A few bytes of sentimentality

Found some information on my first computer today, and laughably a few Tandy 1000SX systems on eBay for chump change. I think mine was a SL; according to my current info, that would mean an Intel 8086 CPU. The best records I ever found on the Tandy family were 8088 based with various configurations of memory and floppy drives.

I was a little kid at the time, no one really used the Tandy for much; when I was older, I would spend afternoons loading games off the 5 1/2" floppy disks. Ha, I still remember doing math material from the upper grades on that box, back in Kindergarten / first grade. Most of the software we got came from a local school supplies store, so it was largly educational lol.

Because of how much her son had improved in school using one, our aunt talked ma into getting my brother a computer. So ma went down to Radio Shack and voila: a 15 pound paper weight! My brother never really used it, so I used to tinker with it as a child, heh MS-DOS and I couldn't even read yet :-/. Ok, so I'm was a strange kid ^_^. That Tandy 1000 had a single foppy drive, couple of empty expansion slots; colour monitor, joystick, (a) keyboard (to dream about), and a dot matrix printer. Oh man, I haven't seen that computer-printout paper in years and years! it had this binder friendly stuff on the sides you could yank off, and the pages were attached in a continuous stream, so you had to tear off the page later. When I was older, i tried to read the things user manual and threw it up in the air: may as well had been written in binary of ancient greek.

When WebTV came out, I got my first exposure to the internet but the Tandy was still 'it' for computers here. By the time we upgraded to a Pentium around '99 or 2000, I already knew my way around the world wide web thanks to WebTV. I didn't really start getting into computers until around then, in the mid 2000s I finally started to geek out. I think if I ever found a Tandy or TRS-80 at a garage sale, I'd probably buy one: just to see if I could make it do anything useful.


I don't know if I'll always be into computers, but I think that I will always be a programmer in some form.