Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
My first "portable" computer (a thing the size of a small suitcase) had a gas plasma display - a mono display technology which had glowing green letters on a black background.
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My first computer wasn't portable, but it had a white on black display. It was a TRS-80, bought around the end of the 70s. It was a Z-80 based microcomputer, and came with a magnificent 4k of RAM, but when the 16k chips came out, I blew a week's pay and upgraded the memory, the day it hit the stores. It used a simple tape recorder for storing programs/data, but you could buy an expansion interface that would allow you to use a 5" floppy drive, and expand the memory up to 64k. I couldn't even imagine anyone ever needing 64k memory, as you could write an incredible assembly language program in only a few k. The operating system was a tokenized BASIC held in eprom, from a little startup company called "Microsoft" that nobody where I worked at the time (Hewlett Packard) had ever even heard of. They all thought it was funny, they didn't think anybody would ever be able to compete with the new Apple!
The computer I used at work was about the size of a large refrigerator, had a megabyte of RAM, and cost a quarter of a million dollars. The hard drive (which was a separate unit) was two feet square, three feet tall, and held an impressive 50 MB of data. My terminal communicated with the system at a mind blowing 9,600 bps!
Whew, it made my head spin, just to think about it
