[AccessD] OT Tuesday? FW: The Most Collectible PCs

jwcolby jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Tue Oct 9 10:58:45 CDT 2007


>My first PC came with WordStar, VisiCalc and dBASE II, plus CP/M.

LOL.  My first PC I built from a kit.  It had 512K or ram and didn't come
with anything.  I ran CPM on it, and any software of interest that I could
download off of the bulletin boards that I dialed into using a 2400 baud
modem.  Stored them on a dual drive 8 inch floppy (which cost me $750) with
a whopping 1 meg storage per floppy.  I was writing programs in Turbo Pascal
at that time (~1983).

My first "PC" pc was an Epson PCXT with DOS, and I purchased Dbase III Plus,
Word Perfect and Lotus 123.  That would have been ~1986 or so.  An XT
machine with a 10 meg disk and (gasp) FIVE MEGS of ram, most of which was
just used as a RAM disk since DOS did not directly support more than about
640K at that time.  I knew I was "famous" when I got a call from a person in
New York (I was living in San Diego at that time) who had downloaded one of
my programs off of a bulletin board somewhere and wanted me to make some mod
or another.

My wife harasses me to this day about deleting WP from her computer when I
tired of supporting (her using) it after I had switched to Word back in the
mid 90s.

John W. Colby
Colby Consulting
www.ColbyConsulting.com 
-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Arthur Fuller
Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2007 11:29 AM
To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving
Subject: Re: [AccessD] OT Tuesday? FW: The Most Collectible PCs

My first PC came with WordStar, VisiCalc and dBASE II, plus CP/M. I learned
WS in two days, VC in two days, and I've spent the rest of my life trying to
learn databases LOL.

A.

On 10/9/07, Rocky Smolin at Beach Access Software <rockysmolin at bchacc.com>
wrote:
>
> Worth a few minutes if you're old enough.  Under 30?  Don't even 
> bother clicking the link.
>
> Easter egg:  there's a link in there on one of the pages to download 
> your own copy of VisiCalc.
>
> http://tech.msn.com/products/slideshow.aspx?cp-documentid=5428179
> <
> http://tech.msn.com/products/slideshow.aspx?cp-documentid=5428179&GT1=
> 10438
> > &GT1=10438
>
> Rocky Smolin
>
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