Days of Future Passed(this will take u back)

Sweet deal, is that still available?

Man, I was in 5th grade then....

Seems like yesterday to me...

Reflecting back a bit - those were bargain basement prices.

I had just joined the Air Force, and was on my way to my 1st duty station (Guam). I also didn't know crap about computers back then. But the 500mb hard drive, that is huge, I am sure that you could never fill that one up...

Laterz
Rage

Hmm, I've still got a P1-90 notebook (Toshiba) around here someplace...

But the TRS-80 Model 1 still wins for old computers.

--TSK

I realize there are those here who can easily pre-date me, but my first machine was 1983. Be prepaired to stone me, but it was an Apple IIe. It had a 6502 8 bit 1 megahertz processor, 128 K of ram (only 48 K accessible without special programming), an 80 column card (not many here will know what that is), 1 floppy drive (143 K on a 5 1/4" floppy) and a 14" Gorilla green screen monitor. Price = $2500. I went back a week later and added a 2nd floppy drive for $200. Don't laugh too hard, the system still runs. Not long after, I saw my first hard drive. It held 5 meg and also cost $2500. It might as well have been infinite storage to us back then.

Jeff, Does the 80 Column card also provide for the Zilog Processor so that you could run CPM/MPM on the ][E? I had one much like your configuration (coutesty of a local hospital giveaway) and has the damdest time getting rid of it. Finally, the local Church wanted it for their Kiddy Training Using PC's. Liked my TRS-80 Mod1 (with all the goodies) better.

G-Omaha, no it didn't do that, but I had forgotten all about CPM. You brought that brain cell back from the brink of death. It doubled your colums in the text page from 40 colums to 80. In other words you could display 80 characters across the screen instead of only 40. Back then we had text pages and graphics pages and one didn't get along with the other. Remember that part? Actually the ][e (forgot about the brackets too) had 2 graphics pages and you could load one while the other was displaying and then swap them back and forth. A friend of mine and I wrote a mapping program that saved a wire frame map at 3 degrees of rotation at a time for a total of 120 maps. I bought a card that allowed me to add 1 meg of ram (at a steal of just over $200 (literally, because the guy who sold it to me later got prosecuted for stealing ram)) and we loaded all of the pictures into it. Then we basically turned it into a ram drive and loaded then displayed graphics pages 1 & 2 in sequence through the whole 120 pictures to get the full rotation. It took hours to process the full 120 maps, but when we had them loaded in all that ram it took only about 15 seconds to get a complete revolution. We won a contest for the Oklahoma Apple show that year with the application. It was presented by the #3 employee of Apple (I forgot his name now), he was the first employee hired by Woz and Jobs. Man I'm getting old.

I had an Etch-a-Sketch, once.

My first computer was a Radio Shack Color Computer. Display was my television set.. 40 columns. Storage was a cassette tape player. Wrote my masters thesis on that puppy!

My first laptop was a Kapro 2000. One floppy, no hard disk. B&W LCD screen.

I still have a 64K memory chip stored away for posterity. You had to install eight of them to make the 64K (instead of a self-contained module like now). Each was like a little centipede and you always bent a pin trying to install them!

My first IBM compatible was a Zenith 8086. Got a university discount. I recall upgrading the 10MB harddrive to a 20MB. That was a big deal and cost a couple of hundred bucks! A Hayes 2400 baud modem was $400!

.........Peter

I remember the apples I wanted one, but got a coleco adam then a commodore 64 instead. It was then it hit me computers, games that was the life for me. Of course, that was after the atari 5600, which wasn't actually a computer, oh well. It is good to see that some of us still remember our roots. There was nothing like pulling your hair out trying to configure the autoexec.bat and config.sys to run advance dungeons and dragons, or even worse might and magic.