Many, many, years ago no one had Personal Computers. Actually, for a while even those people who had computers at home didn’t have Personal Computers. Before IBM introduced the PC Apple made things that it called Home Computers. I’m sure that IBM spent a fortune in man hours determining that ‘Home Computers’ wouldn’t be taken seriously in the work place, and somebody earning many thousands of dollars completed a survey indicating that ‘Personal’ was a much more businesslike and marketable word.
Anyway, back before IBM had even thought of throwing money at Bill Gates to provide them with a Disk Operating System people, mostly guys with pocket protectors, used to build their own computers from kits. I didn’t have one – the computer, not the pocket protector, I think I may actually have had a pocket protector – but I remember that completed, home built computers had lots of blinking red lights that were somehow designed to give them what might be termed ‘Calculating Credibility.’ And I think they had some sort of numeric display that indicated the answer to questions. I think that the answers were mostly in a set of zeros and ones. I remember a friend exclaiming with no little excitement, “See! It works! Two plus three equals 101 !!!”
So one day a friend and coworker, Programmer Joe (he had a different nickname back then, but I suppose that’s a story for a different post) splurged and bought himself a ‘Home Computer.’ It was a strange, pre-assembled device from a new and exciting company named Apple. It was an Apple II E.
The Apple II was a beige plastic box, with a keyboard physically attached to the front. I can remember some programmers being scandalized when the PC came out with a detached keyboard designed to be more comfortable. The general consensus was, “Who moves their keyboard around? You just change where the user is sitting.” The Apple had its own custom designed CRT (cathode ray tube) monitor. It wasn’t a color monitor, and it wasn’t really black and white. It was a sort of black and eerie glowing green on the screen.
The Apple didn’t have a hard drive. It had only one floppy drive. For those old enough to remember floppy drives I might remind you that this was not the cool & groovy 3 & 1/2 inch hard plastic floppy, it was the 5 & 1/4 inch floppy that actually was ‘floppy’ enough to justify the name. So just the one floppy drive. If you were playing a game, and when they first came out it was only games there where no business applications, you started up, the game would prompt you to remove the game floppy, you’d insert a data floppy, on which to save the settings, and proceed with the game. I think that when you finished the game you might have had to reinsert the game floppy so that it could ‘do something’ before shutting down.
So Programmer Joe had bought himself an Apple II. I think it cost him around $3,000. But, as they say, money was worth more back then, and we all earned a lot less. So maybe the Apple II had a market value of $6,000 ? I’m just guessing.
Joe was bragging about his new acquisition, and showing off some of the documentation. (Look! It actually comes with a book that tells you how to do things, rather than how to build it.) I have to admit that I didn’t really ‘get’ it. We had a half a million dollar DEC mini computer at work. It could out perform anything that Joe might have at home, and when I asked him what he intended to use it for he replied, “Sci Fi computer games.” When I asked him if at least it could do Accounts Payable he said no. I shook my head and said, “Then you don’t really have a computer Joe.”
So time passed, and Joe was wildly happy with his Apple II. Then one day he came in to work with an even bigger smile on his face than usual and he started showing off a memory chip that he’d purchased through mail order. Not ‘Online,’ because that didn’t exist yet. He’d found a mail order catalog out of Ohio that was selling memory chips.
So in a fatherly way I took Joe into the boss’s office and made some inquiries about his new memory chip. Now back then Home Computers only had one memory chip. A positively giddy Joe told me that his old RAM chip on the mother board was 16K, and his new RAM chip was 48K. I asked him how much he’d paid for his new 48K chip. He told me that it had cost him $205. I sighed, shook my head as if he were an idiot and said, “Joe, Joe, Joe. 48K? No self respecting programmer would ever be so sloppy as to write something using that much memory. No program in the world will ever require that much RAM. You’ve wasted your money.”
A few years later when I bought my Personal Computer direct from IBM, it cost $3,400, I had 640K and felt like the emperor of Random Access Memory.
Hardware sure has changed.
Funny thing life.

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