integratron wrote:My first computer had a green screen, a Zylog Z80 CPU and a 10-sector, hard sector, floppy disk drive. A 16kb stick of RAM cost $350!!!!! This was a loooooooong time ago.
Nice. I believe my first actual computer was an Atari 800 followed by Apple ][e if I recall correctly. Ah no, I forgot I did have a TRS-80 beforehand but was quite young and didn't do much of anything "real" on it as far as programming or the like. Soon after all of those I moved to having current Apple models and IBM PC/XT models (including some clones of course) since I was hooked and was regularly attending Comdex with my father. This is why I love the series Halt and Catch Fire as it really nails a lot of aspects of the early personal computing era.
Edit - Things were certainly expensive then, too, as you point out. I recall that if I had paid retail my non-clone IBM XT had a street price higher than my first actual new car that I purchased much later in life. Luckily I started work at 14 (shhhh... I guess that may not have been exactly "legal" but I did get parental permission) at a software and hardware reseller. That was certainly a booming type of business at the time, and I am glad I got to configure some of these PCs to learn a lot at the time. That and guitar playing were about the only things I cared about back then.