Blast from the past - the computers of 1985

A recent trip to visit my parents unearthed gems of a forgotten era. (Yes, I realize bowties are coming back and possibly never left, but ponder the Boston Computer Society Publication aka Computer Update).

First we ask ourselves - will online shopping replace a trip to the store? Note the Nov/Dec 1985 date up top here. :)

Dude's socks are atrocious but note the floppy disk-related (word processor?) he's got in his hot little hands,

 

Next, the goods from my own days of yore - my first computer. The DEC VT 180 (made by Digital Equipment Corporation.)

 We couldn't find the dot matrix printer that went with it ( remember the paper with the holes streaming along either side? That was it!).

The left "A" drive was for the boot disk. The right was to store your word docs and BASIC programs on .  It whirred and made an awful racket.

What you can't see very well is the nonsense on the screen - in theory it would be processing the boot disk but ours was so old...

 

 

rinting is blurry on the post-it but .. things were much simpler then. I think we determined that it had 64K of RAM.

Other people had Atari's and commodores - I had a computer for use from the Boston area.

That's why it's so fun to work on Bing Booster startup program in Boston - look how far we've come! :)

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