Bear Down Wildcats

As a kid in the late 70s, early 80s, my Dad always had to have the latest and greatest toys.
In 1978 we had the first VCR on our street:


We had cable and HBO the first year it was offered.

My Dad's first PC was a Tandy(Radio Shack) TRS-80, affectionately remembered as the Trash-80. No onboard storage. Had a dual tape drive. One for the OS and the other to run programs.



Then he had to upgrade to:



I fell in love with Microsoft Flight Simulator V 1.0 on this thing. Also found early shareware and fairly borderline pornographic adventure games that made for popular after school gatherings.

Now MY 1st PC that was mine, not the family PC, was a Dell 386sx 25 mhz with 2 mb ram and a HUGE 85MB hard drive.



My freshman year of HS we moved from in town to way out in the desert on 6 acres. I'm an only child and didn't have a ton of friends at the time. My folks knew that it was going to suck for me for a while. There was no one near my age for over a mile down the road. They wanted to get me a big gift to give me something to do/enjoy until our world settled. Since we were moving out to the desert, I thought I wanted a Quad or dirtbike to play out in the washes and trails.

Anyway, we were at Costco (may have still been PriceClub in 1991). I was browsing around in their computer area, mostly uninterested, until I say this Dell PC running a demo of the Star Trek: 25th Anniversary game. I was blown away. We left Costco with my gift. Not a dirtbike, but the PC and Star Trek. I was a hard core computer nerd from then on. Then I got into the dialup BBS world and ran my own 1992-1995.

My first computer was an apple IIc.... the only color the graphics and text were green!

My 1st computer was an Osborne Executive. My aunt owned a office supply company in Denver and when I graduated from the UA, she sent me the Osborne. It was a horrible computer and I rarely used it.

My youngest brother bought a Commodore Vic 20. The games were text based and a lot of fun. Must have been around 1983.



Believe my first PC was an IBM PS/2. That same brother worked at ComputerWorld or whatever it was called in Tucson and got me a good discount on it. Maybe 1991.



When I was on call I had to lug this heavy suitcase computer home so I could dial up on the 56kb line.

Earliest I can remember was an old 386 my dad had. I know we had some older stuff cause my dad has worked on the hardware side of computer forever.

I know we had an apple IIc at one point. I remember looking at Prodigy and playing B disk games as a like 6 year old on a computer like the Dell 386.

My 386DX-40 home built PC was the fastest PC I ever had running MS/DOS. Then Windows came out and every succeeding release had more and more bloatware slowing it down.

I then built a 486-DX50, which I overclocked to 66 Mhz starting me on a decade of pushing PCs to their limits to increase speed. DOS and Windows 3.1 was limited to less than 4 MB of RAM. Now I have 16 GB. I actually have 32 GB in my current PC, but it's so old the motherboard can't recognize the additional RAM.

The Apple IIC here as well. I think three years after we got it we plugged it into a small color television and I was blown away that some of the programs were actually in color!

My first pc build was an AMD586-80mhz with 12 mb ram. Bought the components thru TigerDirect when they were pretty new. Leap of faith at that time to go with an unproven chip instead of an Intel. I was pleased. The AMDs were so much more overclock friendly. In the gaming realm and some tweaking they smoked the Pentiums of the time.

I had a build it your self kit from Digital Group

It had a Zilog Z80 and 10K memory. We used a Nakamichi 700 as an I/O tape unit.

It is my understanding that the first generation of the Multiple Mirror Telescope was 'run' by this very same system (not the Nakamichi).

The motherboard was so bad that we strong-armed a friend that worked for a traffic control systems integrator to 'tin' every trace on the board before we soldered the parts on. After that it worked perfectly first time and for a long time.

Digital Group had severe problems sourcing the cases though, and they sent us everything but the case. We had the system running for 6 months before the case arrived and it was very nice.

I played with that computer for years - the Nak wasn't mine though, I ended up using a crappy but useable Phillips cheapo. My only problem was that I just couldn't 'like' the machine language. I was a CDC and IBM mainframe assembly language programmer, and the 8080 - Z80 - now x86 or whatever, assembly code just never worked in my brain (much like 'C' like syntax).

I can't remember how I finally got rid of it.