I’ve had lots of different odd computers over the years, my favorite was the Osborne cp/m (?) machine, a little suitcase with a tiny 4″ orange mono screen. I kept track of rebates my wife sent away for with it’s database program.

I’ve had lots of different odd computers over the years, my favorite was the Osborne cp/m (?) machine, a little suitcase with a tiny 4″ orange mono screen. I kept track of rebates my wife sent away for with it’s database program.

Early on, I subscribed to the Source, CompuServe, and Dow Jones. These were online services I used daily, predecessors to the Internet. I worked in financial public relations and obtained financial data and other information for my clients. I lived in Chicago at that time and often sent news releases to the City News Bureau and the Chicago Sun-Times via modem from my home early in the morning. For some reason, the Chicago Tribune would not allow me to send releases to them electronically.

I had a client in Toronto whose CFO had an IBM PC in his office and another in his home. We exchanged copy and financial info for news releases, corporate fact books, and quarterly and annual reports electronically. This saved us a great deal of money in Federal Expense charges. In those days. FedEx charged about $40-$50 for overnight delivery.

Most clients simply accepted FedEx charges as a cost of doing business. Some also spent considerable sums on word-processing equipment and frowned upon personal computers.

In 1986, I used Software Publishing’s PFS software series to build a database of companies in Los Angeles and San Francisco. I then used PFS to prepare a letter and used its mailmerge feature to prepare letters and envelopes to about 300 West Coast firms. I soon landed a senior account exec job with a PR firm in San Francisco.

I learned how to use both Macs and PCs on the job and by taking classes from time to time during the 1980s and 1990s.

On the Fourth of July in 1999, I bought my first PC, a Proteva, for $1,200 as a lark though the Home Shopping Network. It served me well until late 2005, when it finally collapsed on me. I bought a new Compaq Presario in December 2005, which I am now using to write this Comment.

My Apple IIe sits on the computer hutch behind me. Almost 25 years old, it still works like a charm. Apple Computer can be very proud of the IIe line.

Early on, I subscribed to the Source, CompuServe, and Dow Jones. These were online services I used daily, predecessors to the Internet. I worked in financial public relations and obtained financial data and other information for my clients. I lived in Chicago at that time and often sent news releases to the City News Bureau and the Chicago Sun-Times via modem from my home early in the morning. For some reason, the Chicago Tribune would not allow me to send releases to them electronically.

I had a client in Toronto whose CFO had an IBM PC in his office and another in his home. We exchanged copy and financial info for news releases, corporate fact books, and quarterly and annual reports electronically. This saved us a great deal of money in Federal Expense charges. In those days. FedEx charged about $40-$50 for overnight delivery.

Most clients simply accepted FedEx charges as a cost of doing business. Some also spent considerable sums on word-processing equipment and frowned upon personal computers.

In 1986, I used Software Publishing’s PFS software series to build a database of companies in Los Angeles and San Francisco. I then used PFS to prepare a letter and used its mailmerge feature to prepare letters and envelopes to about 300 West Coast firms. I soon landed a senior account exec job with a PR firm in San Francisco.

I learned how to use both Macs and PCs on the job and by taking classes from time to time during the 1980s and 1990s.

On the Fourth of July in 1999, I bought my first PC, a Proteva, for $1,200 as a lark though the Home Shopping Network. It served me well until late 2005, when it finally collapsed on me. I bought a new Compaq Presario in December 2005, which I am now using to write this Comment.

My Apple IIe sits on the computer hutch behind me. Almost 25 years old, it still works like a charm. Apple Computer can be very proud of the IIe line.

It had a processor (Z80) board that also held a couple of PROMs that held the OS and a 48K RAM board. It also had a Northstar tape drive I/F board and later a DOS board that I/F-ed to a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive. Later on a ‘Bitstreamer II’ that fed a composite monitor.

It required a terminal, that I/F-d via a RS232 port. We used either a TI ‘Silent 700′ (which also printed on thermal paper), or a Lear Seigler ADM-3A (which ‘printed’ to a built in screen). The iMac has about the same profile / shape of the ADM3A — I bet they modeled it on it. You also see it sometimes in late 70s and 80s movies, like (maybe) in War Games, which had Matthew Broderick as a teenage computer genius hacking into the Pentagon and almost starting World War III.

It also had a acoustic coupled modem.

I still have most of it (including the modem), and it may even still work (at 300 baud).

The first computer I used was a IBM S/360, at a programming class I took at a local two year college when I was in elementary school. I got my HAM license at the same time. Later on I played with a Sinclair, as well as a VIC-20 and a friends Trash-80 from Radio Shack.

The first PC I used was a 8086 Corona portable (maybe 40 lbs!), with one single sided 5 1/4″ floppy drive. I think when DOS 2.0 came out it became double sided, from 180K to 360K by using 9 sectors per track instead of 8. You actually had to buy double sided floppies. You could also get DSDD (Double-Sided Double-Density 720K) disks.

Later on DOS 3.0 supported 1.2M floppies, but required a different drive. DOS 3 also had hard drive support. You could upgrade to a hard drive in an earlier DOS if you used a (Western Digital) I/F card that had it’s own BIOS. It came with GWBASIC on it’s DOS floppy. IBMs has BASICA in ROM built in. We were told GWBASIC stood for Gee-Whizz Basic – it did some cool stuff, but kinda yawn today.

My next one was a IBM PS/2 Model 30, which I still have and it works. The PS/2 was the first to use 6 pin mini-din keyboard and mouse connectors, which is why we still call them PS/2 connectors. Since then I’ve had at least a dozen. My house today has several networked PCs running everything from Win ‘98 to XP Pro, Ubuntu and Slackware, as well as my son’s MAC Book OSX.

All the best,

Andrew Darlow
Editor, The Imaging Buffet
http://www.imagingbuffet.com

All the best,

Andrew Darlow
Editor, The Imaging Buffet
http://www.imagingbuffet.com

The first computer that I owned was a Radio Shack Model 1 with a cassette drive and Basic in ROM chips. Spent a lot of time typing.