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Do You Remember Your First?
It was the mid-eighties. I had a degree in Literature from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and I was determined to make my living as a freelance writer. And I adored my typewriter—the noises it made, the satisfying push on the keys, the occasional ink on my hands from changing ribbons. I’d heard personal computers were the next big thing, but not for me. No self-respecting writer would give up a beautiful typewriter for that.
Then, at a writer’s conference, I was introduced to this bad boy:
And it seduced me with the convenience of never having to retype a whole page because of a typo or a reconsidered word choice, with the usefulness of having all my work on one slender floppy disk, with the smooth way the keyboard clipped onto the front so you could carry it by the handle in the back like a sewing machine. All my writerly pride went out the window. I had to have it.
Nowadays, I sling around two slim MacBooks like they were nothing, and I can hardly believe I once thought that heavy Kaypro was portable, or that dot-matrix printers were legible. But I’ll never forget you, Kaypro II. You turned my head, you metal-cased rascal you.
What was your first computer?
Published in Technology
And the fun thing is, you can still have one! All kinds of stuff shows up on ebay and elsewhere.
We were all fooled by headline.
That monitor was like a bowling ball. Can’t imagine the shipping on it.
Of course, the physical media has changed over the years…
See Richard’s comment #13. We referred to it fondly as a “Trash 80.” I liked it until I tried to save my master’s thesis on it in one file. I had no trouble saving it. But when I tried to open it, it was too large to open! My thesis!! But there was a Radio Shack store nearby, and he hadn’t seen the problem before, but knew how to fix it. He broke it down into smaller files, which allowed me to open them. Phew!!
Not true! ;-)
I had a Compaq “luggable”; darn thing almost weighed as much as I did!
On my first flight back home from Japan I sat next to an IBM customer service fellow. He opined at length how floppy disks were just a flash in the pan.
So that’s why we have flash drives!
What took you so long?
Keep an eye on shopgoodwill.com they get ginormous shipping discounts from FedEx.
My first computer was a Zenith PC-XT clone. I chose a model with dual 5.25″ floppy disk drives and no hard drive. Why? Because my place of employment used Zenith PCs and it seemed like there was always at least one machine whose 20 MB hard drive was dead. I didn’t want to deal with the hassle of a dead hard drive, and I mainly wanted it to play PC games that ran directly off floppy disks so I didn’t think I needed one. It turned out to be a good choice – I used that PC for years and it never gave me a lick of trouble.
Vic-20 followed by Commodore 65 followed by Amiga 500 (“which was way ahead of its time”) and taught me finally that reality is inferior to perception, inertia, herd instinct, and ignorant journalists in the real world.
Not one Osborne?
I bought my first computer in 1985, a DEC with 2 floppy drives, through my employer at the time. One day, as I was making a payment, the CFO asked me a question. He pointed to a delivery man pushing a handcart with a cardboard box. “Do you know what that is?” I answered no. “That’s a hard drive, and it holds 5 megabytes. No one will ever need 5 megabytes.”
Don’t we stone false prophets?
I looked at the Osborne but the screen was just way too small. The screen on my Otrona is already too-small enough. The Osborne’s was TINY. Especially the original. The Executive or whatever it was called, wasn’t much better.
https://shopgoodwill.com/item/140075887
I had one. It was the only personal computer I could afford (and, at that, I sold some of my coin collection to get it). Tiny screen but I had young eyes, got Turbo Pascal (which worked great) and used it with dial-up for a bit of online stuff. Really, really heavy.
I remember when I looked at it, there were other options that were more usable and less expensive. And I wasn’t terribly confident that Osborne would still be around if I needed help/parts/etc, another difference from Compaq and others. I believe that’s when I got a T3200.
When I bought mine, it was on a big sale at one of the computer store chains at the time. I would have preferred a Kaypro for the larger screen, but at that moment it cost a lot more. Portability (however limited with the size and weight) was a crucial factor.
The T3200 was portable, had a much larger screen (gas plasma, not lcd), probably a better keyboard, and i think a 20 meg hard drive, and it was Compaq so less worries. I don’t remember how much it cost, but if you got a big discount then maybe…
I typed a college paper on a dumb terminal running off an IBM mainframe at the Dartmouth Kiewit Computation Center. I was helping some grad students who were working on a “typing” program. My roommate worked at the data center part time and suggested I play guinea pig. It took me forever to type in the data. The programmers had not figured out pagination, so you had to print it out first on a dot matrix printer, determine where the pages should end, add spaces to advance the page and create a top and bottom margin, and repeat. It took forever. And the end product was terrible as I just ran out of patience and time.
In the late seventies, Touche Ross (my first real job out of grad school) invested in several different computers, Apple 2s, Compac PCs, IBM PC’s, Wang PC’s, and started a “computer room” for everyone’s use. The firm had standardized on Wang word processors, but PC’s seemed to be the next big thing. I was one of two staffers who showed some promise and soon became a go to modeller for the firm (Lotus 123.) They even gave me my own Compaq Portable so I could work on stuff at home. It had a 6″ X 6″ screen and looked like a suitcase. It weighed a little short of a ton.
