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Post by dgriffin on May 13, 2009 21:30:30 GMT -5
What hard drive? My first PC had only 5 1/4 inch floppies. Each held about 128 Kbytes, as I remember. You didn't do much more than write BASIC programs and simple text letters.
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Post by clarencebunsen on May 13, 2009 21:41:32 GMT -5
I'll see your floppies & raise.
My Vic 20 had only a cassette for storage. I did manage to write some Basic game programs that my kids played.
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Post by Ralph on May 14, 2009 1:33:39 GMT -5
Ahhhhh...... The old VIC-20, I remember those days well!
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Post by clarencebunsen on May 14, 2009 5:47:39 GMT -5
Going back even further, the first program I wrote was saved on holes punched in a paper tape. After that I moved up to decks of Hollerith (IBM) cards.
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Post by dgriffin on May 14, 2009 7:58:36 GMT -5
Anyone remember 1401 Autocoder? Then you're older than I. I began with Assembler Language. We had a software test floor in Endicott that was probably 100 feet long and contained about 1/10 the media storage that sits here on my laptop.
My Vic 20 was a vast improvement in quality over my Radio Shack CoCo ... Color Computer ... and a quarter of the price, at least when I bought it. I used mine with my radios for radioteletype and at least the Vic was shielded. Also had a nicer screen presentation. Coco's were known to start typing and transmitting anything they wanted when in an RF field.
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Post by Clipper on May 14, 2009 18:28:58 GMT -5
The first desktop that I worked with while working for the Air Force was a Zenith Z-100 with two drives for 5 1/4 inch floppy's. One was the system disc and you used it to boot and run the dos program, and the other was working disc. Each software program was a different disc. We had a word processing program, and a spreadsheet program and that was all. Nothing stayed in the computer. Everything you did had to be saved on a disc. I had a file on my desk like a card file, except it held all the floppy's for my computer. My memory as to exactly how it worked is fuzzy, but I remember having to change discs several times to accomplish any thing you needed to do. Sheesh, how time flies. That was almost 30 years ago.
Clarence, didn't Texas Instrument make a computer that ran off of a portable cassette player? I seem to remember my oldest son buying one at a garage sale and trying to make it work.
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Post by Clipper on May 14, 2009 18:31:32 GMT -5
I can also remember transporting IBM systems that took an entire tractor trailer, when I drove for Bekins. The mainframe weighed about 1600 pounds, and it came with a half a truck load of tape drives and a card sorter.LOL
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Post by clarencebunsen on May 14, 2009 19:10:04 GMT -5
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Post by dgriffin on May 14, 2009 20:32:01 GMT -5
Clipper, at the prompt, you typed in the file name of the program. Usually, it was the A drive, so it would say A>: and you typed INVENTORY or some such program that was on the disk you had loaded.
I still have right here on my desk a Radio Shack Pocket Computer. I don't hook it up to a cassette to store BASIC programs any longer, but it is quite a nice little calculator that I can store (in limited internal memory) often used formulas I use for designing simple circuits.
Both the TI99 and the Zenith 100 were classics.
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