I think we're all in similar company. This Summer marks 46 years that I've worked in IT. I was a computer tech in the Navy for 20 years, and by the time the Radio Shack computers hit the market, I was an experienced mini-system and mainframe computer operator, with a fair amount of programming under my belt. When desktop computers became a thing, I took a very long look to the future, and saw that that was where the bulk of the industry was headed. I was very excited for that prospect, and couldn't wait to get my hands on (and inside) one of those machines. I have never looked back.
In the Summer of 1981 a roommate friend and I built a clone of a Radio Shack Model 1 on the kitchen table. It was called an LNW-80, whose motherboard was sold barebones in ads at the back of computer magazines. We got the boards, and built them up with parts my friend obtained as free comp'd spares from an electronics company he worked with. It took several weeks, and had a few false starts, but suddenly we were computing at our apartment. The addition of a modified 9-inch black and white AC/DC TV as a monitor, and a decent cassette tape recorder (with a good tape counter, so we'd know where we were on the programs it read), and we were in business. Floppy and Hard drives were still ahead, so this was all stored on tape. It used the "acquired" brain from a real RS Model 1, courtesy of a friend of a friend who sucked the guts from his own RS Model 1's Z80 CPU to program the Z80A chip we were using as CPU in ours, and when powered up, it said it was a Radio Shack Model 1. It was an awesome device that taught me plenty about desktop computing. I cannot count the hours I spent typing in line after line after line of computer code from computer magazines in those days, (anyone remember MICRO-80 and similar magazines?), as I self-taught myself BASIC. It was a great experience. It was thrilling the first time it blinked my name off and on across the screen!
In 1982, I took that computer overseas for a six month deployment aboard my Navy ship, and it saved this then-sailor from months of boredom. That machine and I got to be VERY close friends. Last I knew, 35+ years later, the machine still works, and my friend powers it on from time to time, just to relive the old days of owning a really slow and awkward desktop computer that plays a knock-off of PAC-MAN called "SCARF-MAN." Ah yes, the memories...
Commercial computers and desktops in various flavors soon followed within just a few years, as I ran the gamut of various models of desktops from names like KayPro, Compaq, Texas Instruments, Leading Edge, Dell, Apple, and AST. Just as I have since done with timeshares, where "learning by owning" was the best experience model for me, I bought, learned, then sold many different computer systems. I learned CP/M, MS-DOS, PC-DOS, and whatever else in all its various forms. Then Windows landed with an earthshaking thud on the marketplace. Welcome to the "real" future of computing. I was off in a new direction, learning everything I could about mastering what was surely the future of "real" computing.
I can't count how many computers I've had since then, and ironically, for as well as I learned Microsoft products, I now have an Apple laptop at home. (No judgment, just easier to do what I do at home these days.). I still use every variation of Windows machines at work. I'm still at it, typing line after line of computer code into my machine, as I work my current position as a custom report writer to extract data from a medical database for the hospital where I work. For as much as things have changed over the years, they truly are still the same.
Love 'em or hate 'em, I will always be grateful for this little machine with the blinking cursor in the corner of the screen. It's been a great ride. I learn something new every single day, and for me, that's awesome. Computing as a profession for me has been much like farming: When you're green, you grow. When you're ripe, you rot.
Dave
