I can't remember, but it was ancient and had a massive monitor that weighs like a ton. I kept it in the closet for years and when I finally wanted to get rid of it, I nearly broke my back trying to lift that thing.
I had to get one in the early 90's for my shop because everything was changing from hand written estimates to computer estimates. Can't remember the brand then but the first one I bought for my home was a Gateway. It had the ME OS and was terrible.
Got my first Radio Shack computer in the late 70's or early 80's, then bought a Radio Shack Color Computer. Progressed to a IBM (sort of) compatible the Tandy 1000. Cost.. $3500 with monitor and a dot matrix printer and the super big memory card that brought it up to 640K memory. (DOS 1.** DOS was changing so fast then I do not recall the first I had) But I learned to program a Mainframe in the 60's. Things sure have changed in the past few years!! Still have a VIC 20 in the cupboard here, with the tape drive, and drivers)
This post was edited by Maurice214 at February 12, 2017 11:04 AM MST
An Amstrad PCW9512, in about 1991. I didn't encounter computers until late 1989 when a new employment introduced me to small, self-contained Hewlett-Packard machines with 4.5inch screens & 5-inch floppy-disc drives, and designed primarily for driving the same manufacturer's range of electronic lab instruments. As we used them, with our own programmes written in HP-BASIC. (One computer at work used 8" - yes, EIGHT-inch, diameter floppies!)
The Amstrad was principally a word-processor, but it had no hard drive, just a small kernel OS. Instead the programme lived on a 3-inch (that's right, not 3.5") floppy-disc, and loaded straight away. I used it extensively once I'd grasped how to drive it, to write club magazine articles etc. It had a second disc holding assorted programmes and utilities, most very much for the expert in OS work, but including two language compilers.
One was Digital Research LOGO, supposedly designed to teach schoolchildren something called 'structured programming' but it was very low-level and very telegrammatic, and even with a manual I could not grasp it at all. The other was Amstrad's version of BASIC, and this was much easier, although I never managed to learn how to make it write and read data files. Consequently when I wrote a programme that converted geographical measurements into (x, y, z) co-ordinates for plotting, it had to take each set of input variables, calculate the co-ordianates and print them on paper, before asking you for the next set.
One BASIC exercise I set myself was to reverse the telephone directories' STD code list from town-led to number-led. This responded to newspaper adverts giving phone numbers, and the directories of the time were not designed to work from the code but from place-name. I wrote a neat little routine, tested as a stand-alone unit, that would take a name like "winterbourne st giles" entered all in lower case, and print it with proper capitals: "Winterbourne St. Giles" (it's a village in Southern England). It worked by stepping through the words, comparing the ASCII values of adjacent characters and adding (or subtracting? I forget!) the appropriate conversion constant.
I've used computers over the years from MS_DOS to a brief and very unhappy brush with that bloomin' awful MS WIN-10. I think WIN-XP the peak of MS' development, with some very good (though by no means perfect) applications. In particular, Excel's graph routines had some frankly inexcusable weak points. Since then Microsoft's quality has dropped rapidly, and Excel now is a feeble thing for any serious graph plotting. Worse perhaps, is the recent development of docx and xlsx default converters, turning e-mail attachments into image versions impossible to edit further or incorporate in other documents. MS has also found a neat trick with pdf files, offering you a converter that is a bare-faced lie, for selecting its "Convert now" merely opens a sales window for Adobe, publishers of perhaps the least reliable software going.
Adobe cannot even make its 'Flash' load properly, so I could not watch certain software training videos I wanted. Halfway through installing it told me to turn off Internet Explorer, which as far as I could see was not even open - but if you switch off the Internet link how can Adobe complete its copying to your computer...? I've tried it several times, each with the same failure.
Benedict Arnold 