{"id":118,"date":"2008-07-16T00:01:06","date_gmt":"2008-07-16T07:01:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=118"},"modified":"2008-07-13T08:18:32","modified_gmt":"2008-07-13T15:18:32","slug":"my-very-first-computer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=118","title":{"rendered":"My Very First Computer"},"content":{"rendered":"

The very first computer I bought was a TRS-80 Model III. It cost me $1048, plus another $70 for the taper record. The tape recorder was the computer’s primary mass storage device. I kid you not.
\n
\nI still have the tape recorder, the Radio Shack CTR-80A. One of my kids broke the lid off the top, but it still works. Here it is:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I suppose I keep the tape recorder as a reminder of those early days and the CLOAD<\/code> command I once used to read a computer file stored on a cassette tape. Man that was agonizing.<\/p>\n

I called my first computer Tom. He had only 16KB of memory. That’s kilobytes<\/em>. It wasn’t the low-end computer; that model had 4KB of memory. Yes, that’s 4 kilobytes of RAM for the entire computer. 4,096 bytes.<\/p>\n

You can see Tom on this web page<\/a> elsewhere in Wambooli.<\/p>\n

A disk drive for my Model III costs $800. That was $400 for the disk drive itself, a full-height 5 1\/4-inch floppy drive that ate 180KB diskettes, plus another $400 for a 16KB RAM upgrade, bringing the machine’s total to 32KB of RAM.<\/p>\n

Now that<\/em> was a smokin’ hot machine!<\/p>\n

Eventually Tom was upgraded with two disk drives, a serial port, plus an amber monitor. The machine came with a built-in black-and-white television CRT, which was murder on the eyes, so a better monitor was a worthy investment. I installed it myself, even \u2014 which I’ll never do again. Damn, that was scary!<\/p>\n

I also splurged for the final 16KB upgrade, so Tom wound up with the full 48KB of RAM. (Yeah, “full.”) All-in-all, I spent about $3,500 on the system.<\/p>\n

The computer was purchased for use as a word processor. But because I couldn’t buy the whole thing at once, I spent my time learning about what the computer could do. I even recall telling the salesguy at Radio Shack that I didn’t need to buy any software because I would be writing all my own. And I did. Man, those were the days.<\/p>\n

The computer biz has changed radically in 25 years. Inflation-adjusted, the $1048 I spent on the TRS-80 Model III would amount to about $2,300 today (inflation-adjusted calculator here<\/a>). That would buy a nice laptop or power gaming desktop. But it’s important to remember that high-end technology still has a price.<\/p>\n

To put it another way, that $1119 investment paid out quite well.<\/p>\n

Do you remember your first computer?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The very first computer I bought was a TRS-80 Model III. It cost me $1048, plus another $70 for the taper record. The tape recorder was the computer’s primary mass storage device. I kid you not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}