February 15 marks World Computer Day, which the computer industry uses to celebrate computers and make sure everyone knows how wonderful they are. The event apparently always has a theme; this year's theme is the 80th anniversary of ENIAC, the "first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer." Well, I don't have anything to do with ENIAC, so I'm going to celebrate by reminiscing about my first two computers instead.
My very first computer was an IBM XT. The Wikipedia page for it says that the official name was IBM Personal Computer XT and that it was released in 1983. I think that I got mine just after I graduated college, so that seems to fit. I remember that the really big deal about it was that it came with an internal hard drive of — wait for it — 10 MB! Wikipedia also says that it cost a little over $2,000, which I know I didn't have at the time, and I don't remember how I got the computer.
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| IBM XT photo by Remember the dot; used under license |
I was just starting to play around with the XT and figure out how to use it when the brother of a friend said he really, really wanted it. He was doing some heavy-duty number crunching and could really use the hard drive and faster processor to help speed up his computations. He offered to trade me his IBM PC and $500 in cash for the XT. Well, how could I pass up a deal like that?
So I very quickly was on to my second computer, which was definitely a step backward from the first. The IBM Personal Computer had 16 KB of RAM and two floppy drives but no internal hard drive. I became quite adept at popping floppies in and out, as I recall.
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| IBM PC photo by Rama; used under license |
It was around this time that the staff in the School of Letters, Arts and Sciences at USC, where I was working, also started getting individual desktop computers in our offices. I still remember when the administrative assistant in another department called and asked me to help her figure out what had happened to her computer, which was showing only a blank screen. I quickly determined that she had actually reformatted her C drive and deleted everything on it (yup, people really used to do that). I was able to restore it for her and earned a reputation for being the computer "fix it" person in our building.
In contrast, I'm typing this post on a Dell Latitude 5580 laptop with 16 GB of RAM and a 476 GB hard drive. My, how things have changed.
My first computer was a home-built job with cpm processing, 8 in floppies. I loved using WordStar and making all corrections on the computer before printing on a daisy wheel printer. I also loved playing adventure. We took out a loan for $4K to pay for it in 1982. We still have it tucked away somewhere.
ReplyDeleteWow. Wait, you took out a loan for $4K to pay for a home-built computer? And I don't remember a game called Adventure at all.
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