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Whoa, this thread is a trip down memory lane. Here's some of my favorite out dated tech that maybe some of my fellow aging Gen X goons might remember? My mom owned one of those Packard Bell cabinet stereo systems from when she was a college student in the swingin' 60s. All the fun and games came to an end when she married my dad and he finally made her get rid of it in the late 70s. Man, I really loved this thing.  I was an only child and my parents both worked a lot. To make up for all the time spent alone, my dad would buy me "science toys" (his words) that would 1) get his daughter interested in things not really targeted to my gender and 2) keep me busy for hours. My favorite was the Texas Instrument TI-994a, given to me for Christmas '81. We couldn't afford the monitor, so we had to connect it to a huge rear end console TV. We also couldn't afford many games; I only had a skiing one, a BASIC program and one that taught French, I think. However, I did learn to code a little BASIC and I'd spend ages typing lines to make the screen turn different colors or play a few bars of "Happy Birthday." Eventually I invited my friends over to see how freaking amazing this thing was, but sadly my fellow 7 year olds didn't enjoy sitting there watching me type for 15 minutes and I was mocked until I abandoned it to go play with Barbies. My dad was disappointed in me, to say the least. And so am I, looking back.   Does anyone remember Tandy, Radio Shack's line of PCs? No idea what model my dad picked up on a discount, but I know it was totally buggy, the monitor was always turning off and on and the slot where you plugged in the dot matrix printer was broken. I had a cousin that worked for IBM, but my dad refused to get one from her on discount because he thought IBM was a corporate overlord bent of the destruction of mankind or some bullshit...and obviously Apple was out of the question. My last computer, before I was able to actually buy one for myself in the late 90s, was a Compaq Presario. However, it did not come with Windows. Nope, it came with....TabWorks. What is TabWorks, you ask? It's a lovely shell for Windows 3.1 that was made to look like a loving Trapper Keeper.  It was cool for about 10 minutes, until I accumulated about 30 different tabs and started to lose track of my files. When Windows '95 came along a bit later, I was so jealous of my friends that were able to get it right away. I saved for months and ate lots of ramen in order to finally upgrade. It was an exciting day.... 
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Oct 1, 2012 10:21
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 20:42 |
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