Posted: 6/17/2014 2:12:10 PM EDT
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I was looking for some computer stuff this afternoon, I stumbled onto the owner's manual and receipt for my first computer, here's a blast from the past. 33 mhz Processor 2 mb RAM 200 mb hard drive 2700 baud modem Windows 3.1 13" monitor How much did I pay for that "state of the art" Compaq computer? $1687.48 before taxes on July 29,1994. |
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Quoted:
You can even buy a whole computer that has better specs in every way (rasberry pi) Are you kidding? You can buy a cell phone that has better specs in every way. And I don't mean one of the whiz bang smart phones. I mean one of the dumb flip phones. Our first computer was a 486 DX2 66 MHz with 8 megabytes of RAM, a 540 megabyte hard drive, and a 14,400 baud external modem. I think a coffee maker has more processing power these days... |
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Quoted:
Are you kidding? You can buy a cell phone that has better specs in every way. And I don't mean one of the whiz bang smart phones. I mean one of the dumb flip phones. Our first computer was a 486 DX2 66 MHz with 8 megabytes of RAM, a 540 megabyte hard drive, and a 14,400 baud external modem. I think a coffee maker has more processing power these days... Quoted:
Quoted:
You can even buy a whole computer that has better specs in every way (rasberry pi) Are you kidding? You can buy a cell phone that has better specs in every way. And I don't mean one of the whiz bang smart phones. I mean one of the dumb flip phones. Our first computer was a 486 DX2 66 MHz with 8 megabytes of RAM, a 540 megabyte hard drive, and a 14,400 baud external modem. I think a coffee maker has more processing power these days... My smartphone is the ATT Windows Smartphone Go Phone. It currently costs $55 on amazon. 1.2ghz dual core processor 8gb internal, up to 64gb external memory 512mb ram 
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My first computer was a Commodore 64... as in 64K, and the cassette tape for media storage. Programing was in Basic.
I thought I was uptown when 5-1/4 inch floppy drives and letter quality printers hit the market. This was followed by the mighty power of a 640K PC. This was a DOS machine, without a desktop interface. |
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I got lucky on the 5.25" floppies, mine didn't have one, they were already on the way out, but there were new computers with 5.25" drives for sale years after I bought my first one. My Bro in law was an engineer for Seagate, so he knew computers and was able to give me a lot of guidance back then when I didn't know anything about them. |
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We had Tandy TRS-80 computers in school but that was before the internet was around. I had a friend years ago who was one of the first people I knew to have a home computer. He was showing it to me and telling me what all it did, which wasn't much by today's standards, and I asked what something like that cost. He showed me the sales receipt and it was just under $6K!!! I almost fell over. I asked why he would spend $6,000 on a computer when they really didn't do anything but spreadsheets and a few really boring games? He said it was so he could access the "World Wide Web", which I'd never heard of, but he explained it to me and I thought he was full of it LOL. A computer that let you access information from other location's all over the world?? Yeah, right...
So he decided to show me and hooks up his phone to the computer, it makes all kinds of beeps and whistles then he types some stuff and shows me a " chatroom" where people from all over the world were talking to each other. I thought it was a joke so I started chatting with some people and asking where they were and it was like the world just shifted...like everything on the planet just moved and I could feel it. It was mind altering to go from having no idea of such a possibility in one second to knowing it was real the next second. Sounds corny but it really was amazing. Now I can talk to anyone around the world on little palm sized devices or access almost any piece of information from anywhere in the world in the time it takes to type in a key word...pretty amazing. Of course anyone who was born post-WWW just takes it for granted but going from pre-internet to internet was a gargantuan step in human history. I suppose there have been such major changes throughout history such as electricity, the lightbulb or the telephone. The invention of the internet just happened to fall inside my lifetime... makes me sad I'll not see what major changes come in our relative future. |
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My Dad bought the TRS-80 when it came out. I remember moving up to the Tandy 1000, 186, 286, 386, 486, the Pentium, etc. i was pretty good with DOS back in the day, scared of Windows when it came out.... VGA, SuperVGA.... I remember switching from 5 1/4 to 3 1/2 floppy disks. I remember when you installed a game and it took a few hours because you had to load 8 floppies.
Then AOL came out! Being on the internet with a 2.4 modem was slow! I remember upgrading to 9.6, 14.4, 28.8, and even 56K!!! |