Vintage Tech #1: Remberances of Our Computer Past

In preparing my post this week on Computers 'n Miniskirts, I happened across a bunch of great vintage electronics material - I was in heaven. I've mentioned the Obsolete Technology site, which has a great selection of advertisements for "ancient" electronics. I don't think kids today can fathom how incredibly pathetic computers in the late seventies and eighties were. I think back and wonder how on earth I spent hours on my VIC 20 doing basically nothing. Exclamations like "Look! I made the line turn blue!" were not uncommon. Yet, at the same time, the fact that Matthew Broderick's lousy Texas Instruments could take over our military's defense system in WarGames seemed plausible.

This guy has his TRS-80 and thinks the whole world is going paperless. He's ripping his tax forms, because now he's doing it by computer.... yet, without TurboTax to send it via the Internet, I'm curious how he got his taxes in. I'm guessing he printed them on his dot matrix printer. I'll bet you the IRS consumes more paper now than they did when this ad was made. I don't know about you, but where I work, they've been saying "we are going paperless" every year. Yet, every year there seems to be more and more paperwork.

Get it? He's the Incredible Hulk and the Tandy is "simply incredible". Yeesh. Lots of celebs put their face on the these new home computers. My main man, Bill Shatner was the guy for VIC 20- so that's the one I got. Roger Moore did Spectravideo, Isaac Asimov did the Radio Shack TRS-80, and Bill Cosby was the pitchman for Texas Instruments.

There was also a period of time when nerds were the sole proprietors of personal computers. I'm sure high school computer clubs of today are not exactly your Homecoming Court, but it was pretty extreme in the early eighties. By the nineties, I think computers became so omnipresent that the stigma was no longer viable.

Thinking back, I began with the VIC 20, then Commodor 64. After that, I had an IBM 286. I remember the big 5 inch floppy, those horrible dot matrix printers, the monochrome monitors (then CGA, VGA and SVGA) that took up half the desk, using BASIC, and everything was super expensive. I think it's safe to say that 20 years from now we'll all laugh mockingly at 2009 computer technology, and our current setup (where you're sitting right now - at your desk or on an iPhone) will look just as dated and laughable as the picture below.