Antique Computers
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Now there’s a term that I’ll bet most people haven’t thought of. Just for grins, what comes to mind when you think of the term “Antique Computers”?
Do you visualize great hulking monsters that take up whole rooms and require tons of air conditioning to keep the vacuum tubes cool? Or perhaps you’re thinking of something closer to the size of a washing machines or even Mailboxes?
While it’s true those qualify? I’m thinking of some of the early 8 bit computers that started showing up in the late ’70s and early ’80’s. I remember spending many an afternoon at my local Radio Shack sitting at the TRS-80 microcomputer with it’s 4 Kilobytes of memory and the cassette tape player that was used to store programs and data. (no disk drives for another year or two)
I remember there were some popular machines like the Vic 20 and Commodore 64 that got a lot of use. Many will remember the old Apple ][e machines and the amazing wonders that they were in the early 1980’s.
I’ve still got an old Tandy Color Computer 3. I bought it new in 1985 for around $300. It came with 128 Kilobytes of ram, which was pretty good back then, eventually I got it upgraded to 512K. After a couple years I got a disk controller and a few 5.25 inch drives that saw a lot of use.
Probably one of the coolest things about it is that over 20 years later it still works. Oh, There isn’t much chance of it connecting to today’s internet. Especialy since 2400 bps modems fell out of use a LONG time ago. (I remember when 1200 bps was considered FAST!)
Someday I’m going to get it out and set it up again just for the heck of it.
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My Dad was totally in love with computers when I was a kid and the first one we got (and he still has) was a Trash 80 with the cassetts. He must own 20 computers of all ages that he loves with a passion, and I remember well the one he graciously gave me when I went to grad school. It connected to the internet at 1200bps (smokin!) and I used to watch each letter materialize on the screen. Back then it seemed like a blessing that you could click on the edu site then go make and eat a sandwich while it loaded up. Ah memories!
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