Driver 