Any Similar Experiences?

[W. Gray]

In 1978, I bought a Radio Shack personal computer, commonly called the TRS-80 Model I. Wags called it the Trash 80. It came with 12-inch black and white video and 4 kilobytes of memory.

To put that in perspective, a computer today with 512 megabytes of memory has 130,000 times as much. It had a keyboard built into the monitor, but no floppy drive and no hard drive.

One could not do much with it since there were no software programs. However, it was far above the Altair, introduced three years earlier. Unbelievably, the Altair home computer did not have, and did not use, a video screen or a keyboard. I only know that it used paper tape and mechanical switches.

Since there were no software programs available, I had to write a program on screen and run it. You could save a program to memory but when I turned the machine off, all the data that had been input as well as the saved file was lost.

I spent many hours typing code in line-by-line from program sheets provided by Radio Shack. Each time I started the computer, it was the same story. Re-input everything line-by-line, run the program, turn the machine off and start again the next time.

One of the programs was to add up all the odd numbers between one and one million, which did not take very many lines of code.

This was great stuff for the home market back then and I may have been the only person in Mulvane, Kansas,   who could do such a thing.

[kdfrawg]

I have been in the computer business for somewhere near 40 years. When they started making home computers, and business micro-computers, I started buying them. Cromemco, Tandy Corporation (Mods I and II) , Sinclair, Pet, and on and on. I had to build several of them myself. One day in 1987, I was sitting in my home office in Foster City, CA and I decided that I had had all of that old crap for way too long. So I called and got a dumpster delivered to my driveway.

My office was on the second floor over the driveway, with a balcony. The old computers and peripherals were in the closet in that bedroom and across the hall in an unused bedroom. One by one, I carried The History of Micro-computing on to the balcony and threw it in that dumpster. For some reason, every crash made me feel lighter. By the time I was done, the dumpster was full, I had reclaimed one bedroom, and I was virtually weightless.

[W. Gray]

Model II seems to me had 8-inch floppy disks and might have ran under UNIX.

I eventually became discouraged with the Model I and did not get interested again until 1984 with the TRS-80 Model 4p. Radio Shack, Apple, and IBM were at each others throats trying to be the computer of choice. Radio Shack soon succumbed.

While we are at it, do you remember the Gorilla video game which came out with, I think, MS-DOS v 4.0?

A King Kong like gorilla threw bananas at the New York skyline and each time a banana landed part of a building blew up. Extent of the damage depended on what arc and how hard the gorilla threw. Some keys were used to determine arc and arm strength. We took turns at the keyboard to see who could damage New York the most.

I believe that was the first computer video game and it was free.

[kdfrawg]

There were a number of text-based adventure games from the older S-100 machines that had to be ported to the TRS-80. The operating system on the Model two was also called TRS-DOS and was not very unix-like. It was more like CP/M. When I got my first Winchester drive (one megabyte in a case bigger than a current tower case: $1200) I set it up to be dual-boot, CP/M on half and Oasis on half. The disks used by the Model II were the same as for the first DEC mini-computers. Same format and everything. That was to save Tandy money.

My first personal computer was an IBM 360/25. It needed it's own air-cooled room and a lot of power. A construction company that I owned part of decided to go into the construction estimating business. We called the folks who had provided us with our Mag-card typewriter systems. After they installed it in a room we built next to our offices, and after they could not get a programmer to us any time soon to do custom work, I was nominated. I was also the only one that had anything to do with the computer. We ordered the documentation, which took up more room than the computer.

Once I figured out that a line like ( i = i + 1 ), only in assembly language, did addition, I was off to the races.

[Diane Amberg]

 I remember playing "pong" in Sears...does that count?   In the 1970s a friend asked me to help him write the copy for a computer ad he wanted to put in the  local paper.  He was one of the early computer geeks.  He kept talking about floppy disks and I had no clue what he was talking about.  By the time he explained it all to me, I was scared to death that he was right, and this would be the wave of the future.  Here I sit, pecking away at my keyboard.

[Janet Harrington]

I remember the gorilla and the banana game.  It was hard to do.  What a long way we have come.

[Mom70x7]

I've worked with computers since 1970.

The first ones filled an entire room, or seemed to, anyhow.
We used punch cards to program them.

In the 80's Jim and I also had a Radio Shack computer.
We thought we were real cool to write our own programs.
Time has changed computers!!!

At one of my newspaper jobs, we even "punched tape" to print the stories.
I typed at a keyboard, and a "ticker tape" came out with the story on it.
We plugged the tape into a separate machine, which "read" the holes and printed the article.

Had to be very accurate!!!

Also learned to read the tape, similar to reading Braille, so I could check for mistakes.
I really like today's spell checking programs! 

Computers have gotten smaller and faster and more powerful and that's good! 

[W. Gray]

Before I got rid of the TRS-80 Model I, cassette-recorder memory storage became available. I could save to storage what I had written. Recording to tape had to take place twice in succession since the read-write process was not reliable.

When I turned the machine back on, I loaded the cassette twice and then resumed. It was a slow process but it sure beat what I was doing before.

A short time later, I upgraded memory to 16 kilobytes to take advantage of a software program that Radio Shack had introduced for reconciling a checkbook. This was not a checkbook program.

One could only reconcile a checkbook balance to a bank statement balance. The program consisted of six cassette tapes. I had to read each of these tapes into the computer as called for on the screen. Once I reconciled the checkbook, I could save results to another tape.

This whole affair for just a few checks took the better part of an evening and caused much frustration. I only did it once. Reconciling with a pencil and eraser was easier and faster.

Home computing became a drag and I was painfully aware I was going to need a whole lot more to do anything like the main frame could at work.

Radio Shack soon offered 5.25-inch external floppy disk drives at $600 each. Single sided, single density 5 inch floppies which did not hold much and one had to buy an additional expensive disk controller to make it work.

A daisy wheel printer came out at $2,500. Discouraged with those prices, I sold the computer in 1980. Since these early Radio Shack models were popular and in short supply, I was able to sell it for as much as I had in it. Try doing that today.

[Diane Amberg]

 I remember those big room sized computers that the U. of Del. had. And the big ''Univac'' before that. It was a big deal later on when the student center got a computer and had Lotus on it.

[W. Gray]

I think the British invented the first computer, might have been by or for a pie company?

The first computer in the US was the Electronic Numerical integrator and Computer (ENIAC) and I have seen both the Army and Navy take credit for creating it. It was actually developed by the University of Pennsylvania under contract to one of those services. It could have been a joint contract.

It was to be used for logistics and ship gun firing computations. It was reported to be a huge affair consisting entirely of vacuum tubes. If you all remember televisions with vacuum tubes sometimes they were not very reliable and blew quite often.

The ENIAC may have even been a block or two long and did not have as much capability as any of our personal computers.