Jeff's Computer Chronology

Ok, you asked for it. (Keep in mind that this conversation is banned in some places (namely Carberry Technology, and anywhere else in the presence of Carl Parisi) just because of the number of times it's come up there. However I will admit that I'm a complete rookie compared to the likes of Aron Insinga or Rich Rosenbaum, who have stories of paper tape machines you cranked by hand, walking uphill on ice with barbed wire around their bare feet for traction, and having to spin the electrons around atoms by hand back in the old days.

  1. Sinclair ZX-80. The machine had 1K of memory. (1024 bytes!!)
  2. Upgraded that ZX-80 with a chip to the ZX-81 (I had put a membrane keyboard on top of the old one. Ugh. Horrible.
  3. Timex Sinclair 1000 - same thing, as a full ZX-81 but with 2K of memory instead of 1.
  4. Vic 20. This had like 5K of memory, and COLOR . However it only had 22 columns of text on the screen. It hurts me to even try to remember what that was like. Don't even get me going about the sounds the printer made.
  5. Apple ][+. 64K of memory. This had no lower-case. I applied the "Shift-key modification" (wiring the Shift key to Paddle Input 3) which allowed me to type in lowercase when using AE (ASCII Express), my telecomm program. I used that to call BBS's like Xevious and DiversiDial(DDial).
  6. Macintosh Plus. This had a whole MEG of memory. Whooo. But, it was a Mac. I eventually saved up and bought a 20 meg hard drive for it (because originally, it didn't have a hard drive. I had one floppy for telecomm, one for development, etc.
  7. Macintosh II. I eventually moved this up to 8 megs. Once again I was at a stage where it being COLOR was something new. I eventually bought a 105 meg hard drive for it, and later an 80 meg external.
  8. PowerBook 140. I don't remember the stats on this too well, I'll fill them in later if I get a chance. This is the only computer that I've ever had that I sold. (I gave my Macintosh II to my Dad)
  9. PowerBook 160. I took the money from selling the PowerBook 140 and bought this. I'll enter the stats later too if I get a chance.
  10. Power Macintosh 8100/80. I bought this to work on my final graphics project for grad school: a ray tracer. It's got 32 megs of memory, a 500 meg hard drive, and a 17" NEC MultiSync XE17 monitor.
  11. Laurie and I went to the MacWorld Expo in the year 2000, her first MacWorld expo ever. We got a bunch of free tee shirts, G4 Cube posters, etc, but wondered whether it had been worth going to New York for it (the expo used to be in Boston). Two weeks later Laurie received email (that she almost didn't read) from dealnews.com, telling her that she'd won the iMac DV Special Edition that she'd entered her mailing address on! So, we have an iMac DV Special Edition!

Laurie had a PC that originally came with Windows 95 - we now have that running Linux . And we have two TiVos, which do run linux, but probably don't count (as I'm sure my broken Palm III, new Palm VIIx, and Laurie's Visor don't either). I do have an old Newton 110 lying around here somewhere.....
Jeff & Laurie's Page