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computers in my blood
By vrtualme | October 9, 2007
My g-pop had one of the first home computers back in the 70’s. I believe it was a RadioShack trs-80. It had 4kb ram and 16kb hard drive memory. It also had a cassette tape drive instead of a disk drive. I use to like watching the red laser light bouncing off the tape. He wrote all his own programs in Basic rather than buying any software. And when I was less than 10 years old he would let me play a game he wrote on it where I’d make snoopy climb a mountain.
My mom bought her first home computer in the 80’s. It was an Apple Mac with 40kb hard drive (”which i thought was huge at the time”) and a 5.25” floppy disk drive. By this time my mother had already been going to computer programming classes, and could write programs on punched cards. I don’t remember any games on this computer. But my teachers and school friends were impressed when I’d bring in homework printed off the computer; even though the printout looked pretty awful at the time.
I bought my first computer in the 90’s. None of my friends had one yet. My boyfriend at the time thought he was so smart because he knew what a mouse was, even though he didn’t really know how to use it yet. It was one of the first Pentium processors offered to the general public. It used a 3.5” disk drive and had a dial-up modem. At around $800 it primarily got used for on-line chat rooms, and playing solitaire. I don’t remember how big the hard drive was, but my second computer was 80mb and my mother said that would be much more than
I could ever need. Needless to say I eventually upgraded that to a gig, because my music collection was getting out of hand.
A couple of years ago I bought a 4gig iPod mini. My mother was amazed at the advances in technology. She said she could remember when that much memory took up an entire room. Sadly, I think I can remember that too.
Today I’m on my fourth computer. It’s a dell Inspiron laptop (and yes I can remember the original portable computers too). It’s got an 80gig hard drive and I’ve got three more external hard drives totaling over 500gigs packed away in the case. At home it’s connected to a cable modem, but when I’m out-n-about it connects to the internet using wifi signals.
But hey, this is all standard knowledge these days. In fact, in this age of portable computer telephones, my system is a bit of a relic. But at least I can say I was there at the beginning some 30+ years ago. And for all I’ve witnessed it makes it impossible to imagine what’s still to come. But this is why they say I’ve got computers in my blood.
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October 9th, 2007 at 4:48 am
Yup, me too. I have trouble getting rid of them sometimes too - I stow them away and scavenge them for spare parts over the years.
October 9th, 2007 at 10:23 am
I think the first computer I saw was a dumb terminal in school connected to a mainframe elsewhere. Friends at our brother school had little apples in their lab but we were a bit behind. In college we used UNIX and mom had a little all in one Apple which used the 3.5 disks. At work after graduation we had a VAX running VMS and Macs we used for design…they had 20mb harddrives and were connected to a 600 dpi laserprinter that cost $11K. My how times change.
The first computer that I bought for myself was a Mac Centris 650. It seemed ridiculously fast at the time. In 1999 I replaced it with a G3 Powerbook, which I’ve just supplanted with a Mac Book Pro.