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Inside the pages of a 1981 Radio Shack catalog
Mashable.com ^ | 1981 | Chris Wild

Posted on 03/17/2015 7:49:21 PM PDT by AlmaKing

click here to read article


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To: Inyo-Mono

Imagine if you could go back in show up with a thumb drive and say this holds 64G of data; they’d first look at you like you were crazy then call you bonkers because they wouldn’t know how to access the data because USb hadnt been invented yet...lol


41 posted on 03/17/2015 9:57:00 PM PDT by jsanders2001
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To: smokingfrog

I loved “Parsec”. Got a kick out of “Hunt the Wumpus”, too.


42 posted on 03/17/2015 9:58:39 PM PDT by Charles Martel (Endeavor to persevere...)
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To: Charles Martel
My son's favorite.

Alpiner sucked..

43 posted on 03/17/2015 10:03:18 PM PDT by smokingfrog ( sleep with one eye open (<o> ---)
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To: Retired Chemist

I still have my Model I, Level I 4k model. My mom bought it for me back in 1980. said “One day, everyone will have one of these in their homes”


44 posted on 03/17/2015 10:44:29 PM PDT by MDspinboyredux
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To: MV=PY

Was that one of the old Heathkit DIY’s?


45 posted on 03/17/2015 10:47:37 PM PDT by MDspinboyredux
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To: ThunderSleeps

lol, I’ve got one too.


46 posted on 03/17/2015 10:56:11 PM PDT by keat
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To: jsanders2001

Comp-u-serve at 300. You have to admit, it was pretty damn amazing.


47 posted on 03/18/2015 12:22:37 AM PDT by biff (Et Tu Boeh-ner)
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To: AlmaKing

the TRS-80 model II was the first computer i programmed. i would go to the local radio shack and code on it after school.

the store owner loved it, as i helped sell computers (it’s so simple, even a kid can do it!)

my first major program was a lunar lander type game. i was 12.

my next major piece was on the franklin ace 1000 (the first computer i owned). a rotating cube (not bad for a kid that hadn’t been exposed to trigonometry and only knew mechanical drawing and geometry). after that, i made a dynamic dungeon crawler.

to this day, many people i interview cannot do basic file operations. hell, most cannot implement strlen (auto-fail in my book)


48 posted on 03/18/2015 2:38:14 AM PDT by sten (fighting tyranny never goes out of style)
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To: The Antiyuppie

the average page on my site is about 1.5m on a fresh reload.

1.5m @ 110 bps it would take 114390 seconds or almost 32 hours for a single page.


49 posted on 03/18/2015 2:42:34 AM PDT by sten (fighting tyranny never goes out of style)
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To: mylife

Thought you might enjoy this thread.


50 posted on 03/18/2015 3:40:44 AM PDT by StoneWall Brigade (Daniel 2 Daniel 7 Daniel 9 Revelation 13 Revelation 16 Revelation 17 Revelation 18 Revelation 19)
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To: Texas Eagle

Join the club.


51 posted on 03/18/2015 3:47:08 AM PDT by wally_bert (There are no winners in a game of losers. I'm Tommy Joyce, welcome to the Oriental Lounge.)
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To: AlmaKing
My first was a home-built COSMAC Elf, featuring an 1802 processor and a whopping 256 BYTES of RAM.

Those were fun times. (Except Jimmy Carter was prexy....)

52 posted on 03/18/2015 4:59:12 AM PDT by DJ Frisat (Proudly providing the NSA with provocative textual content since 1995!)
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To: MDspinboyredux
"Was that one of the old Heathkit DIY’s?"

No, but I built my share of those earlier. Every Heathkit I built was soldering to a printed circuit board. That was fun too!

The wire-wrapped boards I built were my own designs.

53 posted on 03/18/2015 11:00:33 AM PDT by MV=PY (The Magic Question: Who's paying for it?)
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To: Retired Chemist

“I started with a TRS-80 that had 4K of memory.”

Not counting the unlimited memory in tapes. But I just had mine so I could use it as a terminal.


54 posted on 03/18/2015 11:03:12 AM PDT by TexasGator
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To: SkyDancer

“- told me that he remembers an Apple hard drive of 10MB “

In the early 80’s, 10mb vendor drivers were about $2000. I bought a third party drive for $800.


55 posted on 03/18/2015 11:07:42 AM PDT by TexasGator
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To: TexasGator

Guess he was a bit off on the price ... it’s interesting how prices have come down on things like that. I read somewhere that if prices paralleled a Rolls, the car would be selling for around $3.50 .....


56 posted on 03/18/2015 11:30:01 AM PDT by SkyDancer (I Was Told Nobody Is Perfect But Yet, Here I Am ...)
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To: AlmaKing
I recall loading programs from the tape recorder.

I was happy as heck when they came out with an external floppy disc drive.

57 posted on 03/18/2015 7:23:23 PM PDT by Retired Chemist
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