[red-beard]

The first computer I worked with was a PR1ME 300. We somehow made that a 23 1/2 user machine (the 1/2 was that one of the user interfaces never worked quite right, and we saved that one for the system console). This was owned by my high school, and I was a Student System Manager from 1979-1983.

First PC I worked on was an Apple II, also owned by the high school. These were 48K, had single floppy drives. If you didn't buy a floppy, you could use a cassete tape drive...The floppy drive was extra, as was the video to RF modulator. The story behind the RF modulator being separate, was that the computer failed its FCC radio interference test with the RF modulator installed. It was the owner's problem if it was sold separately.

1st PC I owned was a Commodore 64, circa 1984, and it worked quite well for lite programming and word processing. We bought it at Montgomery Wards and it came with dual floppy drives and a dot matrix printer, for about $800. Pretty darn inexpensive at the time.

The first computer I personally purchased was a Toshiba 1200HD. 10 MB Hard-drive, 640K RAM (upgraded to 2MB!), 1200 baud modem, MS-DOS. Great little machine. This combined with my electronic typewriter from college as a printer, served my while I worked in India and Pakistan in the late 1980's. I still have it and it still boots. The screen is cracked...I think I spent $2500-$3000 for everything including the modem/memory upgrade, and software.