You Know You Are Old When

[BackRoad]

"...Danger Will Robinson..."

 

[Alan46]

I got one “ Land Of The Giants “
One of my favorites!

Now, that’s hot!

 

[sixdogs]

I remember watching the presidential convention with all the "I like Ike" signs around.

I remember the adult men sitting around in our parlor watching the Cuban missile crisis unfold. Very solemn events so went outside and played but were worried because they were worried.

 

[DarkBlack]

When I started my own computer refurbishing business, in 2003, I started getting requests for CP/M, Z80 and DOS based 8086 type floppy only machines.

My first home computer was a Commodore 64. Bought it with my brother. A whopping 64k of Ram. We bought early cutting edge home computing magazines. We’d find issues that had printed code in them for Commodore programs. Some were like 30 pages of paper edge to edge numbers. We’d take turns on whose job it was to punch in thousands of numbers on which days. Then came trying to successfully compile it, and days of finding a single bad number. A week later, and after figuring out a single mistake , cross checking the magazine, we had a simple pong program.
Storage was an external cassette recorder just like used for music, that we bought and plugged in. Memories…

 

[newbury]

My first home computer was a Commodore 64.

Same here, but I had held out for it, since I was in the Army and employed at an Army research lab which had just started getting DEC Rainbows (with floppy drives) for all the secretarial staff.
And once I got it I found I could fit the C64, it's tape deck and power supply into a scavenged briefcase so I could bring it in to work to write reports.

Then after I produced several good reports, proving it wasn't just a toy my boss agreed I could get a DEC Rainbow. I managed to finagle that into a DEC Pro 380 (with the PDP-11/73 chipset) with a 10 MEGABYTE hard drive! I was the envy of the Lab.

 

[Runner]

I met my favorite TV cartoon show host Whizzo The Clown (Frank Wiziarde) and got his autograph at local home show.

 

[MossRoad]

My first home computer was a Commodore 64. Bought it with my brother. A whopping 64k of Ram. We bought early cutting edge home computing magazines. We’d find issues that had printed code in them for Commodore programs. Some were like 30 pages of paper edge to edge numbers. We’d take turns on whose job it was to punch in thousands of numbers on which days. Then came trying to successfully compile it, and days of finding a single bad number. A week later, and after figuring out a single mistake , cross checking the magazine, we had a simple pong program.
Storage was an external cassette recorder just like used for music, that we bought and plugged in. Memories…

Vic20 here.

 

[WinterDeere]

Vic20 here.

Same time as me, but ours was a TI-99, sold 1979 - 1981. I think VIC-20 came in 1980.

I remember when our school got one computer, to share among 25 teachers and 600 students, an Apple-II or II+. You could sign up for an after-school club to go use it, which ended up being like 3-4 kids at a time watching a teacher use it.

Dad had two ITT PC's (probably 286's) for work, and eventually bought us an Apple II-GS for home around Christmas 1986... no hard disks in any of these computers. Heck, we were amazed when we got a 3.5" floppy, originally 880 kB. Then even more so, when it jumped up to 1.44 MB HD/DS.

It felt like damn-near unlimited storage, at the time. How the heck would we ever fill a 1.44 MB disk?!?

I also remember paying $1200 at wholesaler pricing for 32 MB of RAM in my first Pentium computer. One of the two major factories producing memory at the time had experienced a fire (1994/95?), and the pricing of memory shot thru the roof for about two years. It peaked above $40/MB, in 4 MB SIM's.

 

[ultrarunner]

Apple II here with two floppy drives and Apple LQP at 40cps plus IEEE card.

 

[MossRoad]

Apple II here with two floppy drives and Apple LQP at 40cps plus IEEE card.

My father bought an Apple IIE with two floppies. He was a construction specification writer. He'd get periodic updates to specs in huge binders and input the entire thing into the computer. He could look stuff up a lot faster on that than in the binders. He had it all digitized before digitized was cool.