my first computer was a ZX81
Just had to wait in a waiting room which had a PC World from 2001 on the table. The cover story was about 20 years of PC history - from the IBM PC to “today’s” PIII 1500Mhz (no mentioning in 2001 of Ghz!!). Oh those good old days when I inherited a Texas Instruments ZX81 with 4KB memory (and a hugely expensive 16KB memory module. Where you had to write you programmes in Basic and it was a success to have a random pixel firing up somewhere on your scree (which was a TV set). If you wanted to save that delightful moment you could save the programme to a cassette, using the attached tape recorder.
That doesn’t sound exiting to you?? It wasn’t - and I postponed my career in the IT industry and went back to meet my mates and do stuff you do when you are that age. It took till 92 before I bought my first computer - a 386 with 20 MHz, 4MB ram and a 20MB hard drive. I paid 350 DM for it. I taught myself touch-typing using a German 60s typewriter tutorial (I never learned the numbers….). Then I accidentally deleted a file and my computer stopped to work - which was the beginning of my IT career, because I went through all the try and error stage of dealing with the interior of Win 3.1, using the Norton Commander and lots of MS DOS tricks (which still come in handy these days - and man, I learned a lot!).
In that article I was reading they mentioned a computer with those specs was tested in 1991 here in NZ. Back then the price was 17,000 NZ$ - you could buy a decent sized new car for that money - or probably a good portion of a house. My personal computer history came with me to NZ - because just before I left Germany in 96 I had bought a b/w Toshiba notebook (”last year’s model” - a 486 50Mhz with 4MB ram (which I upgraded for a significant amount of money to 16MB) and a 300MB hard drive which I still have in my drawer. I got a modem for it and it lasted through my university times. After a short desktop computer period that saw me building a business in internet research and mild translations, I went back to notebooks and stuck with it since. This is my 4th one and the 3rd Dell notebook. It features a notoriously overheating P4 (not mobile) 3.04Ghz chip, 80GB hdd (and 160GB external drive), 1.3GB RAM wireless and all bells and whistles. I am writing on an external wireless keyboard and use a 19″ LCD screen while for most of the time while Skype and a couple of other permanently open programmes are open on the laptop screen next to it.
Obviously things have changed, which is quite cool (and the only reason you read this is because I thought I’d write it in my blog and you thought you’d read my blog). What a world we live in.