My first computer was a Radio Shack MC10 Micro Color Computer that I bought in 1984. I believe I got it on sale for about $100. It had 4k of memory and for about another $30 I got the 16k memory expansion (seen plugged in the back.) It connected to a TV as a monitor. Programs were loaded from standard audio cassettes.
It was certainly not what would be termed "user friendly." The MC10 was rated by PC World as one of the 10 worst computer keyboards of all time.
I had a Texas Instruments 300 baud acoustic coupled modem (as seen in the picture above) which was connected by placing the telephone handset over the two "earpieces." I wrote a program to allow me to use this to connect by phone to computers at work to check the progress of large programs running overnight. This was painfully slow by today's standards with each screen of text taking several minutes to load.
Then in 1986 I got a Radio Shack Color Computer 3 which had 128k of memory and also used a TV as a monitor. I got it out and hooked it to our TV to try it out again as seen in the picture above. In the late 1980s Elaine actually used this computer for some word processing including our Christmas letters. It took some patience to use the simple program, and printing took about 5 minutes per page.
Our family played several games on this computer loaded from cartridges or audio cassette. One of the favourites was a classic arcade game called Pooyan that our kids still mention.
These computers had minimal capabilities compared to today's machines. But they did give our family their first introduction to computers.
2 comments:
How many computers have you bought over the years? I don't remember.
My first experience with a computer was a Commodore 64 which we had boosted to 96 K of RAM at considerable expense. Sask Ag bought it to do the reports for the Bull Test Stations. A friend of mine bought an Atari something and phoned me to find out if there was feedlot management software he could buy for it. Yeah, right.
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