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Vic Smith

On Sun, 18 Jan 2009 13:05:50 -0500, wrote:

On Sun, 18 Jan 2009 08:28:12 -0500, HK wrote:

My first pc came with WordStar. I hated it. Fortunately, a few days
later, I stopped by the computer store to whine, and the sales guy gave
me something called Volkswriter. It was *the* word processor for
computer newbies like me. Great little word processor. Had a
clackety-clack daisywheel printer and a real slow Hayes modem.

The PC1s came with a matrix printer and some diskettes. I used
"Easywriter" for years as my word processor. Other than that I had a
lot of the "stare at the C promp"t problem, wondering what to do with
the machine. I dabbled with BASIC and Assembler, writing little
programs that didn't really do much. This also had a spreadsheet
program (Visicalc) I never used.
Once I got a hard drive and started playing with dBase I started using
it more. When IBM/SBS/Sears came up with Prodigy I was "online" right
away ... at 1200 BPS

My PC1 (if that's the XT predecessor) came with 1 floppy drive.
Monochrome monitor. No printer. Can't remember if it was $1700 or
$2700. Wasn't cheap in any case.
Like you I goosed it to the max onboard ram which added I think about
$300 to the price. Second floppy cost I can't remember.
The fully loaded AST 6-pack was about $600.
The Epsom tractor drive printer was at least $300, but I got all the
greenbar paper I needed at work.
Was about a year later before I put a 20 meg Winchester HD in it.
$5-600 for that.
But I had plenty of boot-legged software off the bat, including the
full Micro-Focus Cobol suite, and put it to use writing a horse
handicapping system. Still have the source code for that.
Early PC's weren't cheap, that's for sure.
All that stuff was a lot more time-consuming than now.
Horse and buggy.
Think I was on-line pretty quick doing coursework. Seems it was
slower than 1200 BPS, but I'm not sure. Think is was the IBM network.
USR modem.
I'd almost lay odds my former employer is still paying for my IBM
network remote access to the mainframe OS. I never told them to
cancel it when we went to a GUI interface, as I wanted it for backup.
I really thought IBM would kill MS, but was way off on that.
When my sister got a PC and had me over to help her first thing I
did was replace her MS-DOS with PC-DOS.
If it wasn't IBM, I didn't want it.
Little did I know.
When IBM came out with their PC-OS I found it just as buggy as
Windows, and dumped it pretty quick when I saw it wasn't going
anywhere. They blew it somehow.
It's funny how many non-IT people jumped into that buggy early PC
world, but they did. Now everybody's an "expert."

--Vic