That old relic seen in the photo above was probably one of the early computers with a "CGA" display, which was a screen with a black background, on which you typed green text. I remember my very first computer was an Epson laptop that I got from Wayne Davis, my Editor at the Mercer Messenger. It had an LCD (Liquid Crystal Diode) screen that allowed for 4 lines of text and in order to save the contents of your labors, a tiny magnetic cassette. There are very few visitors to this site who remember "CPM." Chances are the young fellow at the keyboard saved his computer work on an 8" "Floppy" Disk, or a new, state of the art 720MB floppy that didn't flop. Additionally, I would guess that the computer had 16 megabytes of memory. How far we have come with computer technology! What will the next 20 years bring?
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Saturday, December 27, 2008
1989: Here Comes the Personal Computer!
That old relic seen in the photo above was probably one of the early computers with a "CGA" display, which was a screen with a black background, on which you typed green text. I remember my very first computer was an Epson laptop that I got from Wayne Davis, my Editor at the Mercer Messenger. It had an LCD (Liquid Crystal Diode) screen that allowed for 4 lines of text and in order to save the contents of your labors, a tiny magnetic cassette. There are very few visitors to this site who remember "CPM." Chances are the young fellow at the keyboard saved his computer work on an 8" "Floppy" Disk, or a new, state of the art 720MB floppy that didn't flop. Additionally, I would guess that the computer had 16 megabytes of memory. How far we have come with computer technology! What will the next 20 years bring?
There are some discrepancies in the text. "CGA" graphics could do 16 colors; your black screen with green letters was "monochrome". "LCD" stands for "liquid crystal display", not "liquid crystal diode". Floppies were 720kB, not 720MB. The requirements for Windows 3.0 (released in 1990) were 640K--substantially less than a MB; memory was going for roughly $50/MB at the time, so your 16 MB would have cost something like $800.
ReplyDelete(draichle3@yahoo.com)
THANKS FOR THE CORRECTION,
ReplyDeleteDRACHLE3.AS YOU CAN SEE BY THE CORRECTIONS YOU NOTED ABOVE, I AM FAR REMOVED FROM BEING A COMPUTER HISTORIAN.