Blogging or not.

For some reason, I find myself unable to get in the muse on days when my wife is supposed to “not here” but she is…And thus yesterday was the end to an unexpected three-day weekend. Which means that even though I did a lot of back-end maintenance on my blogging setups, I wasn’t able to really come up with a post…

A quick health note.

Today I had a scheduled appointment with my E, N & T doc. I really enjoy the feeling as the fiber-optic scope travels up my right nostril on its way to my vocal cords. As in all the past inspections (at least since the radiation treatments), the images were clear and the tissue looked great. So now I only have to go back and see this man once a year around my birthday. Yes….

And now the trip down memory lane.

First Computer

Do you remember your first computer? The first computer I ever bought was a Timex Sinclair 1000. I bought it in 1982. I remember reading about it in Popular Science before I bought one. The thing that finally sold me was when the added in the 16 kb memory module for the original price. Even so, I had to ask permission from my wife to spend that big a chunk of our weekly budget on what she considered a toy.

And it really was a toy. Add in an old B&W TV and an old Radio Shack cassette recorder and you had a really basic computer. I learned to program in basic on that machine…Played some “basic” games. But really, I quickly out grew the capabilities built into the TS 1000.

Number two

By 1983 I was ready for something better…That became the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. This machine was fast…It ran at a blazing 3.0 MHz. As Wikipedia puts it…

In February 1983, TI lowered the price to $150 and was selling the computers at a loss. And in June 1983, TI released a redesigned beige cost-reduced version that it sold, also at a loss, for $99. TI lost $100 million in the second quarter of 1983 and $330 million in the third quarter. In October 1983, TI announced it was exiting the home computer business. The 99/4A became the first in a series of home computers to be ‘orphaned’ by their manufacturer over the next few years, along with the Coleco Adam, Mattel Aquarius, Timex Sinclair 1000 and IBM PCjr.

I remember those early years of computers as fun for a lot reason, not the least of which was the price wars…I bought my TI at Sears…And as the wars went on, the game and software cartridges ended up on clearance tables. I can remember $150 software packages and memory modules selling for as little as $5. Every trip was a fortune hunt…After production stopped, Radio Shack ended up with a lot of surplus keyboard circuit boards. I picked up a number as spares for less than $5 each…

And the IBM entered the PC market

Business were beginning to buy and use PC’s once IBM made them mainstream. Apple had come out with their first Mac. It was probably about 1986 and I was looking for a “business” machine to learn on. In those days you bought computers at of all places, the local furniture store.

If you think my first two computers were a hard sale for my wife…You should have been along for the ride on this one. The going rate for basic systems were well over a grand. After wandering around poking and prodding and kicking the virtual wheels, I ended up with a AT&T PC 6300 (made by Olivetti and sold under the AT&T brand). Now this machine really did scream, it was running at 8.0 MHz. It came with a megabyte of ram (that included the graphics ram) but the optional 20 mb hard-drive was an extra $1000 so I was stuck with the 5.25 in floppies. Add in a 1200 baud modem and I was flying high.

It turned out this system was a faster and better than the few computers that were making it onto the customer services desks at work for order entry…And at that time that was all computers were being used for in our office.

Dell…

I really don’t remember exactly when I acquired my next computer. But I know it was a Dell. The first one was a second-hand unit from work that set on my desk for several years before I bought it and brought it home sometime in the early ’90’s. It was a 80286 machine with a couple of mb of ram and a 60 mb hard-drive…My kids grew up playing on that old Dell.

We have had a number of Dells since. Today there is an older Dell Desktop setting in our computer alcove that I am not sure has even been turned on this year. Dell Laptops are now the machines of choice around this household…Everyone has their own…Mine stays plugged in to a couple of terabyte hard-drives that sit below the table…Even though it has its own internal  160 gb unit.

Going Forward

Do I have any idea what my next computer will be? Not really. From what I am seeing in the news…Computers are splitting and heading in two directions. On the one hand, laptops and desktops are getting faster and more powerful.

On the other hand are the net-books, and now the iPad…Made for surfing the web or downloading and reading books.

For my personal style of computing, I lean for the more powerful and faster. But I can see the appeal of the smaller always connected net-books but don’t really want one myself.