An early machine
It is time to roll my chair back from the desk and look at where I have been. Specifically going back 40 years ago. I owned a computer. All 27 lbs of it and I was as proud as one could be of overweight software and hardware. Believe me, a five and 1/4 inch disk might seem large but it held very little data. I carried around plastic boxes filled with diskettes that cost me more than I like to remember. There was no real way to get a deal on things that no one else used. If I found a box of diskettes on sale at the local RadioShack I put my money on the counter. I realized that without diskettes I just had a heavy paperweight. For those that wonder, the machine was a KayPro 2. I still have it downstairs although I have not turned it on for a long time. I have a fear of something breaking forever. If I were to restart that computer I will be back in the days when you loaded one program at a time and used it until the job was done. My word processor was WordStar and I loved it because I finally had something that was more efficient then a leaky ballpoint pen. I came across a video this afternoon where someone else was testing out old hardware. The sounds were so familiar. Even the click of the keyboard brought me back to those first days where my desk was a steamer trunk and I would be on the floor beside that to do my work. Ergonomics were a word from the future. I have gone through many machines since but we always remember the first, do we not. That machine brought me from knowing nothing to being the local expert and it got me a job at a time when my good looks would not have done so.
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