Dinosaur sightings – old-school computer hardware

Bill Detwiler's Tandy 1000

This Tandy 1000 was my first real computer. It came with an Intel 8088 processor, 640K RAM, two 5.25″ floppies, and a color monitor. I later upgraded to a 20 MB hard drive. I spent countless hours writing high school papers, crafting BASIC programs, and playing Gunship and MechWarrior on this machine. It still runs perfectly.

Mac 512Ke that sits on Stephen Howard-Sarin's desk at CNET

This was my main PC for most of college. It has a Dove board upgrade to add more RAM (a whole 1MB!) and SCSI. Those boxes sitting next to the CPU are an external Apple 20MB hard drive and an Asante SCSI-Ethernet thingamajig. This old Mac has MacPaint, MacWrite and MacHTTP on it. My dream is to get this up and running on the CNET network as the world’s slowest Web server, but I’m not sure the IT department would let me.

P.S. There’s a fortune cookie saying taped above the screen: “A handful of patience is worth more than a bushel of brains.”

Bill Gate's Altair

Bill Gate’s original 1970-era Altair computer and some of his paper-tape programs.

ENIAC vacuum tube

A vacuum tube on the ENIAC

First Apple Computer

The first Apple Computer now at the Smithsonian in Washington DC.

Wisconsin Integrally Synchronized Computer (WISC)

Wisconsin Integrally Synchronized Computer (WISC)

IBM System/360 console

IBM System/360 console

My Commodore C-64 (around 1985)

This is a picture of how my Commodore C-64 was setup at the time. Back then around 1985, I only had one floppy disk drive (which the Vic-20n at the time had to share) it’s hard to believe that not more then 2 or 3 years later, I’d have at least 5 drives for my Commodore Setup in a tower and by the 1990’s, I had at least 30 Plus Commodore Drives People were giving me. My first drive there cost over $300.