Dinosaur Sightings: Computers from 1984-1989

The picture of Clive Sinclair shows him holding a Sinclair QL, possibly the world's first 32bit multi-tasking microcomputer and afforable for home use. And you imply it's a ZX81, limited an difficult to use! Dear me, no mention of the QL achievement and a derogatory remark about the ZX81. Shame on you.

What about the APC, had an 8086, two 8" diskette drives and ran CPM/86 and MS-DOS (not pc compatible). Then NEC came out with the APC III, which was compatible with an add-in board but had an optional 10 mb hard disk drive.

I remember sitting in engineering lab punching chads out of the perforated punch cards (didn't even know they were called chads until Florida's election woes). We would spend 30 minutes to an hour or two punching chads with a paper clip to solve some simple arithmetic problem. But that beat punching out a stack of punch cards on the keypunch machine and taking them to the university computer lab and have to return a couple of days later to obtain the results only to learn that the program failed...possibly only because of one spelling error or typo on one card.