My first computer was a stock IBM XT with two floppies and a whopping 256K of RAM. Over the next year I added a 20 Meg Seagate MFM hard disk ($440.00, or $22,000.00 a Gig(as opposed to today's $1.47 a Gig)) and an EGA Graphics Adapter that came with an offer for a new fangled program called Windows for $15.00. Windows 1.01. Still have the disks and docs. I'd cut my teeth back in school on text based control of the output and immediately fell in love with with the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) set up in windows and promptly put together my Elec. Cont. proposal contract using the bundled word processor, Write. No more hand written contracts for me, No Sir.
The first computer experience, though, was gained through the indirect access to an IBM System 360 Model 60 mainframe at Iowa State U back in the late '60s. When we were first introduced to it, we were shown the new ferrite toroid memory cores, card about three foot square with a wire mesh, much like a window screen, that threaded through the tiny ferrite doughnuts. This core memory was a great improvement over the spinning drum, three foot wide and four foot high, that was read by a row of brush contacts that would sweep along the outside of the drum. Highest speed Random Access Memory. We'd submit our program exercises to the high priests that served the machine, and get back out printed output a day later. The printers were kept under acoustic shields to protect the priest's ears from the noise created by the chain of printable characters, that was longer than the width of the output paper, that was struck by a hammer as each impression was left on the paper. We'd put the programs together one line of code per punch card at a time. We'd try to do things like solve an "Instant Insanity" puzzle, the Rubick's Cube.
