Monday, July 30, 2012

The first PC I ever used

This is what computers looked like when I first started using them. I was in the military at the time and computers were so expensive that we didn't all have one in our offices. Only the officers had their own box and the rest of us in my unit (about a few dozen of us) had to make do sharing the half dozen or so computers that were in the 'computer resource centre'. There were people who started using these things for anything and everything and many who wanted nothing to do with the computer.

I belonged to the former group.

I remember the controversy that erupted when supervisors started using the computer to write personnel assessments (using Word Perfect). They didn't realize that although they were saving their documents to floppy disks, the temporary files that WP created were saved on the hard drive and anyone who knew anything about computers had unencumbered access to those files. I bought my first PC, a clone built on an Intel 386DX-33, not long after. The rest is history.

2 comments:

Retro Blog said...

The first PC I ever used was in the 80's. It had a WordStar and CalcStar program on it. I believe it had just enough memory to run those two programs. If you wanted to save anything it had to be saved to floppy.

Now things are so improved that I hit invisible key combinations all the time and strange things happen.Grrrrr.

Karl Plesz said...

They need to make a keyboard for people who accidentally hit multiple keys at once. It's a regular phenomenon. I think you could solve it by making key combinations only work when they are deliberately held for a full second. Because most of the accidental combinations are very fast. There should be a setting that ignores those fast multi-key presses.