[Radio Wrangler]

Why did people buy early-ish personal computers?

Well at one point the vendors used a trick out of the encyclopaedia salesman's repertoire.

"You need to buy your family our encyclopaedia/computer or else your kids will all grow up thick."

Yeah, right, and the kids used that BBC model B for 100% playing games, didn't they? As did their father?

One local amateur was a serious type and he wrote software for tracking satellites which got circulated and used widely in a cut-down form. Unfortunately he wrote it for the Sinclair QL.

My first computing was submitting card stacks for the acolytes to run on the ICL1403 at uni, and typing basic into a 4-bit DEC Minic in the EE dept lab. 4 Bit

At HP i started doing real work on an HP 9810 desk top programmable calculator (inc thermal printer like a cash register width) It was on a trolley with a telescopic whip and flag so you could look around the lab and find it.

9820 was a step up. THe 9825 was getting good. Others hogged the 9835 for one project but I did get the use of a 9845 from time to time. I was writing stuff for control theory, analysing PLLs and doing circuit design. I wrote my own 'Matrix Masher' for the 9845.

The HP85s were another step along the road and I had one to myself for a couple of years while prototyping the HP3708A and planning the modus operandi of its 6809 firmware (I didn't write the firmware, but the trial stuff and sorting all the I/O became my master's dissertation)

I had various hand-me-down Unix workstations and then I bought a PC for home. Ti'Ko assembled in beautiful downtown Broxburn. 486DX33 230 meg disc, 8 meg RAM and a couple of 3.5 inch Sony floppies. Win 3.1 and DOS5. Bought Word5 and used it to write the oscillators and synthesisers chapter for the ARRL handbook.

THis machine got a new motherboard and more memory/bigger disc, NT5 and a copy of tomb raider.

That was replaced with a shiny new Apple iMac G5. Power PC - Well named processor, it certainly used power and it all came out as heat. The waypoint with this machine was my first home internet connection. Pipex as ISP

After some years, the fan speed controller sensor (on PPC chip) failed and I moved to one of the Intel iMacs. That ate a graphics card under warranty, the a connector failed to the backlight in one corner. Apple fix £600 new display. My fix, 2 hours, some microsurgery with scalpel and tweezers, a dod of solder and voila! Eventually the second graphixs card failed just like the first. Bad solder under a BGA. No spares available. So along came the iMac in front of me.

David