Once upon a time, in a land far away—I bought my first computer. In 1985, I spent every dollar that I had to purchase a Compaq Portable Plus, the very first IBM PC compatible computer. This tasty box was all I could think about. It was a little over $3600, and had an incredible 128K of memory, and two 5 ¼” floppy drives that one was consumed by the operating system—DOS 3.2—in a case that resembled a sewing machine. It was wonderful! In those days, the race was not to upgrade your software, but to build the hardware system. By 1993, this 30 pound behemoth had a 1.44Mb floppy disk, a 20Mb hard disk, 640K of memory—a new Panasonic processor–with a 1Mb extension card. Good God, and a 9600 Bps modem!
There was no public internet, so this marvel let me get into several dial-up bulletin boards that operated out of people’s homes! Unfortunately, in those days as this–a lot of what was found was cheap porn. As to graphics on the green monocolor screen, a draw was like this—I would issue the command to open the file, got up and go pour a cup of coffee. Step out on the back porch, and have a smoke. Return to the computer 8-10 minutes later, and watch as the draw—usually a vector graphic—complete its task.
Now later in the Windows age (beginning with Windows v3.0 on a 386 processor computer) I began to cut my teeth on helping others set up, and maintain small business networks. Novell was king of this heap at the time. It is interesting to observe that anti-virus, adware, and spam filtering was not necessary—nor was it a regular thing to have to update software or anything else except to load a new application on the computer. This was a good time—and everything that could possibly go on a computer was less than 15Mb. Amazing, isn’t it? I still have that old Compaq, and incredibly enough, it still runs and does everything that it is capable of doing…
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