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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 4/17/2017 5:30 PM, Ken Gano wrote:<br>
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<div>Ok, first computer was a Tandy TRS 80, model II. 64k ram and
two 8" floppy drives, circa, 1983. The program (yes, one) was a
word processor and was loaded via the a drive. I am not sure I
ever used the b drive. It was $4k+ ($15kin today's dollars) ' I
remember because I had to take out a bank loan to buy it, but I
am pretty sure it was the first computer in a law office
downstate. I remember the deciding factor was that is
"supported" capital letter (the first Apple did not). </div>
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The start-up I worked for around that same time bought two barebones
IBM PCs, 16-color, two 5-1/2" floppy drives each and a couple of IBM
two-color dot-matrix printers. They paid list, $7K each, for the
computers alone. Since they'd put virtually all of their money into
hardware, they only had WordPerfect and 1-2-3 to run on it. I
mostly used the XT clone that the company we shared a building with
owned, after hours. They paid a lot less for that (half, I think),
so they had money for software--Lotus Symphony, AutoCAD 2.0, even
Leisure Suit Larry. :) I used their AutoCAD a lot--they were happy
to let me since I did little machining and fabricating jobs for them
from time to time.<br>
<br>
The first computer I could afford myself, I built from pieces in
1990--a 386SX with a math coprocessor and 2MB RAM, 40meg hard drive,
big and small floppy drives, an NEC 800x600 monitor and an ATI video
card, and a 2400 baud modem. I thought it was the cat's ass. Then
the bug caught me, and in 1994, I built a dual-Pentium running NT,
with a 300MB hard drive and 8 megs of RAM, a 17" 1024x768 Viewsonic
and so-called, then, true-color video. Got my money's worth out of
that one. It ran eleven years of hard use before the on-board
keyboard controller died.<br>
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Cheers. <br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Michael Porter
Roswell, NM
Never let anyone drive you crazy when you know it's within walking distance....</pre>
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