After writing about my missed chance to become a billionaire I began thinking about how computers have been a big part of my life. Now that they are so ubiquitous, after all the phone in ones hand today has more memory, storage, and processing power than the computers I started with. I thought a little reminiscing would be fun.
The first computer I ever had was the Commodore Pet with expanded memory, all 8K of it. I loved that machine, it came out in 1977 and now lives in my garage, I can’t seem to part with it.
Besides the expanded memory I also splurged for the additional mass storage device, a second cassette recorder. I practiced my BASIC programming skills on this and when I moved out to an apartment my roommate who Helen always referred to as “Chair” owned a TRS-80 (or as I called the Trash-80) from Radio Shack.
So of course we had to have a computer challenge, and since I was the better coder I wrote a program that would fill the screens in a spiral, which we put on both computers and then started at the same time. While the Commodore Pet seemed to win more than lose, overall the 2 computers seemed to be pretty comparable.
It was also during this time I joined the OCCC – Orange County Computer Club. This was a fascinating time as that during this period I began investigating building my own computer, because the only way to get a ‘real’ computer was to build it yourself. I subscribed to the Dr. Dobbs Journal, the bible for all computer enthusiast at the time. Unfortunately my job at Computer Automation didn’t pay enough for me to actually build my own computer, but I sure had lots of fun browsing through all the hardware.
One day when visiting my folks I saw that my dad had a computer in his office, it was the Texas Instrument TI-99/4, this was soon to become my favorite early computer. This thing was expandable through a slot on the side, the problem being that all the expansion was spread out across your desk as every peripheral plugged into the side so you ended up with something that looked like this:
Later they released an update that used a cabinet so that it no longer filled your desk and it looked like this:
I was so crazy about the one that when TI announced they were cancelling the TI-99/4a I dragged Helen to all the JC Penney’s stores in the area trying to buy as many of them as possible for about $50 apiece, I ended up with 2.
I unfortunately, well actually fortunately, because by this time we already had our 1st daughter and I had way more fun holding her that any computer could provide.
It wasn’t until around 1984-85 that I was finally able to buy a computer. So my first computer was and IBM PC/AT clone that I bought at the Computer Swap Meet at the Fairgrounds in Pomona, my new favorite playground.
This was the first computer that i spent lots of time using. Prior to this computer everything I did was standalone, it was offline only because online didn’t exist yet. With this machine though I went online in 1985 or what passed for online then and joined Compuserve, Delphi, & Prodigy. This was mostly for message boards. My favorite was on Prodigy, a Robert A. Heinlein board where we discussed his novels.
While this was going on at home things were changing at work. In 1983 I went to work for Northrop on the B2 program, there, the team I was on wanted find a way to make use of desktop computers to track our work. So my boss gave me permission to buy the first Personal Computer for our department and maybe for the whole program. The machine was an Apple Lisa. Until that time all I ever saw in the building were word processing machines from Wang at the secretaries desk. I had hoped to find a way to tie in what I was doing on the Artemis system, a project planning/networking product, with the Apple to produce meaningful information.
From this job I moved upstairs to join the program planning team and ended up buying the first computers for that department. This time I bought Texas Instrument Professional Computer (TIPC) machines and used them to develop a database program for managing change orders. In doing the database I ended up having to learn DB IV a database program.
From there I went to McDonnell Douglas in Long Beach where I used an IBM PC. I did database and other types of programming on this for my organization. The thing I remember most was my morning routine. When I made it in to work, I would first walk over to the PC and turn it on. I would then go get a cup of coffee, chat with a few people for a few minutes and then head back to the machine. By this time, if i had timed it right I only had a few seconds to wait for the menu to pop up.
When I transferred to McDonnell Douglas in Huntington Beach they were using PCs. After about 2 years they decided to switch to the Macintosh SE.
This was interesting as the entire support staff were new to Apple computers and really didn’t know how to maintain them. So I did for our group. One day the support staff came through the area to upgrade the memory on the Macs from 1 Mb to a whopping 4Mb. So they came in snapped the new modules in and then left. Unfortunately to use the full 4MB you also needed to make a change to the system to recognize the memory. So I basically had to follow them to fix every machine in our department. This was also the first computer I ever actually was able to explore the internet. The experiments with Mac SE’s lasted about 2 years before they switched back to PCs.
Meanwhile at home I would occasionally upgrade to better and faster computers. When laptops came out, I of course jumped on to that and bought not only myself one, but bought one for Helen. I didn’t realize how carried away I was in buying computers until we sold our last house in Moreno Valley for a move to Pismo Beach. As part of our packing I decided to get rid of any old computers I had laying around and recycle them. So I went and put them in the back of my truck. I was shocked with what I ended up loading up.
Of course I pulled the hard drives to destroy and it was interesting to see how they had changed over the years.
In the above picture the amount of storage on the drive goes from the smallest amount on the left to the most storage on the right.
Since then I have mostly focused on using various forms of laptops. I now currently own:
1 – mid-2012 Macbook Pro (upgraded HD and Ram
1 – Microsoft Surface Book
1 – Microsoft Surface tablet
1 – Dell 27″ Inspiron all-in-one
4 – iPads
1 – Kindle Fire tablet
3 – Kindle
And don”t get me started on the number of phones laying around the house….
Central Coast Senior 
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