TRS-80 and Commodore Pet really were hobby computers, I'll agree, but even with them you could quickly write decent programs to crunch numbers. However, maybe a mainframe was better for that at the time, having proper FORTRAN and COBOL and all that.

There was also quite a lot running CP/M everywhere at the time. If I recall correctly WordStar and dBase II were popular. Whether CP/M or Apple, it was important to have actual floppy drives and not play with cassette tapes. The latter were to inefficient. Most places I saw by the early 1980's had moved up to Apple II or II+ to hop on the spreadsheet bandwagon with VisiCalc. I should look around online for an emulator and a copy of VisiCalc to see how much LibreOffice has inherited of that. There was a lot that Bricklin and Frankston got right.

Since Apple II hardware was open and came with schematics you could build or hire someone to build peripherals. That was more common in research than business, obviously.

I never had one but there were some interesting kits in the late 1980s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangerine_Microtan_65
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_I
Note how expensive the Apple I was compared to the Tangerine! Some things don't change.

In 1983 IIRC I saw a $100.00 USD Sinclair kit computer (not much more than a Scientific Calculator, just programmable) do a decent job of controlling an entire set of stage lights which even had a Random - Hands Off Mode that saved a $2500.00 gig at an unscrupulous nightclub as well as $300.00 for 6 days for a LightMan.

No, you can't have my Apple-I motherboard. (I don't care how much one fetched at auction.) Or my KIM-1. Or my Altair or IMSAI ...

"The thing is, you just had to be there." You knew that you were literally watching a new technology being birthed, although I daresay that no one anticipated what Intel (and AMD ...) Corporation would eventually come up with ... that they would be able to economically produce chips that were that dense and therefore that fast and powerful.

Any regard of the devices "in those days" was that the Application-Specific IC ("ASIC") technology was not yet possible. It took many chips to do what today can be shrunk into one, and clock-speeds were thousands or even millions of times slower. Nevertheless, then, as now, hardware (and software!) engineers were pushing the boundaries of what they did have.

Many technologies needed to produce purer and purer silicon, and to etch smaller and smaller (denser) circuitry onto them, simply did not exist yet. The percentage of usable, defect-free devices that you could slice from any particular silicon wafer was still comparatively small.

We must also remember that these devices were successors to ... "no [computerized] devices at all." I remember when the Intel 4004 came out (a 4-bit microprocessor), and it revolutionized the design of traffic lights, which until that time used relays and timers. The Intel 8008 gave us the first electronic calculators. And, so on. There were no "computerized" predecessors to these things. We dreamed about building them but didn't yet have the devices needed to do so.

I remember disk-drives ... "big" ones ... that held 10 megabytes and were about the size of a small washing machine. I briefly worked at a data center with four large drives, each the size of a refrigerator, which held one gigabyte (gasp!) apiece. This was in the 1980's . . . But, once again, that was where the underlying technologies were, at that instant in time. Did we wish for more? Darned right we did! (We still do.)

So, "sux that you weren't born yet." We could dream of what we have today (and we certainly did do that ...), but I daresay that we never dreamed of actually having them, a mere (ahem ...) thirty-odd years later, and at ridiculously low prices. "We live in interesting times."

And yet, it hasn't stopped. Ten years from now we'll be teasing our computers for putting up with us while we forced them to run "HTML" and "Apache" and "Web Sites" and "JavaScript." They'll be smiling back at us benignly, while they secretly plot to close the pod-bay doors behind us ...

ping sundialsvcs - Hmmmm... let's see... the 4004 had a clock speed of 740 KHz and the single core managed 1 x 4bit instruction per 8 clocks (or 0.125 IPC) and a new i7-6950x has 10 cores each capable of roughly 3 IPC at 64bit..... but you just couldn't bring yourself to say "billions of times slower", eh? <poke, poke>

The UK has a very well conceived and executed TV program for BBC that's now on Amazon Prime, called Humans that explores the complicated effects and reactions as true AI becomes a reality, which it very likely will in just decades. I find it both deep-thinking (only moderately voodoo) and refreshingly hopeful while maintaining the complexity of such a sea change. It's also quite entertaining... a proper job as they say. I don't know if I'll live to witness it but Damn! I surely hope so.

