John Sheesley describes his first computer: a TI 99/4a.
Last week, Jason Hiner mentioned that his first
computer was a
Mac Classic. He also asked other TechRepublic members what their first computers were.
My first computer was actually a TI 99/4a. This was a
computer that my parents bought when I was still in high school. It was a nice
little unit. Texas Instruments actually sold a lot of them in the early 80s
but got scared when IBM entered the market with the PC and bailed out.
As you can see from the image below, the TI 99/4a was all
integrated in once piece, kind of like the Commodore 64. Mine had a whopping
16Kb of RAM. I forget the speed of the processor, but I dont think it was over
1Mhz.
There was a cartridge slot on the front that you could use to
play games with. You could attach a joystick to it. For external storage your
basic choice was a cassette recorder.
(Yes, like the kind you record voice on.) To get any real work done however, you needed
to drop several hundred dollars on an expansion kit that would take you to a
phenomenal 64K and could host full height floppy drives. We never got that.
The first computer I purchased with my own money was a Tandy
1000. The Tandy 1000 was Radio Shacks first successful IBM compatible. Its predecessor, the Tandy 2000, was actually
more advanced than the IBM PC at the time but wasnt compatible enough and
died a slow lingering death.
The Tandy 1000, shown below, was actually a clone of the
ill-fated PCjr. As such, it ran all of
the regular programs for the IBM PC, but had an enhanced sound chip and better
graphics than the basic IBM PC. You could run 16 colors at 320x200 where the
basic IBM CGA graphics limited you to 4 colors. It wouldnt be until the mid
1980s when EGA became more popular that you could run that many colors on an
IBM compatible.
I went ahead and bought some of the extras for it. An
internal 300 baud modem ($175 1200 baud was just TOO fast and TOO
expensive). A 2d half-height 360K Floppy
drive ($150 no FULL height floppy drives like those PCs). I didnt
immediately get the color monitor - I stuck with a green screen.
I also didnt get the extra memory at first. The Tandy came with 128K of memory which displayed in
giant numbers when you booted the machine. My roommate who was a Computer
Science major took a look at it the first time it started up and said 128K?!
What are you going to do with THAT much memory?.
Actually nothing. You could do hardly anything in 128K with
a PC-compatible. The first thing I did to buy an expansion board to
take
it to 640K. Then I got an external 10Mb hard drive. And a color
monitor. When I outgrew the 10Mb hard drive, I put an internal 40Mb in
it which is still there.
My last major purchase for the computer was a 286 accelerator board for it that sped it up
about 6 times. The card had an 8Mhz 80286 with a ribbon cable on it. Youd disconnect
the 8088 CPU that came with the computer and plug the cable in. Then youd put
the card in an available slot, load the DOS device driver in CONFIG.SYS and
zoom off you went.
I still have my old Tandy 1000. Its sitting on my desk in my
home office. Its a great little machine and it still works. I also use it as a
baseline to remember how things used to be and as a measure against modern day
computers.
For example I have a copy of Windows 2.03 installed on it. I
can turn on the Tandy, have it go through its startup routines and boot
DOS and Windows 2.03 before my 3.0Ghz Dell here at the office boots Windows
XP. Hows that for 20 years of progress?
