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| Part 1- Christmas. The 1980s. by Ice Cream Jonsey 09/27/2022, 10:39am PDT | ||||
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| Christmas of 1984 or 1985 (probably 1985) my younger brother and I woke up and had a magical moment as we went toward the Christmas tree. A computer had been setup. It was running a BASIC program our neighbor wrote. The BASIC program flipped through colors and had a GOTO loop. It said something like, "This is a computer for you kids on Christmas, go wake up your parents DO NOT TOUCH!!!" over and over again. We immediately woke our parents up. Other friends and neighbors had various computers and I was obsessed with them. Probably, not having one in our home for so long stoked that obsession.
The computer was an IBM PCjr. It had the "normal" keyboard (not the chiclet one which gets referenced, we had no concept there was a "bad" keyboard in our childhoods), a color monitor and two joysticks. Our parents bought a game (Touchdown Football) and a learning ware (Bumble Plot). It was one of the most magical moments of my life. I was so fortunate and lucky, I get that now. My father had to go back to work at some point during Christmas week. He would bring up 5.25" floppy disks from Kodak filled with freeware BASIC games and other .COM files of games that were floating around. At one point we tried running a program off a floppy disk and it didn't work. We called up dad. He suggested we load it first, then run. And it worked! We never had that problem afterwards but dad might as well have been the biggest brain computer genius in the world at that point. We had a wonderful computer. We were happy. ICJ |
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The IBM PCjr journey NT by 09/26/2022, 9:16am PDT  Re: The IBM PCjr journey by 09/26/2022, 11:18am PDT Ah. Yes. I forgot about the humiliations. NT by 09/26/2022, 6:40pm PDT IBM PCjr LINKS by 09/27/2022, 8:53pm PDT Part 1- Christmas. The 1980s. by 09/27/2022, 10:39am PDT Say Happy 40th Birthday to the PCjr by 11/01/2023, 6:59pm PDT |
