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My first computer: The sad little IBM PCjr
When I was getting ready to head to high school in 1983 I begged my father to get me a computer. I really wanted an IBM PC, but on the middle class living we made do with IBM's newest model: the IBM PCjr It was a cute little computer with a "chiclet" keyboard, 128K of RAM and two cartridge slots.
Nope, it didn't have a hard drive and the floppy drive was 180k. It took a couple of minutes to boot up DOS, after which you had to switch your floppy disk to the application you were running. The monitor was tiny and the mouse was extra, but I loved my little machine and spend hours on it each day. The PCjr was discontinued by IBM quickly after its launch, but I will never forget the Charlie Chaplin commercials and the 300 baud modem I added to it in order to dial up to BBSes (bulletin board systems).
Today I write this on a Mac Tower with two gigs of ram, a terabyte of storage and three, yes three 30" monitors. My internet connection is fiber and 30 megabits a second, but I don't feel connected to it. In a way I look back on my old PCjr like EVE must have seen Wall-E -- outdated and underpowered but with a ton of personality.
For fun, have a look at the Charlie Chaplin commercial for the little computer that couldn't I found on YouTube. Charming!
Additionally, here's a print advertisement they ran for a while back in the day. I wonder if this was the one that got my dad to buy me my PCjr? I'll have to ask him when I upgrade the RAM in mom's iMac over the New Year.
They don't make them like they used to do they?
In the comments please answer the following questions:
1. What was your first computer?
2. Do you look back on it as a computer or a pet?
3. Compare how you feel about your current machine to how you feel about your first love.
Back to the table of contents.
Nope, it didn't have a hard drive and the floppy drive was 180k. It took a couple of minutes to boot up DOS, after which you had to switch your floppy disk to the application you were running. The monitor was tiny and the mouse was extra, but I loved my little machine and spend hours on it each day. The PCjr was discontinued by IBM quickly after its launch, but I will never forget the Charlie Chaplin commercials and the 300 baud modem I added to it in order to dial up to BBSes (bulletin board systems).
Today I write this on a Mac Tower with two gigs of ram, a terabyte of storage and three, yes three 30" monitors. My internet connection is fiber and 30 megabits a second, but I don't feel connected to it. In a way I look back on my old PCjr like EVE must have seen Wall-E -- outdated and underpowered but with a ton of personality.
For fun, have a look at the Charlie Chaplin commercial for the little computer that couldn't I found on YouTube. Charming!
Additionally, here's a print advertisement they ran for a while back in the day. I wonder if this was the one that got my dad to buy me my PCjr? I'll have to ask him when I upgrade the RAM in mom's iMac over the New Year.
They don't make them like they used to do they?
In the comments please answer the following questions:
1. What was your first computer?
2. Do you look back on it as a computer or a pet?
3. Compare how you feel about your current machine to how you feel about your first love.
Back to the table of contents.
Comments
1
Subscribe to commentscorfmanjDec 31st 2009 3:34PM
My first computer (if you can call it that) was an Atari 400. It did have a keyboard (albeit a membrane keyboard, which made it very hard to type) and it did come with a cartridge that allowed me to write programs in BASIC, but it had two major flaws as a computer. First, as I said, the keyboard was awful. And second, we didn't have any way of storing data (no floppy drive, harddrives were out of the question... also no printer and no modem). Much later, I found out that a floppy drive and some other peripherals were available for that system, but it was way too late by then.
I wrote my first programs on that computer, but if you spent much more than, say, a half hour writing a program, you pretty much wasted your time because you couldn't save anything. But how much of a program can you write in a half hour with a lousy keyboard?
It was a fun gaming machine with excellent graphics for the day (for example, Pac-Man looked exactly like Pac-Man at the arcade, rather than the weird looking Pac-Man on the Atari 2600). The keyboard definitely allowed an extra dimension to some games that supported it so I had more buttons than just the orange button on the joystick.
I think my parents were sold on the Atari 400 because of the keyboard, giving them the idea it could double as a game system and computer. And it might have with the right peripherals. But I remember that system more fondly than any computer I have ever owned.
My first real computer didn't come along until about a decade and a half later. It was a Packard Bell 486 66Mhz computer running Win 3.11 that became half mine after I married my wife (it was given to her two years before we were married as a college graduation present by her parents).