Is that an ashtray on his desk? Wow! This ad must be old!
Is that an ashtray on his desk? Wow! This ad must be old!
3D-printing technology; this came in an email from the MOtley Fool.
My dad brought home a Radio Shack TRS-80 in 1980. We loaded our games with a cassette drive that took an eternity. If somehow you even looked at the wires going from the cassette to the computer it would fail to install properly-very frustrating for a 7 year old who just wanted to play a game.
18 years ago I was with a girlfriend touring the Smithsonian and looked up and saw my dad’s old “trash 80” system on display. It made me smile thinking of all the interesting times I had on that system.
Hard to believe I’m typing this on an iPhone 32 years later...
Roscommon
In ‘93 I took an Autocad course a local college. I think the machine was a 13mhz. You could draw one tooth of a gear and then have the machine do an “array”, draw the other teeth. You could get a cup of coffee while it was doing this!
Coffee table made from an original 26-inch hard drive platter from a 1967 Control Data Corporation 6603 Disk File Controller
My first machine was an Apple IIc. I was one of probably five people in the world who bought one. It came with a blazing 1.77 MHz Motorola 65C02 microprocessor, two 64K “bank-switched” RAM boards, a green monochrome monitor and a built-in 5 1/4” floppy drive. The OS (ProDOS) had to be loaded from a system disk every time the machine started and it had a built-in BASIC interpreter coded onto the ROM (the “Monitor ROM”). I still have the machine and all the peripherals, including AppleWorks, Apple’s integrated spreadsheet, database, and word processor.
Those were some good times. I ran a FidoNet BBS all through the 90’s, and had a ton of fun.
I still say the absolute funniest computer ad EVER was Hal Pawluk’s “dBASE vs. the Bilge Pumps” that came out in the 80’s. Wish I had a JPG of it to publish here, but if you follow the link below, you can see it from InfoWorld in 1981.
My Dad did the Cromemco ad. I got my feet wet in hi-tech by writing/editing copy for Cromemco, Wiltron, etc. way back when.
Thanks for starting this thread! The first computer I used was a company machine that my mom’s company issued to her. The machine had a giant tape drive (about the size of a video cassette). After that, my school introduced some Tandy machines in the library. Gads, I remember making ASCII drawings of fighter jets and helicopters on a Commodore 64.
Awesome stuff.
Isaac Asimov!??
“What the heck is electronic mail?” - lol
That was one BIG modem on the first ad. What speed was it, 1200 baud?
I remember taking my shiny new 300 baud modem to the Atari users group meeting and they were mighty impressed because you didn’t have to stick the handset into the top or use an interface.
At the time a higher percentage of Atari users had modems than any other brand.
Well there was a t-shirt with MY WANG NEVER DOES DOWN.
The first computer I ever programmed on. The Imsai 8080. Used an old B&W TV as the monitor. Storage was a cassette tape.
