See avatar/"profile pic": "Now where do I insert my 5-1/4" floppy?"

I was going through old pictures and I found a picture of me in front of my first computer: a TRS-80 Model III! I thought there was nothing you couldn't do without a Zilog Z-80 (2.03 MHz) processor and 32K of RAM!

It's amazing how far we've come since one Christmas morning in 1980.

I admit to start with a combination of 8-inch floppies and punch paper for storage.. I just about avoided the punched cards era though! And I've still got a single-board Z80 computer somewhere around. The N800 would probably be considered a super-computer back in the 70s.

Hey, I learned on the TRS-80! Then I bought a Timex Sinclair T1000 to play with. When the Commodore 64 came out, I HAD to have it! My mom thought I was nuts. "That was a waste of money. What can you possibly do with that thing but play games?"

Same here, Texrat. I learned on the TRS-80. I got a 1200-baud accoustic coupling modem the following year, and thought CompuServe at $10/hour was the peak of civilization.

I never got my parents to buy me a Commodore 64 or Amiga. It was years later they got me a Tandy 1000SX instead of a IBM PC/AT.

TA-t3: by most of the 80's standards, the N800 would still be a supercomputer... it wasn't just the 70's.

I bought the C64 myself, with a credit card, when it first came out. My stepdad thought it was cool but mom surprised me with her anger over it. But it turned out to be a sweet investment! Man I loved that machine... but someone stole it (and the C128 I later bought) or I'd still have the thing somewhere.

What, no one bought a Coleco Adam? I went thru the T/S 1000 and 2068 and had an Adam. It was kind of expensive, but it came with a printer that instantly replaced our IBM Selectric typewriter, which still sits in a closet somewhere.

I used to drool over the idea of having a floppy drive some day. Before that, I learned on a Wang something or other at a typesetting company.

Lucky for me, I spent the CompuServe years of $10 an hour working for a company that paid for my account... But before that I was a BBS user, of course.

I did the punch card thing in college. There is nothing like a 4 hour turnaround time on batch jobs the last week of school when all our assignments are due.

Doh! another typo - and another 4 hour wait to see if it compiled & ran.

man, you guys are old!

I got my start in the world with an IBM 286 PS/2. I never got to mess around with OS/2 though, I ran "windows 286" then later 3.1.

Any of you remember olivetti?

Olivetti M24, which was a PC clone but with an 8086 instead of an 8088. Did quite a bit of programming on that one (wasn't mine, couldn't afford to by my own). And, let me have a look around.. ah, an Olivetti M700. Kind of like a PC, but with a MIPS R5000 CPU. One of these days (or years) I'll fire it up again.

Has anyone else ever used Windows v 2.0? Am I the earliest Windows adopter and so it is all my fault?