Computing: PC Era

I was born in October 1982, so by the time I was old enough to have opinions about electronics both PCs and Macs were available. I don’t recall when I first encountered an Apple or Macintosh computer; there’s a good chance it wasn’t until I entered kindergarten. Our first home computer was an IBM PC XT purchased in December 1986.

It was quite a privilege at that time to have access to a computer at home before the age of five. I’ll put words in their mouths and assume my parents saw how computers would be the future! Sure, it lacked a hard drive and you needed to swap the DOS disk in and out to have a program disk and a files disk, but it was pretty amazing. We had a word processor and database productivity suite that we even loaded our contacts into and did mail merges for our family Christmas letters.

No photos of our PC, but found this still in the video from my 7th birthday

We had a few DOS games, including some obvious ones as PBS kids: Ernie’s Magic Shapes (the yellow box on the shelf above), Pals Around Town, Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy!, Tetris. Tetris was probably the most formative of these. Another fun program we had was Muppet Print Kit, which let you make huge graphic banners on our continuous feed dot matrix printer (I think it was an Okidata?). These were a regular feature of our birthday parties around this time.

This was also an era in which you could easily get floppy disk games checked out from the Hennepin County Library in these big red boxes that were kinda similar to the fancier VHS boxes Disney movies came in. I guess the copying concern was rather different then; it’s hard to imagine a public library being able to loan out software in today’s App Store world.

Incidentally, if you’re following RAM prices right now, in 1988 we apparently bought a 256KB upgrade for this machine for about $600 (in today’s dollars). That would get you somewhere close to 64GB today!

I think even more important than the games was the BASIC prompt. I had a few programming books I could copy things from, including one somehow framed around Bible stories (one I remember was “building” pyramids out of text art). I also remember having a series of picture books on computers and programming that mentioned using cassette tapes for data storage, which seemed wild to me as a small child since I only ever used them for audio. I think I played around with basic interactive text prompts to tell knock knock jokes? Sadly I don’t have any of these preserved but it was technically my first programming experience. I gave a computer instructions that weren’t mediated by someone else’s program. While I dabbled and didn’t make anything amazing, the experience cemented the idea of being able to tell a computer to do a thing.

While this PC would serve us well for many years, my computing world would soon expand at elementary school…

#basic #dos #ibm #libraries #programming #videoGames