A learning experience: I bought my first computer just as people were switching from,iirc, 400kb to 800kb. Clever me decided to save money by getting only one disk drive, since surely my new 800 kb drive would be able to handle anything. Ha. Ha.
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I once worked an assembly line where the 110mb hard drive was the fancy-pants add-on, and it was the size of half a loaf of bread. Fun story, every computer upgrade I've ever done allowed all of the previous drive's data to comfortably fit in a small corner of the new computer's hard drive.
sep 10, 2025, 4:52 pm • 0 0 • view
It was so much fun putting one floppy disk after another into my one disk drive. This was before you could just put MS Word into memory; whenever the computer needed to refer to Word instead of my document or vice versa, I had to swap disks. NOT FUN.
sep 10, 2025, 4:38 am • 15 0 • view
pikers, ;-) ever drop a big punch card deck or used paper tape OS?
sep 10, 2025, 5:05 am • 3 0 • view
And yet, for all that hassle, it was so much easier to edit than using a typewriter we thought we were blessed. Until it crashed or the floppy was corrupted.
sep 10, 2025, 12:40 pm • 1 0 • view
I still remember the joy of typing the final edits on my undergrad thesis, typing PRINT x 5, and going to sleep, while almost all of my classmates were frantically typing theirs. Thanks to my friend Cliff, who was a computer guy and turned me into the only computer-using humanities type around.
sep 10, 2025, 12:45 pm • 2 0 • view
Editing shmediting, I was lucky to be able to correct typos! Hooray for Liquid Paper! Or corrasable bond typing paper, which some of my teachers hated because it smeared.
sep 10, 2025, 3:27 pm • 1 0 • view
And I myself am still not convinced there are any real improvements in today’s MS Word compared to the 86KB program I was using on the first Macs.
sep 10, 2025, 6:28 am • 0 0 • view
At least it was faster than a TRS-80's casette-tape drive!
sep 10, 2025, 4:41 am • 1 0 • view
My first computer was an Atari with a tape drive, an external drive, and a 12" B&W TV for a monitor. I eventually upgraded to an 8088 with a blazing 300 baud external modem. If there's a hell, being forced to use either of those will be mine.
sep 10, 2025, 6:57 am • 2 0 • view
My first was a Mac, which was fun. But just to make sure that I did not escape the early computer era too easily, I had a job programming for a deeply annoying -- computer? mere terminal? with a one line display and the most annoying beep ever. It made this beep whenever the user made an error.
sep 10, 2025, 12:41 pm • 1 0 • view
I had to debug my code on this computer, which basically involved making all the logically possible errors after another to make sure that they were not accepted. BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! for DAYS on end.
sep 10, 2025, 12:42 pm • 1 0 • view
And there's your hell, lol!
sep 10, 2025, 1:04 pm • 1 0 • view
My first computer science classes in 1980 were on a dumb terminal, hooked into the HP-3000 mainframe where we programmed in BASIC, FORTRAN, and COBOL. I was playing my favorite game, Mystery Mansion, when the SYSOP flashed a message to everyone’s terminal about the attempted Reagan assassination.
sep 10, 2025, 3:30 pm • 1 0 • view
I took BASIC in college. Worst professor I had in my entire college career, he was an idiot. He had this program a student wrote he loved and was his favorite example... until I pointed out it was wrong in the last line of code and it would fail. I treasured that moment, that's why I remember it.
sep 10, 2025, 6:31 pm • 1 0 • view
It could handle everything! For a little while… 😉
sep 10, 2025, 3:25 pm • 2 0 • view