"Billions and Billions ..." (sigh, R.I.P., Dr. Sagan.)

It is definitely interesting to see what's developing out of AI these days, particularly speech recognition. (Plus, we're doing it quite nicely on a phone!)

So true! I remember opening up my Sinclair Spectrum in 1982 and marveling at how tiny everything was, compared to my IBM PC at work. Then in 1985 I bought the Sinclair QL just because it was an affordable "proper" computer only to be astonished again: a multitasking OS! Then to those of us who'd grown up on typewriters (and correction fluid), word processors were such a blessed release. And how wonderful it was to see the back of the index card.

Get a PC they said. It will free up time to go outside and have fun.

Placed the new PC by a Window.
Melanoma was mentioned in the burn unit diagnosis.

Ha Ha! Good one. Some comedians have mined this irony ------

--- Internet Was a Surprise ---

Yes, but let us also note that "the history of computing" is still being made. We have not stopped "living in interesting times."

Most certainly, what everyone in this business (especially, of software) must be prepared-for is that whatever skills and specific-knowledge they possess will have, in one sense, a very short shelf-life. I'm sorry that BYTE Magazine (and Creative Computing and, I think now, Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calesthenics and Orthodontia) are no longer being published to guide us along the way, but the journey isn't over yet.

You'd best spend part of your time each week searching out the "bleeding edge" of computer [software] technology, even in what are now obscure on-line places, because in very short order these things will become mainstream and they will challenge your employability if you have been "asleep at the switch." (And, if you haven't, it's like a white-water rapid ride that never stops. "Wheeeee!!! Wow!! Uh oh ... Oh-shi....")

Hi,

Memories!! Brought back loads of memories from my early days in computing. I built my S-100 bottom up, Some etching but a lot of wire wrapping boards late at night burning the candle from both ends.

I built my first Intel 8080 system that used a ASR-33 for I/O. It had 256 B memory and when I up the memory to 1K, I was in heaven machine coding

Home-brewing was the big thing back then and I am not talking about beer.

My Z-80 Zilog S-100 board was neat and using CP/M was a great experience. Writing code back then required one to have tight efficient code, mostly due to memory limits even with that 8" floppy then things boggled down.

I bought a Radio Shack TRS-80 primarily due to the Z-80. Built my expansion interface because RS wanted about $1000 for a complete unit.My homebrew expansion had a S-44 buss for expansion interfaces with a single step capabilities. I added Data & Address display using LED to allow I/O via toggle during SS debugging. The 5 1/4 floppy was not cheap back then but I did fork out major bucks for that 5 MB HD and then the new 10 MB and my times quickened with disk access.

All those early years, I was working on DEC equipment. Fell in love with DEC VAX and loved the support technology. And yes, the storage was very large in size but limited in storage area. Our shared memory was by a limited buss theory in very large racks to share 256 MB then expanded to a whopping 1024 MB to allow swapping of pages. I've got more power in my Laptop than we had in the whole house combined that cost millions of dollars for the hardware alone. Add a few more millions for the software that as far as efficiency is poor as compared to today's code that have lazy programmers with Gigs of memory to work with.

I still build but using ARM and other chip-sets for my designs. I still throw in some older arches but not that often since our buss speeds are beyond older technology.

BTW, I do remember BYTE, Circuit Cellar and a few other mags that I could not wait to get in my hands on each month. Like a 13 year old getting to his dad's Playboy and drooling over each page. I would find someone's article that would get the flame growing within to expand an idea or technique in my LAB.

Fun!! Fun!!

Have fun & enjoy!

