MY COMPUTERS: A History

The Commodore 64 computer was deeply discounted, I got a Cassette Recorder (1530 Datasette) instead of a floppy drive, and a VIC 1525 Printer that did not even have descenders on the letters g, j, etc. You plugged it into a television. I added a 5-1/4" (1541) floppy drive and a (1702) monitor almost immediately. I added a 300-baud modem and logged on to GEnie, Oracle, and CompuServe, and BBSs, but there were no graphics on-line, and it was so slow that it wasn't much use. I added a $300 dot-matrix printer (Star Gemini) that required a $50 interface from Orange Micro. Later, I bought a Commodore SX-64, which was the "portable" version. It had a 5-inch screen and a built-in disk drive. It weighed about 30 pounds, and you could not plug in any other screen.

The Commodore 128 was compatible with all the equipment that I already had, but I had to replace the original chip set to make it work perfectly. The 128 had an 80-column screen, so I had to get a new monitor. The faster disk drive was the 1571. For a letter-quality printer, I got the Blue Chip Daisy Wheel printer. It was compatible with my Brother CE-50 Typewriter, though I never got the very expensive interface to connect the typewriter to the computer. I used the 128 for Word Processing more than anything else. I became very familiar with BASIC programming, and wrote the first version of Stamp Tags.

In 1994, I finally went to a PC-Compatible with the Packard Bell LG 11CD. Many refer to it as Packard Hell. Windows 3.1 was apparently the first version of Windows that really worked. I had good luck with it, but I had to call my brother-in-law to actually get the computer to work. Ctrl-Alt-Delete seemed to fix everything. It wasn't long before I realized that it needed more memory; going online seemed to be a bottomless pit. I added 8 mb for $300, giving me a whopping 12 mb. If I had waited a couple months, it would have been half as much money. The black-only Epson Ink-jet Printer that came in the bundle never seemed to work quite right, and it was a good two years later that I found that it was connected with a defective cable. The monitor had speakers built-in, which was actually very nice. The software included a telephone answering machine, which was a good idea, but it never worked very well. I replaced the modem with a nice US Robotics Sportster, for $200.

I had had good luck with the company, so I got a Packard Bell model unknown in 1998. The computer itself was only $800, and it was blazingly fast compared with the old one. Knowing Packard Bell, I immediately removed their proprietary software. There were a few times I had to re-format the hard drive and start over, but that was expected back in those days. It was not long after that Packard Bell quit selling in the U.S. They are still big sellers in Europe and Asia. But then, so is Commodore. The modem was fried from a lightining strike, and a new one was just $20. I programmed with Visual Basic which only now, in 2006, is becoming incompatible with the newer versions of Windows.

Those little weird things that happened in the end were really more because of Windows than the computer, but we decided to get a name-brand computer in 2000, the Sony Vaio RX470. Again, it was blazing fast compared with what had come before. The Sony also introduced me to the full versions of Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop.

The next computer was similar, with more memory and a bigger hard drive. The Sony Vaio RX860 finally brought me up to 512MB. And after a few upgrades, Windows XP proved to be about as stable as you can get with a PC.

The Sims asked for even more memory, so I got Micro Center's Power Spec 8900. It started acting kind of weird, and I discovered one of the memory chips was faulty. Okay, so when I took it back it took them weeks to figure out that they could't get another chip for a while. I said you have all those sitting on the sales floor, are they all faulty? So they took a chip out and put it in mine. I have had a CD drive go out, and it is nearly impossible to just reformat the hard-drive to clean it out. But then I guess PCs are still not perfect.

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