The Dawn of Mass Computing (Pics)

visualnews.com — Remember the days of 5 1/4 inch floppy disks, reel-to-reel tape drives, green or amber monitors, terminals, big mainframes, big daisy-wheel printers, and more? Here is a selection of vintage promotional photos showing computing equipment of yesteryear. Oct 24, 2010 View in Crawl 4

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retroscifigeek Oct 24, 2010

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Apple IIe, Apple IIc, Commodore 64, IBM AT are some of the first machines I ever used.

0ldb0y Oct 25, 2010

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i remember keypunchers and punch cards.

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myztry Oct 25, 2010

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I remember mainframe connected teletype terminals at the local University during a school visit. Sad thing is I had my own Tandy Colour Computer at home...

neocorvin Oct 25, 2010

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dont forget Sphere 1, the first fully assembled personal computer created in Bountiful, Utah in 1975 by computer pioneer Michael D. Wise

myztry Oct 25, 2010

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The good old "Tandy Coco" pictured up first took my geek virginity at the age of 12. Sure it came with a crap Microsoft Basic/OS and couldn't measure up to the likes of the BBC Micro with a real basic (including inline assembler & domain style logging onto the schools network) but it came with the Motorola 6809e processor.

Not only could that processor address the entire memory in a single 16bit register (unlike the 6502 of the C64, BBC Micro, etc.) but you could even get a multitasking OS for it (OS-9). Extended the ram to 64k with a soldering iron and wire cutters. Even built a double sided Chinon drive and replaced the Microsoft disc crapware with JDOS to enable use of both sides of the drive.

Exciting times. Seems ironic that the IBM PC derivatives that came to rule played essentially no part in the PERSONAL computer revolution. Way too expensive and green screen drab for the home user.