A client recently brought by a very nice IBM notebook for me to work on. It's really light and thin, but very capable. As I worked on it and seeing how capable it was, I got to thinking about the "old days"...
I started my love affair with computers back in the mid 60s in college. We actually had a UNIVAC computer built using vacuum tubes that took up an entire building! By the time I graduated, most computers were transistorized, but still big. There were some smaller computers that were room sized, but still nothing you could afford to buy or take home. Luckily for me, when working at IBM in the late 60's and 70's I had unlimited access to IBM's biggest computers. A lot of the overtime I put in was just getting to know them better (read: hacking).
In the mid 70's, minicomputers using the CP/M operating system started to become available. They were somewhat affordable, but unfortunately really couldn't do much. I kept my money in the bank.
Finally in 1978 or so, the first volks-computers showed up. There were actually 3 competing systems - The Apple II, The Commodore Pet and the Radio Shack TRS-80. For me, the TRS-80 was the way to go. It was fully self-contained (it included the monitor and tape drive) and was sold and serviced right at your local Radio Shack store. I raced out to get one and was one of the first owners in the area.
(A little side anecdote here. The original TRS-80 cost $600 - a lot of money in those days. My wife agreed to let me buy it if it was "all that I needed" - in other words I wouldn't have to spend any more money. Well, in the ensuing decades, I have spent a lot more than $600 on computer gear! Perhaps I should confess to her now...?)
Now, let's be clear. The original TRS-80 was PRIMITIVE! It came with a version of the BASIC programming language that was a challenge to use because it was so restrictive. It had only 4KB (that's KILObytes, not MEGAbytes) of memory. The screen was black and white and had very coarse graphics (128 x 48). The "tape drive" was actually a standard portable cassette player, and very slow. There was no operating system, no hard drives, not even a floppy disk drive. I loved it!
I wrote many programs for my kids - geography, math, etc. The fun and challenge was making something so simple do something complex - especially for someone who had daily access to the biggest of mainframe computers.
Eventually, floppy disk drives were added, along with more memory and a better BASIC. With the floppy disk came the first TRS-80 operating system, TRSDOS. The TRS-80 was more of a real computer now.
I used my TRS-80 for about 5 years, doing word processing, games, educational software, and general hacking - until I got my first IBM PC in 1983. By that time, it was hacked and patched in a number of ways, and I had written (or re-written) a lot of the system software. The IBM PC was of course the forerunner of things to come, but some days I still miss my old "trash-80"!
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport / Oak Island area. You can visit his website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail him at bsc@bobseidel.com).