my first computer was a Radio Shack TRS80.

48k RAM. no hard drive

Me too, except I had only 16K of RAM. Permanent storage device was an audio cassette recorder that worked maybe 50% of the time on a good day.

"Hello world"

I recall the Digital Research's GEM windowing environment for MS-DOS came out about a month before, and "won" pretty much all the comparison reviews that Byte and the other magazines ran. I had the pleasure (NOT!) of evaluating both of them for potential roll-out in a Govt. agency. Six months later, this agency was almost all-Macintosh.

I think I still have a copy of Win One.. it was useless.. It was not as good as DOS 3.1 And Most people didnt know how to use a Mouse. I sold some stock to buy my first PC it had the 8088 processor and 1 Meg of Ram. It had a 10 meg HD, and a 1.44 meg 3.5 in floppy.

quote:

Originally posted by LimaCharlie:
I remember when MSDOS was introduced. I said CPM/86 was a better operating system and MSDOS would never last.

You were right, CPM was the better system,
The developers were reported to have been honest with IBM that their OS wasn't quite ready for prime time.
In slipped Gates with MSDOS (also NOT ready for prime time) and the rest is history.

quote:

Originally posted by old dino:
I still have my dos floppy discs from back in the day. I has a dos fan and hated windows when it came out, though dos is the basis for windows. Back in the mid-70s I took basic and fortran in college ... remembered the importance of numbering the punch cards in case dropped them.

I took IITRAN 360 in 1967 in high school (still have the book).
Had to write the program, send it to IIT and wait a week for the solution.
Took Fortran and BASIC in the '80s but never had to worry about keeping the punch cards in order.
Only that the dickhead IT dept. at school blocked off seeing what you were typing (it wasn't a damn typing class ) and if you made a mistake could not see it in order to eject eject the card.
Had to review after completion and WAIT at the back of the line if even a minor typo occurred.

It was the COBOL guys who crapped their pants at the thought of dropping the deck of cards.