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Subject:RE: Back to the Dark Ages. From:bryan -dot- westbrook -at- amd -dot- com To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 20 Jun 2002 07:41:49 -0500
Wow. Now that was high end. My first computer was a Commodore Vic-20. IIRC, that had about 4K of RAM and a keyboard that was notorious for losing keys. All the Commodores suffered from this malady, and last weekend I found a stray F1 key from my old C-128 when cleaning out my spare bedroom (which is usually the storage room). It was a couple months before I was able to get the cassette tape recorder drive. At first, I would have to type in a program and only be able to use it until I turned off the computer.
Does anybody else remember Compute Magazine and its ilk? I remember spending hours upon hours typing in sample programs from those magazines. Eventually, I picked up enough to start adapting them and even creating some of my own but I stopped short of trying to learn the assembly language, which everybody thought was going to be the big thing in the future for programmers.
What a concept: that the most complicated way of doing things would end up dominating. Of course, most of the users I knew back then prided themselves in being able to master difficult interfaces. I reckon, however, it was probably good experience for being a tech writer and having to figure out unfamiliar interfaces all the time.
-----Original Message-----
From: Ed Gregory [mailto:ed -at- gregorynet -dot- net]
Sent: Wednesday, June 19, 2002 8:08 PM
To: TECHWR-L
Subject: RE: Back to the Dark Ages.
First computer:
Radio Shack Color Computer, chiclet keyboard, 8K of RAM, data storage on a
Radio Shack cassette tape recorder.
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