My First Laptop Computer

[MineralMan]

36. Could be, but we had what we had in the 80s

The reality was that the computers available in the mid-80s were pretty wonderful, really. Compared to the previous decade and decades before, amazing power was available on the desktop and even on the road. While all that stuff seems antiquated today, it was revolutionary then.

My first cell phone was a bag phone. Within a couple of years, I had a Motorola flip phone. That was how fast things were changing. I remember running the first version of Windows, too, and using a Mac right after it appeared. Those, too, seem so out of date now, but they were the next phase of making computers accessible and usable by anyone.

I wrote a three-part article for Computer Shopper on how to maximize the use of batch files in MS-DOS. Primitive stuff, but a whole lot of people created menus for their PCs based on the instructions in those articles, and were able to do a number of other things, using just the capabilities of MS-DOS.

I wrote several articles early on about how to get online with a PC. Back then, you had BBS systems, GEnie and CompuServe in their ancient text versions. The Internet was still something people were just talking about.

I wrote an article about installing a hard drive in an existing 2-floppy PC. A 10-MB hard drive, it was. At the time the BBS I operated had a massive 40-MB hard drive that you could fry an egg on. I had to add ventilation to the PC's case to handle it.

Other articles talked people through building their own PC clones from individual components, so they could have a PC for under $1000. Complete with step-by-step photographs.

These days, computers are commodity items. That's wonderful, but there was an intense excitement about PCs back in the 80s. I was lucky to have been able to make a career out of helping people change their lives with that technology. I wouldn't have missed it for the world.