> I started with a TRS-80 that had 4K of memory.
It was so much fun loading programs with one of those bulky tape drives wasn’t it? They didn’t always take. I remember writing tons of programs in BASIC and playing Dungeons of Daggorath and being beaten to death by a stick figure...lol
Back in the 1980s and early ‘90s, the hard drives on our computers at the radio station where I worked were cassette tapes that we erased and re-programmed several times a times a day (every six hours) for on air play to engage reel to reel tapes and carts (similar to 8 track tapes) to play music and commercials.
UT was still using them in their electrical engineering program in 1989. They were outdated even then and the students called them Trash-80’s. There was a lab with about 30 of them and I remember one spring break when the place was full of hapless engineering students, clacking away on those little chiclet keys. The lack of a spring break was really brutal and so was the sadist of a professor who threw the assignment at us. I still remember him being dubbed the “smiling assassin” because of his tendency to cut students down with a big grin on his face. Ahh, those were the days.