Today's post may not be so impressive to the youth of today but for those of us who grew up in MY era it's quite amazing. No, it's not DVD quality or anything like that but who would have thought that back in the age of ASCII printer art we could have been watching videos on our DOS command line PC's? Of course I didn't have $3500 to blow on an IBM PC back then so I had to settle with a Commodore but that is another story for another day. I do remember being amazed when I heard a very horribly digitized audio clip of a Led Zeppelin song (about ten seconds worth) on my C-64 though. Ahh, the days!
I still have old Popular Electronics magazines that feature building your own comuter circa 1975-76, building the 4 bit 1K memory Cosmic ELF microcomputer, set bits of binary data and assembly instructions in octal via switches, blinking LEDs showing status and results. Then there was the infamous do it yourself kit for the IMSAIA (?) Altair 8800, so cool, a box with even more switches and blinky LED's. Soon after Commodore and Radioshack's Tandy dropped in price I picked up a Texas Instruments TI994A, with speech module and program modules, connected to color TV it was way cool, then came learning to program to do anything beside play game modules. Ancient blocky sprites and pixels by todays standards but incredible back then, a whopping 16K RAM memory. custom written programs could be stored as serial data on cassette tape recorder, that was really cool. Floppy discs on newer systems made it possible to save and store vast kilobytes of data and switch programs on machines that lacked memory capacity to hold much less run more than 1 application at a time. 8 inch soft cased floppy discs were awkward, as big as a sheet of notebook paper, they held an amazing 360 kb, within a couple years 5-1/4 floppies replaced the bigger discs and doubled g capacity to 720 K. State of the art harddrives featured 1 or 2 to then incredible 10 Mb. The development of computers from building size behemoths to literally pocket-size is indeed a fantastic story.
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