DRAFT - My History with Computing - DRAFT

So I spend my days making money as a VB.Net, ASP.Net programmer and honestly I love it. I'm going to free form this until it takes shape and then split it out for the "history" page.

My first exposure to computing was when my father, sensing the future of the accounting world was going to revolve around computers, took an assembly language programming class at the local technical college in 1976. Not exactly the type of training that is going to prepare you to program spreadsheet formulas in VisiCalc. I remember him sorting punch cards and walking through his code before submitting the stack to the operator. I never had that "pleasure", heh. I did, however, play Battleship on the school district's minicomputer using a teletype with an acoustic coupler modem in the 5th grade. Using a teletype is as "old skewl" as I get. No punch cards, paper tape, switches, or patch cables.

My first computer was a TRS-80 Model III my father brought home in 1981 to run VisiCalc on. It had 48k of ram, dual 320k 5.25 floppies and a black and white screen. It cost around $4800! He considered an Apple II but liked the big corporate local support structure of Radio Shack and felt he couldn't take a chance on Apple going under. I remember my mom and I asking pops "why you can't just put a color screen in there it would look so much nicer!" Hah! I also played around with the Vic-20 and Atari 400 in the computer room at school but after waiting a week for a program to load itself from cassette tape on the Vic 20 and cursing the Atari 400's wtf were they thinking keyboard, nothing serious came of it.

The Trash 80, for me, was mostly used to write papers using WordPerfect 2.0 (I think) and print them on a Tandy daisy wheel printer. The only game I had for it was a Defender clone called Eliminator.

Next up in 1984 was a Tandy 1000A (and a copy of Lotus 123 of course) which I had always assumed was a PC clone but which I learn recently was actually an IBM PC Jr clone. I used it until I was a Sophomore in college! I poked around GW Basic and drew some circles on the green screen until a buddy up the street hooked me up with a copy of Borland Turbo Pascal and, as they say, the rest is history.

The first computer I ever spent my own money on was in 1993 on a Tri-Star Tri-CAD loaded up with an Intel 486-DX2 66mhz cpu, Micronics motherboard, VL-Bus Ati Mach32 2MB video card, 16MB of ram, Maxtor 340MB IDE HD, 5.25 floppy, 3.5 floppy, full tower case and the kicker; a 17" NEC 5fg. I took out a $5k 2 year loan on this f'n thing. The 5fg alone was $1300. I picked this bad boy out of the monolithic, tree killing, phone book eclipsing, '90s institution called, you guessed it, Computer Shopper Magazine. I ran Window 3.1 and Norton Desktop on it through 1996. I was so happy with its MacOS-like desktop interface I just ignored Windows 95 during its first year of existence.

To be continued...