16k Memory ( Archived) (9)

I couldn't afford such a luxurious model, so I bought a kit and wired up a Sinclair.



It had 1k of memory, with 56kb RAM usable of 64k. It did run BASIC so you had to write your own instructions each session. The pic shows an optional memory extension in the back. There was also a proprietary thermal printer available.

It displayed to your TV in glorious B&W, with all its raster scan lines. That made text interesting to read.

Note the stylish membrane keyboard, making typing impossible. So I got an old DEC keyboard in a steel box and put all the guts in there. I added a battery so that I could walk away and find my program in RAM still there.



All in all, it was a great investment for $100, though there was no use but to explore BASIC at home. It sufficed until the Atari 800 with an external 300 baud modem came along. Meanwhile at work, we bought a pair of IBM PCs for $10000 apiece with all the frills which actually worked.

I had to own the Trash-80 with 16k in the keyboard and a whopping 32k more memory in its expansion interface.

Hahahah, I used to be a manager for Radio Shack back in the 80's. I have fond memories of the Trash 80. However, I was disloyal and preferred the Commodore 64.

I remember when we first came out with the IBM compatible line. The first one was the EX with a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive on the side. We called it "The Crunch" because we used to constantly crunch those disks trying to put them in that ridiculous side disk drive. The first one that came with a hard drive was the SX, I believe. 20 MB!

My first PCs had the BIG 5MB hard drives with 5-1/4 floppies. My Lotus 123 machine had a Hercules graphics card so I could do spreadsheets in color, though I could not replicate that on a printer. The other, primarily running BPI, had a stylish green screen for bookkeeping. Remember how that phosphor persisted?

We had a sneakernet. You would copy data onto a floppy. Then using your sneakers you would carry it over to the other machine to share.