Retro Computing!

I'm still busy packing up my belongings. I keep getting stuck on memory lane. When it was time to pack my old photographs, I had to look through them. And when I found my old Tandy 1000RL computer in the attic, well, I just had to hook it up.

I bought this old timer with the money I earned by running a paper route. I saved my pennies for an entire year and, by the age of 11 or 12, I was able to walk into Radio Shack and bring it home.

When I powered it up tonight, to my surprise the fifteen-year-old computer's date and time were only twenty minutes off. The brand new Sun servers have more clock drift than that!

This trusty old Tandy came with a single 720kb, 3.5" floppy drive. It has a 10MHz Intel 8086 processor. There was originally no hard drive... Just a stack of floppies. A big stack.

Eventually, I decided I needed to upgrade the RAM. The 512KB just wasn't cutting it. So I spent the cash to upgrade to 768KB. And once the floppies started to fail, I opted for a hard disk drive. I seem to recall spending a fortune for the 40MB (yes, Megabyte) hard drive.

The Tandy served up my bulletin board system, NorthStar BBS, for quite a while. I remember being woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of someone paging the SysOp (me) in the middle of the night. And there was the exciting screech of the modem when a user would dial up to play the games I hosted or to chat with me.

When it wasn't running the NorthStar BBS, I used the Tandy to dial into Sendit, the ODIN library system, Compuserve, and all kinds of the BBSes in the Minot area. I also messed around, learning to program in BASIC and playing SimCity. It was a good time.

Searching through the hard drive tonight, I see that I was one organized kid. The hard disk is immaculate. Everything in its proper place. But then again, without a graphical user interface like Windows (the Tandy runs DOS 3.3) it's important to keep things organized. It's hard to find things in DOS.

Ah, the memories.