Those were the days. I remember being excited when they came out with a 40 Meg hard drive. My days as a disc jockey were over!
I also built programs in COBOL that paralleled client processes. We used to run these programs at night at the Harvard Data center. They almost banned me from the place when I inadvertently mixed up the Job Control cards that cued up one of my runs, a physical inventory reconciliation for a major client. I crashed Harvard’s mainframe. I took them a couple of hours for them to find the problem.
The Qantel minicomputer systems I worked on had a “document printing” program, and it handled pagination etc, but it was really just used for printing out user guides for the software on the systems. Most of which was in all-upper-case because the commonly used 300-cps Teletype model 30 printers only did upper-case. The character belt used in that printer had, as I recall, 3 sets of characters in the loop. That standard belt could be replaced with an optional belt that had 2 sets of upper-case characters and one of lower-case, for better-looking documents. But that reduced the speed for all-upper-case printing (which was most of it) to 200cps, and lower-case printing was just 100cps. So most places got along without it.
That dealer also sold Lexitron dedicated word-processing systems with 5.25″ floppies and a nice WYSIWYG display and a Qume (I think) daisy-wheel printer with optional sheet-feeder.
Later, Qantel added a specialized terminal model, the VT-4, that loaded a specialized word-processing program from the main system and document storage was also on the main system. A letter-quality printer (maybe also Qume) was usually connected directly. All of the Qantel terminals were “smart” (I remember seeing two Z80 CPUs in an older model) and later models could handle up to 6 “sessions” that were user-switchable. The VT-4 went farther.
My adventure in that area was writing a basic Artificial Intelligence program called Normal Algorithm for my academic advisor at Oregon State, who was also the head of the math department. After a first year of “bonehead” classes – biology, etc, the stuff you have to take to get any degree – and frustration at easily blowing away senior-level (400) Computer Science classes, he offered me a full 12-hour term of “A” for making that program for the department to use.
I met with the dept. head one day a week to get details nailed down, wrote the program out longhand on legal pads the last weekend of the term, keypunched it myself, and it worked.
Normal Algorithm is based on individual character manipulation, and the system it had to run on was a CDC Cyber with 60-bit words. If I’d packed 10 6-bit (upper-case only) characters per word for “efficiency,” the processor would spend 99%+ of its time just unpacking and re-packing characters. A terrible waste of time for a mainframe. So I wound up using one whole 60-bit word per character! Which meant that even a rather modest “program” and operating string might use up most of the 192k-word system memory. And that meant that for NRMALG to run, however briefly, everything else in the system got swapped out.
The system managers/operators were not happy about that, but the head of the math dept had some pull. Still, they agreed to have students only use the program at night.
I made it less egregious by breaking up the program itself into segments, “edit” and “run” etc, and that revealed that the segmenting system created by CDC wasn’t much good. The on-site field office for CDC didn’t like that part.
After that, and realizing it was pointless for me to take any more regular classes – I’d had 3 years in High School on the PDP-8, whereas at that time most kids going to college may have never SEEN a real computer before – I went job-hunting and got my first job with the Qantel systems at a manufacturing company in Central Oregon. After 2 years working miracles there, I got hired away by the Qantel dealer they had bought the system and (terrible) original software from. (The source code they had been given often didn’t compile at all, and what did compile often didn’t come out the same as the object code they were running!)
That would have been a much later computer. When I was buying it was either Osborne or Kaypro or a box + monitor. I bought when portables with hard drives did not exist; the Osborne had two 5.25 inch floppies. Hard drives for desktops were physically big and expensive.
Seems there was pretty close overlap, anyway. The Osborne-1 looks to have been available through 1985 or so, and the T3200 came out in 87, I got one of the first available in my area.
I had my Osborne in 1982, maybe. A lot of advancements were made between then and 1987. The original Macintosh came out in 1984 and it didn’t have a hard drive.
Oh I figured later, maybe a closeout, depending on how discounted it was.
The computer magazines of the day reflect the changes in the industry. Magazines from 1980-82 are pitched to hobbyists and buffs, people who are willing to install print spoolers and set elaborate DIP switches at both the computer and printer ends. People who rhapsodized over writing device drivers. From the mid-80s on, they became less geeky, more attuned to end users, particularly business users. More color illustrations. Fewer admonitions to use a little PEEK and POKE.
In the MS-DOS world, the 286 was a big advance for graphics quality and ease of use, as was the 386 later.
And I miss those 500+ page tomes, BYTE Magazine with Pournelle’s Chaos Manor column and John Dvorak’s industry musings. (I miss Jerry Pournelle, too, may he rest in peace.)