Last Thursday when I was in New York I swung by Steve Rubel’s office and hung out with him for an hour. We caught up on a bunch of stuff but managed to squeeze in a short riff about our first computers (yes – we were talking about how old we were – which is not that old, but it feels like it now that we have Facebook accounts.)
That’s me – as a 40 year old – with my first computer – an Apple ][. The actual one – with some software that I wrote running on it (yes – those are five menu options, numbered “1. “ to “5. “) It cost about $3,000 total, which included two floppy drives, an Integer Card, memory (it had 64k), Pascal, Visicalc, and a couple of games.) I eventually got a copy of Beer Run to go with Choplifter.
My second computer was an original IBM PC.
I can’t remember how much memory it has (not much) but it came with two floppy disks. Again, $3,000 or so. One day I got a Tandon 10MB hard disk (ST506 compatible – anyone remember that?) and thought for about 24 hours that my life was complete.
My first laptop (er – portable) was a Compaq.
I also had a Mac 128k and a Lisa. Reflecting on the whole thing is a little scary to me. Especially since each of them seemed to cost about $3,000 (except the Lisa which was closer to $10,000.)