|
PureBytes Links
Trading Reference Links
|
Hello...
on a quiet day like today it may be fitting to remember the first personal
computers some of us used. I was reminded of mine yesterday when I hit upon
www.hpmuseum.org, featuring the HP-65, the first hand-held programmable
calculator, which I remember I bought around 1976. It could store 9 numbers
in as many registers, and 100 lines of simple "code" which had to be stored
on small magnetic cards.
A few years later, after a brief encounter with a Commodore PET (quite
unreliable), I bought my beloved HP-85, a desktop computer boasting 32K of
memory, magnetic cartridges as storage media, and HP BASIC as the built-in
language... After that came HP's "Integral-PC", the first portable UNIX PC
with a plasma display and a built-in printer. Somehow it never really made
it on the sales front, but I loved it! I still have one at home, a nostalgic
item to be shown to friends and dusted faithfully.
Strange to say, I have no similarly fond memories of the many PCs that have
followed through the years, though these were, of course, many times more
powerful. One reason may lie in the fact that Hewlett-Packard, in those
days, was a company fanatically dedicated to near-perfect quality, and it
showed! It actually made a person delay a new purchase of equipment because
the old HP machine just wouldn't die...
My apologies for this off-topic post. Won't let it happen again.
Good trading to all,
Michael Suesserott
|