My Sinclair ZX-81

The first computer I ever had was an English import, which my Uncle had bought in a kit. If you were brave enough to solder your own computer together, you could get it for under $200 with the 16K Memory Expander. That's right, not 16meg! 16 kilobytes of memory, on top of the already spacious 1K internal to the machine... Ah, when the world was young.

Why don't more computers have touch-pad keyboards like your microwave? I'll tell you why: Can't type!

The Sinclair ZX-81 - Later upgraded to 2K and sold by Timex (briefly) as the Timex/Sinclair 1000

How many other computers were sold at jewelry & watch counters?

The TI-99/4A is the machine you can thank (or blame) for everything I've done since.

Everything.

The Texas Instruments TI-99/4A

This was my first "real" computer (arguably, after the ZX-81 above) and really got my enthusiasm going for the whole mess. The console itself was all I had to start with, but eventually ended up with a respectable collection including the monster-honkin' expansion unit. The speech-synthesizer has yet to be surpassed, in some ways.

Not to mention, the fact that it looks so cool.

The Sharp PC-1500A

This PC (Pocket Computer, ya'know) was given to me by a cousin, while I was in High School. If you ever thought you were the social-outcast nerd-type, you can imagine the looks they give you pulling THIS thing out of your pocket. The rest of you are probably from one of the cool crowds.

With a whopping 16K of memory (and an optional memory chip/card) there wasn't much you couldn't do with this baby. As long as it fit on a one-line, 28 character LCD display.

Except for missing the full-alpha keyboard, you can probably do more with one of today's graphing calculators - And they're smaller, too!

The lovely and talented Alice shows off my glorified calculator.

Actually, calculators have more glory than this, nowadays.

The Apple IIE: an era no more

The Apple IIE

The mainstay of my High School days, the Apple IIE is actually a recent addition to the family. With dual floppies, and an original Applewriter dot matrix printer, this baby rocks! At least, it would have in the mid-eighties, when it was new. The authentic Apple II monitor is monochrome (good ol' green screen) but considering the resolution and quality of the composite color monitors of the time, am I really missing much? Not from what I can remember.

Double-Density 8 inch Floppies

Not actually "equipment" in the normal sense of the term, these massive things were destined to fade away in the face of smaller (much smaller!) and larger-capacity diskettes. But now, the sheer size of them can strike fear in the hearts of man.

Not much of a man, though.

Now, the computers that used 8 inch diskettes? Those things really ARE scary!

The lovely and talented Peggy, with a small selection of large diskettes.

The Commodore 64 was one of the greatest computers of its time. Relatively inexpensive (several hundred dollars!) and more powerful than many others, it had better graphics (and much better audio) than most computers of that era. In fact, the audio chip was taken from professional synthesizers!

Commodore 64: Power to the People!

The Commodore 128:

Part Old, Part New.

All Confused.

Mostly desired for its faster-access disk drives, since the Commodore serial-device interface made them all terribly slow!

The Commodore 128 was a strange and exotic beast. It was actually three different (VERY different) sub-computers in one case. In C128 mode it was the latest thing, with higher resolution graphics being a major selling point. But in C64 mode, it was an honest C64 (with the massive software library available to it). Unfortunately, that meant the C128 mode was hardly used, as many companies didn't try to create software for two different machines from the same company! The massive C64 installed base had a little too much momentum!

It also had a Z-80 chip (just like the ZX-81, above) which was used in the rather unused CP/M-compatible mode. Before Windows, MacOS and Linux were fighting for supremacy, CP/M was the king of small cross-platform operating systems. In case you've been living in a cave... The King is gone.

Originally created by a Joystick Manufacturer, Commodore liked the computer so much, it bought the company. The original Amiga 1000 was a bit of an oddball, but the later Amiga 500 (console, right) and Amiga 2000 were solidly built and well supported in the graphics and video industry. The home market however, had poor distribution and support. They were hard to find, and harder to buy software for.

After Commodore folded, Amiga has bounced around as people keep trying to breathe new life into the "popular" widely unsupported machine. At last I noticed, the rights to Amiga was acquired by Gateway, Inc. (Amigas in cow boxes? Maybe!) The latest machines available were (or are) Amiga 4000's, which are all stock left over from the last owners.

The Amiga: The Best Computer that Never had a Chance.

What the heck happened?

How can anybody live in modern society without a Dr. Suess hat? You can't!

At least, I don't want to try.

PC Compatables (386DX-50 and 486DX4-100 Shown)

Before you get your hopes up, even my "modern" machines are old-school. The 100Mhz 486 is the fastest, "newest" PC I personally own, and I've had that for almost five years. And it's only one of a long parade, tracing back to my 1989 10Mhz XT machine. With a VGA card, 80Meg hard disk, and an original Sound Blaster card, it was cooler than many of the 286's around.

It isn't, anymore.