Our son John and I began working with computers in 1981 with the purchase of a "loaded" Radio Shack Model I. We spent over $5,500 for the best personal PC that money could buy. It had 48K of RAM (the maximum available), a 1.77 MHz 8 bit Z-80 CPU, black & white monitor with FOUR external floppy drives that had a total of 375K of single sided single density 5.25" floppy storage. Shortly after that a double density floppy controller was available which increased storage by 80%. The $1,100 printer printed only 10 CPI upper case Courier font with no graphics. We ended up wearing out two of these machines. John and I did a lot of programming in BASIC with these machines after taking a course in programming in BASIC at SUNY Brockport.
The Model I was replaced with a Radio Shack Model 4 with 128KB of RAM, a 4MHz 8 bit CPU and two 180K internal drives and a 360K 5.25" DD & a 720K 3.5" DD external drives. We used it mostly in the Model III mode. Our favorite OS was LDOS/LS-DOS which had many nice features that MS-DOS never had. Except for the IBM PC, most of the rest of the PC world was still using CPM which I disliked. Although it no longer works, it still lives on through emulators to play old games, with 13 Ghosts being the most popular. The emulator also reads the old VisiCalc and Word Processing files.
Our introduction to color was with an RS Coco 2 with 64K of RAM that connected to the TV. The kids spent many hours playing games and educational software. We also had a loaded Coco 3 with 512K of RAM that was destroyed by lightning. It also had OS-9 support which is the OS that NASA uses because it works in real time. There is still a very active users group for this computer.
Tandy was the first to mass market a laptop in 1983 when the "PC" was not the standard and Windows was unheard of. John's first notebook was a Model 100 with 24K of RAM.
I was slow to get into the MS-DOS world with a used Tandy 2000. It was far superior to what IBM and others had available at the time. It had 640 x 400 x 16 color graphics when IBM offered 320 x 200 x 4 color CGA. Its processor was a speedy 8MHz 80186 with both a 16 bit CPU and data path. Mine was maxed out with 768K of RAM. It was MS-DOS compatible. The floppy version had dual 720K Quad Density 5.25" floppies instead of 360 DD floppies. Although it was far superior to IBM's offerings, IBM had name recognition in corporate America and sold much better and eventually established the PC compatible as the standard using MS-DOS. Also the 80286 processor came out 6 months later and it could address much more memory. The Tandy 2000 was the first machine to use Windows 1.07 because of its superior graphics. All future development of Windows was with the PC compatible. This was the computer that I used PAF 2.2? to begin entering our family history.
We owned other PC compatibles such as a Tandy 1000HX with dual 720K floppies which was Lori's machine for years and Wendy's 1000RL with a 20MB hard drive and Deskmate II which was like a non-multi-tasking version of Windows.
COPYRIGHT © 2008 Bob & Betty Hales