Jim's Computer History
ca. 1985-1989 : Tandy MC-10
Ah, the sweet beginnings. Though I had experienced the one Apple II
computer at my elementary school, the teachers and faculty treated
it as if it were made of solid gold. My brother's TRS-80 Color Computer
was a fascinating machine, and I begged my parents for a computer.
They obliged in sometime around late 1994 with a Tandy MC-10. This
beauty hooks to a television for output, boasts sixteen colors and around
two kilobytes of memory. I wrote many programs, starting with audio and
video tricks and ending up with a fairly decent word processor, though
one was limited to writing fairly short papers.
1989: Tandy Color Computer
Though this was my brother's computer, he was away at college and I was
getting interested in the growing uses of more modern computers. So why
did I begin using the CoCo? One word: MODEM. I found a 300 baud direct
connect modem at the local Radio Shack on sale for something like $10.
Several of my friends at school were calling BBSes and I was drawn to the
wonderful world of online. I spent a few months calling places like
the JCCC COIN BBS, but at 300 baud there was little I could do.
More begging to the parents, and for Christmas 1989 I got...
1989-1994: Tandy 1000 HX
7.16 mhz 8088; 256k RAM; BIOS with DOS 2.11 in memory; 16 color TGA.
What more could I want? Well, a hard disk would have been nice, but that
was a lot to ask for at the time. For a couple of months I had a 300 baud
modem; a quick trip to the Rat Shack and I was 1200 baud richer. The Kansas City
area BBS world opened before me.
I was using Deskmate's terminal program to call BBSes, but I ran into a snag.
I wanted to get a copy of the shareware Procomm 2.4.3 communications program.
But the bulletin boards I was finding usually had a one hour time limit--and
at 300 bps I couldn't get it done! A guy at school, Tom House, was kind
enough to copy it off on a 720k floppy, and I was in business.
So I had comm, basic, word processing, and the Radio Shack DMP-100 printer I
bummed off of my brother. I was in business!
By the end, I had swapped to a NEC V-20 processor (decent speed boost) and
was up to a full 640k of ram and dual 720k floppy drives. With Procomm Plus 2.0,
I was routinely dialing into the university VAX to do mainframe business.
1994-1999: Packard Bell Legend 20 CD
In the fall of 1994, I was off to college. My Tandy 1000 HX was serving me
well, but the floppy swapping and lack of a hard disk were really taking
their toll. Nevertheless, I had over 60 megs of storage on hand...in 720
k bites. My chemistry professor, Dr. Greenlief, was a computer techie and
I sought his advice. He urged me to get a Pentium, but when I made my list
of required and desired features, I found a computer that fit the bill very
well--the Packard Bell Legend 20 CD. It had a 486 DX/2 66 processor, 4 megs
of ram, a meg of video ram with a Cirrus Logic chipset, a 420 meg hard
drive, full multimedia capabilities, and a built-in 2400 BPS modem.
After years at 1200 baud, the 2400 baud modem seemed to be like lightning in
a bottle. With the included Microsoft Works software, it was a very useful
college machine. I shortly upgraded to Word 6.0, and a gift from my uncle
Jim bought me a 28.8 modem. In 1996 I upgraded the processor with an
Evergreen 5x86/133 overdrive processor and added 16 megs of ram for a total of
20. In 1997, my girlfriend bought me Windows 95 Upgrade for my birthday, and
my parents bought me a ZIP drive, giving me much better mass-storage options.
In 1998, I installed a 6.4gb hard drive with overlay software to make
it work.
This machine still works fine, running Windows 98 for light tasks. I have
at times used it exclusively to display the JPL Clock and similar programs.
1999-Present: Tigerbook Z3
After graduating in 1998 and a brief career as an admissions counselor at
my university, I entered graduate school in the fall of 1999. One of my
presents to myself was a full office setup--nice desk, great chair, and
a new computer. Tigerdirect remains one of my first stops for any computer
related purchasing, and I stumbled upon a nice deal.
This machine was running on special, just under $1000 for a laptop with
an AMD K6/2 350mhz processor, 2.1 gb hdd, floppy, 24x CDROM, 12.1" supertwist
LCD, and 32 megs of ram. I splurged and bought an extra 64 megs and a 56k
modem card right off the bat.
This machine is still my main thesis-writing and physics-modeling
machine at my university office.
2001-Present
While my notebook was serving admirably, I was still using my Packard Bell
for my home computer. It worked, but I needed something better. A sale
at Tigerdirect caught my eye. This was about six or eight months after the
first 1ghz PIII machines hit the market, and Tigerdirect had scored a load
of the original Intel pre-release kits for computer manufacturers, which
included an Intel VC-820 motherboard, a 1ghz PIII (Coppermine) with dual
processor fans, and 128 megs of Rambus 800mhz ram. I added a full-tower
case with beefy power supply, a parts-bin 28x CDROM, a Creative Geforce2 GTX
video card, an external56k modem, Windows 98, and a 17" ViewSonic flatscreen
monitor.
This, with the addition of Windows XP, another 128 megs of RD-RAM (total 256)
and a TDK DVD+/- R/RW drive is my main computer today.
(Various strays)
Along the way, I have picked up various strays and dumpster-bin computers to
play with--hey, it's a hobby, and it's always fun to see what I can do with
a 286. Among the computers that have come and gone were a couple of AT&T
286es, a couple of apples, and a Compaq Deskpro 486/50 that I bought for a
girlfriend to use when she was still in school. My current 'projects' include
a Pentium II 300 with 64 megs of ram that is destined to be my "hobby room"
computer running some flavor of linux (I'm itching to try Gentoo). I also have
a 200 mhz Pentium which I would probably toss except that the case is so nice.
It may get one of my orphan copies of Windows 95, or maybe I'll see if I can
dig those Red Hat 5.0 CDs out of storage.
Last updated 1 January 2005