My Computer has a Hard Drive, a Color Monitor, and 512k RAM!
Posted Sep 3, 2009 @ 7:14 pm, Viewed by 408 Visitors, Read 455 Times.
Twenty five years ago my husband and I purchased our first home computer. It was an IBM XT, it came with a 10 MB hard drive, a color monitor, and 512k of memory. We actually paid extra for the color monitor and to double the RAM to 512K.
We had not been married very long, and had to save up to buy it. I don't remember the actual cost but I do recall it was over $3,000.00, which was about half the normal price. We were able to get it cheap because IBM had just come out with the IBM AT. Of course, we could never have afforded the AT, you know with all it's speed and memory! BY the way, out of all the computers that we have owned over the last 25 years the XT is by far the most expensive.
We also bought a dot matrix printer with tractor feed paper and a Hayes 1200 modem. The modem could connect at a blazing 1200 BPS, I remember using the modem but for the life of me I can't remember what or who we were connecting to.
The XT was a great computer, we had a word processor program, a checkbook program, and could even play chess against it. We also learned all those crazy DOS commands, we used chkdsk quite a bit because our hard drive was always full and we'd have to move files onto a floppy disk.
We kept the XT for several years and later upgraded to an IBM PS2 Model 50, when we purchased the PS2 we asked if our XT had any value and I remember the salesman saying it would make a good boat anchor. Now that's depreciation!
Tina Fountain is the Broker Owner of Tina Fountain Realtors, visit tinafountain.com to search for all homes for sale in Atlanta including Buckhead luxury homes and Marietta real estate. You can also reach us at 404-842-1555.
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Social Bookmarking3 Responses to “My Computer has a Hard Drive, a Color Monitor, and 512k RAM!”
I had a Apple II+ with green phospher monitor (maybe 12 X 12), 64K RAM, a 64K disk drive, a 300 Baud Hayes Micromodem and the software I used was Visicalc for work and Castle Wolfenstein for game play. I finally ran into a guy at Mississippi State that had some communication software and got a copy of it..
I thought I had really arrived when I got my hands on a Compaq with an RGB monitor, a 20 Megabyte Hard Drive and a 1200 Baud Modem. I thought there would be no way I would ever use all that disk space.
The modems were used to access BBS's or Bulletin Board Systems which were primarily all text. You could download .jpg images, but it would take 15 minutes or more to get a single image. The BBS software I used was called Frontdoor and was my first venture into what would become the internet and the web. Shortly after that I began to use FidoNet which used nodes similar to the numeric IP addresses and you could syndicate information among the BBS's much like the RSS feeds of today.
I recall downloading what sounded like something real cool called Mosaic. I fooled around with it for quite some time before I figured out that you had to have an ISP. The instruction was so vague I never could figure out how to get one. The Mosaic would have been my very first web browser. It was a couple years later before I figured it all out when my brother bought a Gateway with a web browser already installed and showed me something called the World Wide Web.
robert worthington
Hi Tina. I grew up with the 5.25 floppy. Its almost drepressing to even think about that.
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Yikes! Makes me thankful for the cheap fully loaded computers that are being sold these days. I remember when my parents bought our first computer. I believe it was in 1998. They payed 3 times more than what I paid for my brand new (3 years ago now..) computer.
It had 4 gigs of memory and next to no ram. Funny thing is.. That computer lasted me all the way to 2007! Almost 10 years ain't so bad! Of course.. it sounded like a semi truck and was extremely slow.. but it still worked!