I remember VAXes. We used them a lot at the Building Research Establishment where I worked. They had an operating system called VMS with a very good shell called DCL. That was where I learned shell scripting.

One odd thing about VMS was that it allowed you to have multiple files with the same name. They were given a generation number; if you didn't specify this in a command, you got the latest version. It was very useful for program development.

I must admit that I'm annoyed by the prevalence of both tablets and touch-slab phones to the seeming detriment of other things. Granted, laptops are still available but things are going touch screen and single-window. Phones too, I recall when my smartphone had a proper keyboard and ran Windows and I wanted a Nokia tablet phone with keyboard but they initially refused to add communications chips and keyboards to their offerings -- now it's almost impossible to get anything but an irritating Android slab.
As far as non-table PCs go I don't feel to worried as I'm not sure I'll see be too difficult to get in my lifetime but modern smart phones are just garbage to me and once my Blackberry Bold goes it will be very frustrating having to carry around a cheap, cruddy piece of rubbish in order to stay in communication and mess around with a horrible screen that's nothing but a PITA every single use. I have been looking into the various Pi-Based portable issues though so, hopefully, I'll just have to carry a cruddy phone and a Pi-Based rig of some kind.
Still, it's far from my vision or being able to carry around a computer the size of a packet of cigarettes with phone, radio and keyboard built-in and the ability to "dock" to be used as a laptop. Infuriating, actually, that such things are possible and would be usable but I'll never see one, much less own one.

Aha, you mean those new-fangled DEC computers?

As an old hardware guy, our company had a contract to maintain PDP-8/E systems in the early/mid 1970's before the VAX was even around. PDP-8' were in some interesting places, my favorite visit was to assist with the system running the scoreboard for a major-league baseball team. Lunch on the press level of the stadium, indoor parking, watched 3 or 4 games, and getting my name in lights at the end of one game! It was fun to see the innards of the scoreboard itself, in those days each scoreboard pixel was a 100 watt incandescent light bulb on a custom socked that allowed intensity control, tens of thousands in a 2-story frame, all wired back to the pdp-8 on the other side of the stadium.

In around 1981 the company whose computers we fixed upgraded to PDP-11 systems, and they gave me my first home computer, a PDP-8/E with 2ea 5mb hard disk, asr-33 teletype, a couple VT05 crt's and a 300 lpm line printer. A fun thing to have at home!

@273

I agree new hardware, Not just phones. Are built like bic lighters. Use them and buy another one when they wear out. EG: non removable battery, soldered in ram or mmc hard drive.

Now having said that. I am happily married with wife who has a alpha wolf personality also, like me.
Ginger hair with freckles. Who weighs in on things like my above opening statement.

So, I am told our phone contract. That she pays for since phone service is important to her more than me. I can survive on a beeper service contract. I digress a bit to explain why I currently own
a Iphone 5s WITH IOS 10.

She tells me our service contract is up and she wishes to upgrade her phone and mine. But cannot afford it this time. Did I mention love is involved? So I mention go ahead and pull the trigger on a Iphone 7. While you are at it. Pull the trigger on A Samsung Galaxy 7 Edge for me.

Because I hate the hoops I jump through syncing up IOS 10 on my Iphone 5s to my Linux laptops.

I am not a fool or a idiot. Buying new phones that I kind of dislike on how they are made.
I am just a happy camper trying to get along with his old lady.
I really really liked my Blackberry also till I ran it into the ground. It still sits on the shelf.
But the operating system does not boot up any more. Even with reflashing the rom using propreitary Windows operating system. I know a little about Blackberry phones.

http://www.smartestcomputing.us.com/...ackberry-9530/

One tries and not stay stuck in the past. But move on with the world and learn new ways of doing things. I may not like it. Along with others. But I know it is one of the survival traits one must have.
To live a full, current, life style. We don't build the hardware. So the only control we have is pick and choose. Then use.