When did you buy your first PC? What was the first spreadsheet program you used? Word processing software? Modem? Its speed?
In my case, 1983 - an IBM PC with a 10mb hard drive and (maybe) 640kb memory. Lotus 1-2-3. Multimate (a Wang lookalike). A Hayes 1200 baud.
I bought all of this for my employer at the time, and as I recall the hardware alone was about $5,000. The Lotus software was approximately $499, the Multimate WP program was about the same, and the Hayes modem was over $400. We only used the modem to communicate with our bank, checking out balances and moving cash around.
Posted by Linkmeister at September 22, 2007 01:37 PM | TrackBackFirst computer was a Commodore 64 bought in '84. $200 for the computer and $250 for the floppy drive to match. It's still up in the attic somewhere. It was my first big purchase after I got out of grad school and got a real job. The word processor was Speedscript, which came as a machine code listing in the pages of one of the C-64 magazines. Took me a couple of days to type in all the numbers (and every one of them had to be correct). I worked pretty well, except that that the 64 only had a 40 character screen. I even wrote a lab manual on it for a course I was teaching. The first spreadsheet was something called SwiftCalc, which came as part of a very inexpensive productivity pack for the machine. I got a much better spreadsheet for it later, but I can't remember the name. Had a 300 baud modem which I used to connect to Quantum Link, now known as AOL.
Not long after that we got our first computer at work, a TRS-80, the console model with a built in screen. My boss picked up a 5 MB hard drive for it for a mere $5K. Later we got the same IBM XT you did, although I think ours only had 512K of RAM. We used 123 and Multimate, too, then replaced the latter with WordPerfect. I still use the 123 transition shortcuts in Excel, along with a couple of 123 macros that I was never able to translate properly to Excel.
Posted by: DXMachina at September 22, 2007 04:42 PMI didn't buy it, but my family's first computer was an 8086 clone; the word processor was WordPerfect 5.1. It had no modem.
The first computer I bought (and built) was an AMD K6 200, 64MB of SDRAM, Western Digital hard drive (I don't remember the capacity, but it seems like it would have been about 3GB), 16MB ATI video card, and 56k modem. No LAN card (I added one later). I was still using WordPerfect.
I wonder if WordPerfect is still any good; I hated giving it up, but I guess I've become numb to Word, with time. I mostly only think of it, now, when I have to footnote, which, thankfully, I don't very often.
Posted by: Andrew Shimmin at September 23, 2007 10:19 AM1983, Kaypro, WordStar, PerfectCalc, no modem. I didn't get a modem until around 1991 with my little Mac Classic. I think mine was a Hayes, too, but can't remember the baud rate. Wasn't much, I'm sure. I used it to connect to Prodigy and then AOL around 1993.
Posted by: Kate at September 23, 2007 01:50 PM1987, I went to work for Oregon Common Cause, and we had an Atari 1080 wired into a Brother daisywheel typewriter for a printer. I ended up using the Timeworks word processor and data manager, and wish I could still find that data manager. I talked the board out of $1,000 and bought a 9-pin printer (rigged with an A/B switch so I could still use the typewriter) and a 30-meg external hard drive. It was like driving a Crosley Hotshot with a full-race engine!
Posted by: t at September 23, 2007 06:49 PMThe first computer I used was a Commodore VIC-20 in 1981; soon after my dad bought our first PC in 1983 with Lotus 1-2-3 on it.
The first computer I bought on my own was a Tandy Sensation, a 486/33 MHz, in 1994. I upgraded using those OverDrive processors and I eventually got it to 100MHz before I retired it.
The first modem I got was back in college, a 2400 bps Hayes-compatible modem that came in a kit with Prodigy (the first online service I used).
Posted by: Keith at September 24, 2007 05:06 PM