In 1988, I Bought an 80 Megabyte Seagate Hard Drive

[Worsel]

73. my first home computer had 8k of memory

I bought a Bally Home Library computer in 77 for, I think, $300. It had 8K RAM and accepted 4K cartridges, mostly games. One cartridge was a TinyBASIC compiler that came out in 78. You multipunched on a small keypad to enter code.

I bought a kit to expand the RAM to 16K. It had 9 chips and a few other components that had to be soldered by me to a circuit board. I remember spending $100. The whole 8K expansion with case was a little smaller than a deck of cards.

I remember writing a submarine game that shot torpedoes at ships appearing randomly at the top of the TV screen and traversing the screen in both directions. The game was written in machine code and TinyBASIC POKEd into RAM one hex byte at a time, no compiler. The game was several hundred bytes, a lot of which were supervisor calls and sprites.

This wasn't that much different than what I was doing at work, writing assembler programs for IBM mainframes and various mini computers. I started in 73 on an IBM 360/30 that cost a fortune and had 64K memory and 160 MB of disk ( if memory serves ). All of the IBM software was free, but the hardware cost of the mainframe far exceeded the cost of the entire programing staff.