Ah, the days of VisiCalc.

Oh, god, 8 inch floppies.

But yummy business wear vests! I wish they'd make a comeback.

Yeah, what is that, linen? It looks great. Of course it's got a wrinkle-free perfection unknown to any actual business day.

I do love that this image shows an early adopter of keyboard-on-lap style.

And you know what? It did offer high-powered business functions! And then it offered you an hour or so to go have coffee while you waited for your report to print.

Ah, my first computer: a TRS-80 Model 1. All decked out with 48K memory, Level II Basic ROM, Modem (rarely used as Compuserve was 6.00 per hour back then), 5" Single sided single density floppy drive holding 90K bytes per disk. 1.8 MHz Z-80 processor. Writing in assembly, it was fast enough. It still sits in my Mom's basement. It'd be fun to resurrect it and some of my old programming projects, and put up some web pages about it.

I was, like, the only kid person in town that knew how to use computers, so when all the businesses started buying in TRS-80s, I was never hurtin' for workin'.

I WAS A VISICALC GOD BABY!

One of those trash-80s even had an 8 megabyte hard drive!

I'll be eternally grateful to my high school freshman algebra teacher. I finished all the year's work in about a month, so in order to give me something to do, he brought in his own TRS-80 and set me to learning everything I could about it. Were it not for him, I probably would have turned to a life of vice and crime or something.

and then the secretary comes in and the music starts!

My first computer was a RadioShack Color Computer, hooked up to the TV, with a regular-old cassette player as the tape drive. Old skool.

Mine too, mrmoonpie. Heh.

See, those were of the era when we had COMPUTERS, you know, those amazing futurific marvels that were sci-fi come true. They were progress made manifest and were super neat-o keen, and everybody and their brother were prone to use "Joshua" as a password and think they were being so very clever. Damn, I miss that. Today, computers are amazing, they are fun, they are powerful, but on some level prosaic, they lack a lot of the "Holy shit, I want one!" romance of the Carter-Reagan era.

I never had one like that but was around them on occasion and coveted, oh how i coveted. I had a Commodore C-64 for awhile, until a kid from my church sent a static charge through the keyboard and fried something, about a third of the keys stopped working. And then I was computer-less for years.

If someone says the word computer, it's those devices I think of, not the stuff we have now. But then I may be a nostalgic freak, after all, does a normal person take a modern monitor with 32 bit color and do a custom window theme that is just black and amber from time to time?

At our house it was the Epson QX-10. Before then it was the Zenith Heath (leading to that great name, the "Heath User's Group" - my mom designed the logo)

...does a normal person take a modern monitor with 32 bit color and do a custom window theme that is just black and amber from time to time?

maybe...

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I miss my Sinclair.

It was a hell of a lot cooler than you Trash 80 fuckers. Though I bow down to Heathkit, which was indeed the shit.

hell of a lot cooler than you Trash 80 fuckers

Oof. I had a Sinclair too. I never did much with it because it was such a PITA. So there.

The user looks a lot like the bad guy in the Tron movie. I'm worried.

maybe...

≡ Click to see image ≡

Hehe, awesome!

A few friends in elementary school had computers. One a C64, one A TRS80, one an Apple IIe (he and his brother had built a Heathkit a couple years earlier), and then me with my ZX80. The Trash 80 and the Apple 2 were excellent platforms for learning to program. The C64 played games. The Sinclair ZX80 ran Basic and had a cassette tape drive. Most all I got out of it was bragging rights, "I owned a pre-Timex ZX80, so there." It was replaced by an Atari 800 (talk about playing games!) and then a 1040ST (1 MB RAM, motherfuckers!). Man, those Ataris were good machines.

Well, if you guys want to get really back-to-the-future-retro, I was hooked into a Control Data PLATO system at my elementary school so there! This thing had a touch screen, awesome vector graphics, online interactivity. All in 1977!

Holy shit, 'Daddy, that's the move; I ain't fit to wash your tube socks!