Sunday, July 24, 2011

My first computer

The year was 1986 and I had worked (at a Christmas tree farm) during the winter to get money for a computer. I didn't quite have enough (since at time they were very expensive) but my parents said they would pay the difference. They ended up paying almost half but it was what I wanted and since it was almost Christmas we bought it.Soon we were going home and I was pleased that I had a computer.

It had no hard drive (those came later), one 3-1/2" floppy (they had just came out) and 2 5-1/4" floppies. As soon as we arrived home I took it out of the box and read up on how to hook it up. Soon I was learning how to use DOS (no Windows yet), what the inner workings looked like and how to change out the drives.

A few days later I bought a book on DOS and start teaching myself the commands and how to write programs. Then it was on to games such as hack and adventure, which where text only games. I then started going through the library and taught myself how do graphics, which at the time where extremely crude. 

Not long after I had bought my computer a family friend bought a new model of the same computer that had a big 20MB hard drive and Windows 1.0. I later was given that computer since both of our computers had problems but I was able to combine the two into one unit. So now I had a hard drive, which was about 400 times small then the average today, and Windows 1.0, which wasn't much better then DOS.

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