To think that an external hard drive of 20MB was considered large enough for every eventuality; and it was the size of a brick.
I seem to remember that my Sinclair ZX81 had an optional 16KB expansion module about the size of a fag packet which cost £125 and programs, entirely self written in Basic, were stored on a Philips compact cassette tape recorder.
My first PC had 512k of ram and a 360k 5 1/4FDD, no sound, no colour, 8088 at 4.77MHz, ran MSDOS and was great, had a dot matrix printer with a 128k buffer plug..haha. My first HDD was 10mb full size 5 1/4 bay, funny how things change... I did have an old CPM machine too but it was crap, green screen and did very little. Other old school for me was my teletext adaptor for my spectrum and my old 28 baud modem and prestel. I still have an Amstrad PC512 and some spectrums around, a ZX81 and an Atari ST, got a few old mags from back then too, the PC512 had dual 360k floppy discs a 16 colour display 8088 at 8mhz three 8 bit expansion slots a chip port for a DX chip, cost £1,000 lol
seems like yesterday when these two were literally laughing all the way to the bank after closing a deal with the BBC to repackage their Acorn Proton as the BBC Micro which initially sold so quickly that they struggled to meet the demand.
Those old BBCs were all over schools, I set up an internal pupil info service called Bofax at my old school, it would now be known as Facebook, well you have the idea but sadly don't see the potential! We used to pay a ver of sweet dreams on the BBC back then it sounded the nuts haha, I spent my pocket money back then on a portable black and white Sinclair TV, it took a flat Polaroid battery, needed to be sat on the local TV transmitter to get a picture but it was cool as.
I loved my old commodore 64, the games took 15 minutes to load off a cassette tape but at least they were colour unlike the Spectrum!
I used to know all the codes for MS-DOS. I could key in commands at the prompt and get it to do whatever I wanted - I understood the system pretty well at that time. Then Windows came along, with each successive version becoming more confusing than the last. Now I have no idea what is happening behind the interface; it might as well be magic. So it goes ...
